Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine.

I'm Ellie Cawthorne.

For author and historian Neil Faulkner, the 21st century War on Terror,

echoes a series of conflicts that erupted across North Africa and the Middle East back in the Victorian era,

an episode that he chronicles in his new book, Empire and Jihad.

It's a story that takes in imperialism, anti-slavery, moral panics and Islamist revolts.

Here, in conversation with our production editor Spencer Mizzin,

Neil reveals how these conflicts changed the course of history.

Neil, your new book offers a fresh analysis of the Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870 to 1920.

Now, I'm guessing that a lot of our listeners won't know a great deal about this episode in history.

So I was wondering if you could start by giving us a brief overview of the wars.

Yeah, well, I think the very essence of it really is that it begins ostensibly as a humanitarian mission, or what is packaged as a humanitarian

mission, a response to the surging of the Arab East African slave trade. Of course, at a time

when the Western slave trade, the European slave trade, was being suppressed, and at a time when the Western slave trade, the European slave trade, was being suppressed,

and at a time when there was a very, very strong abolitionist movement, not least in Victorian Britain,

that was then fired up from the middle of the 19th century onwards,

particularly by David Livingston,

but also by other travellers, other explorers who were going into Africa

and were discovering this surging of the slave trade.

Now, what develops out of this growing concern about the slave trade,

and the reason it's surging, of course,

is because the world economy is surging at the time. This is the great expansion of world capitalism

...