For the subversion of a territory, a people, a nation or a state to an external alien power to be imperial requires there to be dynamic processes that draw in, bind, subvert and control, over time. The extent of this must be sufficient to sustain the extra-territorial supremacy of the imperial power. If this process reverses, or collapses, albeit gradually, the imperial power goes into decline, either locally or generally. This is what this book is ultimately about: how imperial processesâspecifically those of an economic natureâwax and wane, in this case in Sudan.
What are imperial processes and what agencies and institutions exert power in such a way to make a relationship imperial are complex questions that relate to notions of where power is embedded and from where it acts. Military force and violence are clearly one fairly obvious way in which imperial power is exerted.1 However, from an economic perspective, with reference to how imperial power operated systemically, it is necessary to think of structural forces capable of embedding people, territory and resources within imperial relationshipsâthat is, within an empire. These forces of coercion that were capable of such imperial embedding were found in a wide variety of institutions, organizations and activities. Ports, railways and other forms of transport, mail services, telegraphs and telephones, businesses, farms and plantations, universities and schools, hospitals, armies, dams and canals, and so on, from a notional list of functional structures and that could (re-)order space and place, people and animals, water and other physical resources, technology and knowledge, in such a way as to colonize, subjugate and control. The combination and mobilization of these resourcesâtheir organization and managementâformed power relationships that allowed, ordered and sustained imperialismâor at least had the potential to do so. These same processes and institutions of imperialism also âdevelopedâ territories, countries, societies and states, often in ways that destroyed and dispossessed individuals and communities, creating distorted institutions and social relationships.2 These became âdeath worlds,â to use Banerjeeâs captivating description of the relationship between corporate capitalism and development in colonial contexts.3
British imperialismâthe most impactful of the imperial systems of the last 400 yearsâwas part of the modernity created by industrial capitalism. Though, it can also be said that British imperialism helped create the modernity of industrial capitalism by opening territories and markets, providing labour and capital, consumers and consumption. As such, colonies became sites of activity to exploit (i.e., âdevelopâ) resources.4 In managing and organizing such spaces (such sites) imperial agencies âdevelopedâ territories.5 In so doing, the colony was economically integrated into the broader imperial economic system. One purpose of this book is therefore to trace how Sudan was subjected to imperialism in this wayâhow its resources were organized and managed to sustain the imperial power relationships between Sudan and Britain, and how this endured over time.
Generally, the colonial era in Sudan is applied to rigid dates associated with the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899â1956).6 Yet Sudan was gradually drawn into the imperial system for years before the invasion of 1898, as the tendrils of political and economic interest reached inwards to the interior of Africa in the latter part of the nineteenth century. This is more generally known, of course, as the âscramble for Africa.â Though the invasion in 1898 probably can be described in the quickening action of a âscramble,â the preceding years were a more gradual âslide,â as British interestsâboth political and economicâbecame more interested in Sudan over time. In the nineteenth century Sudan was a province of Egypt, itself a peripheral part of the Ottoman Empire. Increasing British influence in Egypt from the centuryâs mid-point culminated in direct intervention in 1882. At the same time a separatist movement sought to wrench Sudan from Egypt and then to govern the country according to Islamic principles. The effort to retain Sudan for Egypt led the British to become militarily involved. This campaign ended in a rare and humiliating reverse for British military power when General Gordon was defeated in Khartoum, in 1884.7 From 1884 Sudan was autonomous and independent of both British and Egyptian controls, the Islamic state that was created being referred to as the Mahdiya. The invasion of Sudan in 1898 reversed the defeat of Gordon and ended the Mahdist period of Sudanâs history. Sudan was thus incorporated within the British imperial system in the region, administered by the British until independence in 1956. During the Condominium, economic development was focused on large-scale cotton-growing in the Gezira Scheme (the Gezira being the area of land between the confluences of the Blue and White Niles, south of Khartoum). This was the central imperial economic activity that bound Sudanâs economy to the political-economy of the wider empire. Decolonization occurred in the 1950s. Yet even through this process of separation, the disengagement of the binding ties, networks and circuits of power was not synchronous with juridical independence and mutual recognition in the international states system that independence is meant to achieve (the theoretical characterization of an independent state).8 At an economic level these processes of power associated with imperial subordination wereâas we shall seeâas much marked by aspects of continuity as by change.
The chronological periodization used here reflects this sense of providing prior context and the longer-term aftermath. The book begins around 1880 and ends after the formal moment of decolonization, in the 1970s. An alternative way of thinking about this periodological choice would be to imagine the process of (British) imperialism intersecting with Sudan for a time. Initially, this contact was slight, but gradually more pressing. Eventually the processes became strong enough to form structures that came to imprint, re-order and, at least to an extent, define Sudan, especially as state. Then, after some time, the force of the processes receded, slackened and weakened; decolonization occurred. The imperial imprint dissolved somewhat. Decolonization, then, is part of the imperial process as well, and processes are not easily guillotined, at least at the scale of empires. Here decolonization, as with imperialism, is seen, described and analysed as an incomplete temporal process, just as imperialism is itself an incomplete temporal process. It is these fundamental, secular and deep processes that are the primary object of research in this book.
The centre of the analysis presented here is to assess the importance of business to the processes of imperialism and its role in the history of the Sudan economy. As such the book is primarily a work of business and economic history, and is chiefly concerned with political-economy: it examines the power and agency formed between business organizations, state institutions and markets. In so doing, the book will address three historiographical issues. First, in relation to the nature of the development of a cash-crop economy in Sudan during the colonial period (in this case large-scale cotton-growing)âhow did Sudan compare with other colonies in sub-Saharan Africa? Second, were the operation of business and the nature of capital accumulation a case of âbusiness imperialismâ as discussed by D.C.M. Platt and Charles Jones, among others?9 And, third, were the operation of business and the nature of capital accumulation in Sudan a case of Gentlemanly Capitalist imperialism, as suggested by the work of Cain and Hopkins?10
The argument presented is, in summary, as follows. Sudan was locked into an economic path dominated by a cash-cropâcotton, and as such shared relative similarity with comparable colonial states.11 This experience of imperialism helped create and institutionalize a modern state where the various sources of military, economic and political powers were increasingly gathered together and that this institution was the crucial determinant of the political-economy of imperial Sudan.12 These institutions and concentrations of power were to survive decolonization and form the basis of the post-colonial state, and shape its position within the international political-economy that emerged in the period after decolonization during the Cold War.13
Historiography
In 1945, reflecting on th...