This book is about Empire and thus about power. It treats of one set of developments that was variously paralleled across large stretches of the expanding British, and indeed other Western, empires during much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the late twentieth century considerable attention was given to analysing the processes entailed in the decline and fall of the Western overseas empires during its middle decades. Here the focus is upon one example of the opposite end of that story – the initiation of colonial rule in a relatively confined region of eastern Africa around the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Already there are plenty of narrative accounts of this story, and it is no way the present intention to add to their number. Rather the concern here is to analyse how all that came about. As will be clear, the result will not be a blueprint for enquiries into all similar encounters elsewhere since so many of the critical circumstances differed from place to place. It is to be hoped, however, that the present study will provide something of a benchmark against which the consideration of corresponding occurrences in other places may be set.

The area in question lies astride the equator within the northern arc of great lakes 600 miles or so inland from the East African coast, large parts of which comprise the headwaters of the White Nile prior to its great journey northwards to Egypt and the Mediterranean.