Desert Standoff: The Absurd Crisis That Prevented World War

In the late 19th century, the British Empire wanted to build a railway from Cairo to Cape Town. The French Empire wanted a line from Dakar to Djibouti. The two massive colonial ambitions physically intersected at an isolated, worthless mud fort in the Sudanese desert called Fashoda. When heavily armed British and French expeditions finally met at this exact coordinate in 1898, the world braced f...