Books by Terje (University of Bergen Tvedt

"[A] vivid travelogue." New Statesman"Has much to offer." The Spectator"Sparks the imagination." BBC History Magazine "A fascinating study." BBC History Revealed Magazine "Essential reading." All About History"Valiant, valuable and entertaining." Times Literary SupplementThe greatest river in the world has a long and fascinating history. Professor Terje Tvedt, one of the world's leading experts on the history of waterways, travels upstream along the river's mouth to its sources. The result is a travelogue through 5000 years and 11 countries, from the Mediterranean to Central Africa. This is the fascinating story of the immense economic, political and mythical significance of the river. Brimming with accounts of central characters in the struggle for the Nile - from Caesar and Cleopatra, to Churchill and Mussolini, and on to the political leaders of today, The Nile is also the story of water as it nourished a civilization.

The Nile today plays a crucial role in the economics, politics and cultural life of ten countries and their more than 300 million inhabitants. No other international river basin has a longer, more complex and eventful history than the Nile. In telling the detailed story of the hydropolitics of the Nile valley in a period during which the conceptualisation, use and planning of the waters were revolutionised, and many of the most famous politicians of the twentieth century Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini, Dwight Eisenhower, Anthony Eden, Gamal Abdul Nasser and Haile Selassie played active parts in the Nile game, this work will stand as a case study of a much more general and acute question: the political ecology of transnational river basins."

The international contributors shed new light on the ways in which the key relationship between humans and water has given rise to new forms of social organisation, new technologies and economic activities.