Ottoman History Podcast - The Economic Roots of Modern Sudan

Episode Date: July 11, 2020

Episode 466 with Alden Young hosted by Chris Gratien As a site of recent civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, Sudan's history is often framed by violence. In this podcast, our guest Alden Young offers an alternative framing of Sudan's modern history, as we discuss Sudan's economy and its relationship to the broader Middle East from the 19th century onward. We discuss Sudan's unique experience of colonialism under Ottoman/Egyptian rule and how the issue of slavery intensified as Sudan's ties to Egypt and the broader Ottoman world intensified during the 19th century. We also discuss how colonial planners slowly reoriented Sudan's economy towards agricultural export and away from pastoralism. We explore the Gezira scheme, a long foretold irrigation project that would become the centerpiece of Sudanese economic development after independence during the 1950s. And we consider the fate of the class of Sudanese economists and technocrats who straddled the late colonial and postcolonial periods. At the bottom of this post, we also offer an activity module for university classrooms based on this podcast, a documentary about the Gezira scheme from the 1950s, and the novel Season of Migration to the North by Sudanese author Tayeb Salih. « Click for More »

I'm Chris Grayton, and you're listening to the Ottoman History Podcast. Sudan has been part of the Islamic world for centuries, and has been a member of the Arab League since achieving independence in 1956. Yet its history is often ignored by scholars of the Middle East, and when it does come up, that history is usually framed by recent violence and the refrain that Sudan is a textbook example of a failed state. In this episode, we're speaking to Alden Young, an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at UCLA, and the author of a path-breaking book about the formative period of state building in Sudan. author of a path-breaking book about the formative period of state building in Sudan.

Khartoum is a new city. Khartoum was a colonial city built by the Ottoman Egyptians. We'll begin our discussion of Sudan's history by exploring its relationship to the late Ottoman Middle East under Ottoman Egyptian and later British rule. One of the important economic continuities that we'll explore is the Gezira Scheme, a vast irrigation project that would become the centerpiece of Sudan's post-independence economic development, but which had much older roots. It gets its start actually from a series of American speculators. And they have this idea along the Nile in Sudan they could create, you know, recreate this kind of vast plantation society

that they had known in the American South. The latter part of our discussion will focus on economic policy in independent Sudan. Both inside Sudan and outside, the question of the 1950s and 60s has been partially ignored. In our conversation, we'll resist the teleology of the failed state and consider why the people who built modern Sudan made the economic choices they did. Sudan does develop and maintains a massive professional class that expands throughout this period. But in order to maintain that professional class, the Khartoum and Omdurman elites have to globalize it. And while our discussion will not center on the wars of the late 20th and early 21st century,

we'll shed light on how the history of economic development in Sudan related to those conflicts. They become kind of great economic advisors, but the logic of economics that they understand and that they develop from economic science does not allow for the development of a country like Sudan. Our story begins when Alden Young, a doctoral student at Princeton University, sends a fateful email to Ismail Al-Khalifa Suleiman, a professor at the University of Khartoum. I mean, obviously, I had never been to Sudan before. I started my career, you know, as an undergrad exchange student at the American University in Cairo. And this was 2003. So it was in the midst of the run up to the Iraq War. And I remember we were protesting like twice a week at the AUC.

But the question of Sudan was kind of in the air, sort of, in Cairo and in the AUC. But we never really talked about it. It didn't seem like it was really playing in to the discourse that we were learning, which was much more focused on Palestine, Egyptian relations, a little bit with Saudi. And by the time I got to Princeton in 2005, 2006, and I was thinking to myself, look, I want to write an economic history or history of state formation, but I don't know if I want to write about Egypt because that's where my advisor had written like 10 books. And the first thing I did is I went to Firestone, the big library in Princeton, and I started finding these books from the Graduate College of the University of Khartoum, sort of from the 1980s, looking at economic development, economic planning. And I did this crazy thing. I just wrote. I found the email address of one of the guys

who was in the center for the book, one of the books it was published from. And I wrote him, and I was like, look, I want to come to Sudan. And I didn't think much of it. I was like, this guy's probably not going to write me back. But he was like, sure. And so he arranged my visit from the University of Khartoum. And he was like, okay, I'll find you a place to stay and everything like that. And I was like, sure. And so I arrived, and he was like, look, you can sleep in one of these classrooms and do work in the institute. Young arrived in Sudan during an unusual period of its history.

After multiple civil wars, Sudan's future, as well as its past, emerged as growing subjects of interest for foreign researchers. But Alden Young was one of the few researchers in Sudan not working directly on the recent conflicts. It was an interesting experience. It was also eye-opening to see how much my access to the archives depended on the politics of the moment. They had just renovated the National Records Office, and it was a period of openness. They had just renovated the National Records Office, and it was a period of openness. The questions of the conflict in Darfur and the question of war crimes for President Omar al-Bashir meant that the Sudanese government in 2008-2009 was willing to allow foreign researchers into its National Records Office. I was surprised by the extent to which Sudanese officials that I would talk to and people in the archive really believed that if outsiders looked at their archival records, they would come to see that Sudan wasn't at fault, particularly for the war in Darfur. And you would have these meetings with archivists who would tell you sort of this story, right?

They would take you out to have a fool and they would be like, look, you know, it's not our fault what's happening in Darfur. It's the international NGOs. It's the aid organizations. Underlying this was this idea that maybe it was the British or the Americans. And they were completely confused by the idea that I wanted to read finance ministry papers, because everyone there was working in the Ministry of Interior and questions of land tenure, native governance, the kind of classic questions about why the war in Darfur had broken up. And so they were like, okay, these Ministry of Finance papers are kind of useless. We'll let you read them. And they were uncatalogued sort of from the 40s through to the late 60s. I kind of think people thought it was a little bit ridiculous,

or not ridiculous, but it wasn't one of the burning questions of the moment. Some of my best friends from undergrad were Jordanians, which is really how I got interested in Arabic in the Middle East. And I remember I stopped in Amman before coming to Khartoum. And I was just asking my friends there, you know, for some advice. And then I remember some others were like, well, you're going to study this idea of failure, right? Sudan failed to develop, so looking at its economics is a question of failure. So that was my first introduction was like other, you know, shammy Arabs say,

basically saying like, there's nothing to study there with this question of economics. And then when I got to Khartoum, it became obvious that like, they kind of expected foreign researchers to be looking at questions like around the Civil War or the humanitarian project or the question of Darfur or even the refugee question. But people have been really positive, especially Sudanese researchers and scholars, about the idea that I was willing to study this period.

researchers and scholars about the idea that I was willing to study this period. And I think for a lot of them, the idea has been that taking seriously the project of state building in Sudan, that it was a project in the 1950s and 60s, that there were bureaucrats who were fully functioning bureaucrats, administrators, politicians, intellectuals, and that they were invested in this idea, even if some of their conceptions of what should be Sudan were narrow in terms of who could be included in the state, that they were actually interested in this building of the state. And I think when I interact with Sudanese scholars now, there's this idea that this gives a sort of hope for the transition out of the period, the presidency of Omar al-Bashir. That, you know, we can return to this older tradition. We can

argue about who was included, what went wrong, whether or not the development plans were the right ones, but at least we have this tradition of kind of bureaucratic competency in state formation. In the end, Sudan's president would be indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide over the war in Darfur. South Sudan would secede from the Republic of Sudan and form an independent government in 2011. Though Sudan's past offered a possible window onto its future, the same political context that facilitated Young's research ultimately began to undermine the possibilities for continuing the work. Just as I was staying there for about seven months or so, President Omar Bashir would be

indicted by the International Criminal Court. And once he got indicted, I started to get harassed in the archive. I was brought to see state security. They were like, what are you guys doing here? Suddenly people realized that I was taking photos in the archive or using a laptop to write notes. And all those things kind of went away and it became much more difficult to do my research. And so they would periodically check on me. And the big discussion was, are you violating your visa requirements? And you would have these discussions about whether or not you were a real historian. And it was interesting because a lot of these guys had master's degrees in history and political science themselves from the university.

And so it was like these conversations you would have about what is history and whether or not you were using history to damage the Sudanese state. But it was also the first time I came to understand the idea that history or academia in this way was this problem of national security. Sudan looms large on the world map.

It was the largest country in Africa in terms of area before the independence of South Sudan in 2011. Sudan and South Sudan combined encompass a population of over 50 million people. That's more than Iraq, more than Saudi Arabia, and more than all the countries of the Levant combined. Until 2011, Sudan was the second most populous country in the Arab League, after Egypt. Yet Sudan is often an afterthought in histories of the Middle East. Its modern name, which derives from the Arabic designation of the lands of the blacks, attests to how its inhabitants were seen as different from their neighbors to the north, as well as the extent

to which outsiders have shaped its recent history. I think Sudan is a fascinating case study for historians, particularly of the Middle East. Right now, I've been working on a Sudanese historian and political economist named Abu Qasim Haj Hamid, and I've been looking at his sort of 1980s works on two-volume history of Sudan. And I think one of the points that he constantly tries to make is that there's this sort of broad narrative. I mean, he's trying to deconstruct. He's writing in Arabic, but he's trying to deconstruct sort of broad narratives about Africa, especially Muslim Africa, and this idea of decline. And one of the things that he tries to say is that, look, it's easy for us sitting in the

Middle East and Africa to think that the period after 14... I mean, he goes all the way back. So he's like, the period after 1492 is a period of decline. But he's like, it's actually a period of expansion. And Muslim Africa is one of the great sites of this expansion, right? I mean, Muslim Africa is being pulled further and further into a kind of what he calls Mediterranean civilization. But by that, I think he means, think he means this greater Ottoman empire. And that this goes, in the Sudanese case, throughout the 19th century. It's an expansionary place in which the Ottomans are bringing this whole region of the Nile Valley going further and further in South Sudan, almost towards Uganda, into the state building project. Sudan, I mean, going into the

16th and 17th century is largely autonomous and governed by separate kingdoms. And there's this question of Arab migration, Arab tribal migration into the Sudanese, into what we consider today to be modern Sudan. And you see also the Islamization during this time period of the major kingdoms. So it's during this period that you see the kind of conversion of the kingdom of Funj or the kingdom of Sainar into an Islamic state. And at the same time, you see the rise of Islamic states in Darfur, like the Sultanate of the Fir, etc. And their kind of combination with particularly the Abd al-Abb tribal confederation. And it's in this period that you see sort of the reorientation

of Sudan towards the Islamic empires. And you also see the mass migration of Sufi orders coming in. One of the biggest Sufi orders in Sudan that's really dominant, even amongst the figures I study in the mid-20th century, is Qatmiyyah. And they sort of begin coming en masse from Saudi Arabia, or their leaders come from

Saudi Arabia in the 18th century. And so you see this tying of Sudan, a renewed tying of Sudan into the greater Middle East, or orientation into the Islamic world. Prior to that, you had had Christian kingdoms in Sudan. And so you saw the Nubian Christian kingdoms in the period before the 15th century, and that sort of break down in the coming of the 16th century. And they had been governed by this treaty called the Treaty of Bakht, which from the early conquest of Egypt had basically said that Arab armies would not enter the Nubian territories and the Nubian territories would pay a tribute. And so they have been largely autonomous. And that period sort of breaks down. And Hodge Hamid says that one of the reasons that it begins to break down is with the conquest of the new world, you see this kind of need to expand. You see this sort of push to gather more territories into sort of this sort of Mediterranean world system.

These are the new frontiers. And so it's a sort of late incorporation of these territories into the greater Mediterranean world. But, of course, the formal ruling begins sort of with Muhammad Ali and the question of building the new army. sort of with Muhammad Ali and the question of building the new army. And so these questions of what will be the military industrialization of Egypt get tied into larger questions about the incorporation of Sudan, what does it mean to be a modern state, and what will be Europe's role. And so you see this kind of defensive modernization perhaps going on. Yves Trapal has a great phrase, colonize colonizers. But I mean, more than that, I think you're also seeing this question in the 19th century

of what did it mean to be a viable state, right? And so Egypt finds that to be a viable state or to be, you know, the sort of centralizing project, it needs to take over ever more territory. And Sudan gets this very brutal lesson as Egyptian armies sort of come further and further into Sudan. I mean, even the capital Khartoum is built during this period, right? Khartoum is a new city. Khartoum was a, the presence of the Ottoman Egyptian army and the garrisoning of northern Sudan. It was a very violent process, right? So, I mean, you get the Dongalawa in the beginning and the violent repression there, the Jahili further to the south, the destruction of the kingdom of Sinar. And you get this kind of war-making incorporation and kind of merchant colonial project in the 19th century. And that kind of marks the question of Sudan. And then what happens, even today, they call them Jalab, Jalab merchants, right?

And you get the expulsion of people who are closest to Sudan, I mean closest to the Egyptian border. They get kind of displaced. I mean, closest to the Egyptian border, they get kind of displaced. And one of the ways in which these communities reconstruct themselves is by becoming merchants and long-distance traders in other parts of Sudan. And it's in that process that you also get a reorientation of the slave trade. The slave trade comes to be focused on Khartoum and held in these forts called zawiyas in the different peripheral regions of the country, or what become defined as peripheral regions of the country. Because many different kingdoms are incorporated in this process into one sort of territorial unit.

Though that process of incorporation takes a long time. I mean, Darfur is not included really formally into this sort of colonial Sudan until after World War I. And so it's a long process of incorporation. One of the main links between Sudan and the broader Ottoman world had always been the slave trade. As Sudan became more politically and economically integrated into the Egyptian sphere over the course of the 19th century, that slave trade intensified. One of the big markers of Sudanese 19th century history is the question of slavery. During the period of Mahmud Ali, slavery becomes actually a bigger and bigger industry, and the export of

slaves both to Khartoum and then to Cairo as well becomes much more centralized, and it expands. And you get these slaving forts that sort of tell part of the story of the incorporation of what today is South Sudan into this state. So, you know, you hear the famous stories of the Zawiyas, these slaving forts in Bar Gazal, Upper Nile. I mean, pushing all the way today what we would consider the Central African Republic. These regions are incorporated through this process of slaving.

But one of the debates that happens during the period of Qadai Vismayel is the question of whether or not Qadai Vismayel, especially as he becomes more and more dependent on the European powers because of his debt problems, he's told that he needs to abolish the slave trade, not only in Egypt, but also in Sudan. And this becomes one of the ways in which the British began to send their own senior officials to rule in Khartoum. And so the most famous one, of course, is General Gordon, who comes from Hong Kong and his other exploits explicitly with the idea that he's going to abolish the slave trade. He does no such thing in the 1870s, but the question of abolishing the slave trade becomes one of the motivating factors

for the rebellion, for the Mahdus uprising in the 1880s. So yeah, the 1880 Mahdus uprising. So yeah, the 1880 Mahatis uprising. And's a semi-autonomous governor in Western Sudan. And he's, of course, brought to Cairo, right? And part of the reasons he's brought to Cairo and disciplined is because supposedly he's a horrendous slave trader of which the Egyptian government and the Ottoman Empire are deeply ashamed. But he was one of these kind of warlord type figures that had governed or provided a certain stability in Western Sudan. And his replacement causes vast instability in Western Sudan. And there you get the Mahdus rebellion in the 1880s, the fall of Khartoum in 1885, the establishment of a new capital of Omdurman, and the creation of a

state. And the Mahdi state also does not abolish slavery, but it promises this reorientation. And this is something that you get repeated over and over again, this question, this debate of whether or not Sudan is naturally aligned along the Nile going north, and whether or not what the British and the Ottomans had done and whether or not what the British and the Ottomans had done was a distortion of Sudanese society and the economy by making it a sort of north-south instead of an east-west state. And so the Mahdus closed the border with Egypt, began to wage war with Ethiopia. They have this sort of expansionary project or ambivalent relationship with South Sudan, but they try to reorient, right? So the state becomes an East-West state,

opening to West Africa and going into the Hejaz or Arabia. And that state, of course, can't last, right? I mean, it lasts from 1885 to 1898. And in 1898, you get the return of Lord Kitchener, who brings an Egyptian army now under British officer command into Sudan. And they have more mechanized, so they bring partial railroad, they bring the Gatlin guns, and they eventually, after a long campaign, suppress the Mahdus state. campaign suppressed the Mahdi's state. But the Mahdi's state was riven by this internal tension of the question of the base of support that came from the Bagara, or the tribes of the western Sudan, with what they call the Awilad al-Nil, so the children of denial, who were the earlier

groups that had been incorporated under the Ottoman state at its very beginning. And so those groups have this clash underneath the Mahdi state that undermines them and allows for the reconquest of Sudan. And Sudan is interestingly reconquered because and the British public doesn't want to pay for the reconquest of Sudan. So Lord Cromer designs this structure in which Sudan becomes a condominium. So it becomes the Anglo-Egyptian condominium, which I think in Cromer's mind means that Sudan, one, won't be governed by the colonial office, won't have to have these formal regulations that he sees as undermining the entrepreneurship of the British Empire in places like India as they've become more bureaucratic. But it will also get paid for by the Egyptian treasury. And so it has a dual crown. It's both a crown territory of the British crown and the Egyptian monarchy. And so that state lasts from 1898 until 1956. Sudan had a unique

experience of colonialism. It became a frontier of Egyptian expansion as Egypt moved away from being a province of the Ottoman Empire towards becoming a largely autonomous state. But with Great Britain's gradual takeover of Egypt, Sudan became subject to multiple layers of imperialism. Depending on how one looks at it, the British colonization of Sudan following the Mahdus uprising could be seen as a major turning point or a continuity in Sudan's history. So that's one of the largest debates, I think, in the Sudanese literature. They call it a Turkia. And so like sometimes it's the British colonial project is simply called the second Turkia,

Turkia-Thania. So it's like the second Turkia, right? And that is this question, the popular memory, whether or not the British were seen as any different than the Sudanese, I mean, than the Egyptians that had come before them. And there's ways in which perhaps for people in the state, you know, the project hasn't really changed. The colonial and post-colonial state continues to have this grip from Khartoum and this extractive relationship with the countryside. And you see this in the mass migration of people beginning in the Ottoman period in the 19th

century, through slave raids and other things like that. You're seeing the pulling of people into the sort of central Nile Valley around Khartoum and the Gezira Plain. So you see the people being pulled into these agricultural estates to work for the growth of export crops or for slaving. And you see that intensify during the colonial period. And today you see this huge migration of people into what they call the urban slums around Khartoum, right? So millions and millions of people have been pushed by the sort of civil wars that ravaged the country to come into the countryside. And so in that way, you see a kind of continuity maybe, right?

From all these periods, there's a sort of pull from the periphery to the core. But, I mean, you do see some important differences. I mean, one of the some important differences. I mean, one of the questions that begins during the British period is you see the development of these massive irrigated estates. So you see this huge investment of capital and the early post-independent, the colonial state and the early post-independent state become cotton exporters. So you see the development of a cotton economy that's oriented towards the British mills of places like Lancashire and places like that. And this growth of this huge export economy that's really capital intensive and revolves around dams and large

scale irrigation projects. And the British state is also sort of hostile in some ways to independent merchants. So the Ottoman state had been much more open to this kind of, you know, you would have Armenians and Jewish merchants and Maltesians and Greeks and Syrians as the commanding merchants of Khartoum. And the British state will try to centralize those things into major export companies. The world has gained a new nation. The Sudan, for 58 years under the joint rule of Britain and Egypt, becomes an independent republic. The proclamation of independence is read from the balcony of the House of Representatives in Khartoum,

and the new flag is hoisted. Blue for the Nile, yellow for the desert, green for agriculture. Blue for the Nile, yellow for the desert, green for agriculture. In territorial terms, modern Sudan was a creation of the colonial condominium of Egypt and Great Britain, which gradually came to an end over the decades before and after the Second World War. Its end is precipitated both by Sudanese nationalists, but also by the rise of Jamal Abdel Nasser. It's in this kind of coming with the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, and that's where my book sort of begins and starts to tell the story, because one of the only concessions that Egypt is able to win in the Anglo-Egyptian

Treaty of 1936, which completely excludes Sudanese officials, both British officials and Sudanese national and political leaders. They're completely excluded from the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, and they're really annoyed. But one of the few concessions that Egypt wins is the right to send an economic advisor to Sudan to audit whether or not Britain, as a co-trustee, has been correctly managing the natural resources or the patrimony of the Egyptian crown. And that goes on. I mean, they produce these reports, but it creates this dialogue that then gets taken up by Sudanese nationalists of what I call water nationalism. And so one of the things that comes about is this idea that Egypt has been, I mean, Britain

has been denying the Sudanese their ability to fully exploit the waters of the Nile. It hasn't been investing properly in the development of Sudan. And this becomes a sort of nationalist cry. And there's this idea in the 1940s that Sudan should join a union of what they call their brothers in Egypt. They would become one state. And Jamal al-Banr calls their bluff of the British when he says, you know, there should be a referendum. The Sudanese people should have the right

to decide their own fate. And this is after Egypt has already brought Britain to the United Nations in the 1940s to say, look, it's vast mismanagement. And that becomes the impetus or the break for the British to make the concession that yes, there will be a vote to determine the future of Sudan. With gradual independence, a new class of Sudanese officials would emerge out of the colonial apparatus.

They were steeped in the very economic ideas that underpinned British colonial policy. And nationalists in Sudan and elsewhere would come to criticize colonial rule on the basis of those ideas. Sudan, and elsewhere would come to criticize colonial rule on the basis of those ideas. I mean, looking in some ways at the Ministry of Finance, you get this kind of technocratic vision of the state, right? I mean, and so the debates that take place within the Ministry of Finance, and my book is primarily based on two sources. One, I had the personal papers of the last British economic advisor in Sudan, so this man named John Carmichael. One of the interesting things about studying Sudan is that the Sudanese records are not in the National Archives in Kew Gardens. And Britain refused, in the period after 1954, to pay the pensions of officers in the Sudanese political service, saying that it was actually a private corporation that had been running the state.

Those officers became really upset. And one of their protests was they refused to deposit their papers in the National Archives. So they're held as personal papers at Durham University. But that was really helpful for me because those papers, like for Carmichael, for instance, they straddle the 40s into the early 60s. So they straddle the independence period because he stayed behind, working as his own private official. And people like him, the British side, he started as a meteorologist. And so this idea that you were going to do economic planning of the Sudanese state was new in itself. And I think that's where Egypt played a really important role because the Egyptian economic advisor in 36, I mean, I've read some of his books and you can see what he's

basically saying. He's like, look, I need to basically produce read some of his books, and you can see what he's basically saying. He's like, look, I need to basically produce a kind of public economic discourse, distribute these things. And he's trying to calculate. He's trying to calculate how much money is being stolen in customs or mismanagement, why Egyptian businesses aren't being allowed to invest. And it forces the British to scramble. And so they have to take people that are like meteorologists and things like that, people who are numerate and start moving them into economic,

into the finance ministry because they now need to produce a kind of public record that they hadn't before. And similarly, the Sudanese officials that I found, men like Hamza Margani Hamza, Mahmoud Beharie,

Abdul Rahim Amargani, these officials, they were being trained usually, I mean, they were usually the sons of people either in the Sudanese armed forces or Sudanese defense forces, or they were the sons of notables, and they're being sent abroad, right? So they're sort of the same class as the Sudanese nationalists. The first prime minister is Ismail Azhari, and he goes to the American University of Beirut. He's a school teacher, a high school teacher, and he's pulled into the nationalist movement. Because as Heather Sharkey in an amazing book, Living with Colonialism, describes that the nationalist movement in Sudan was also a sort

of a cultural literary movement, right? And they're having these, they're usually junior officers of the bureaucracy, and they basically meet in these sort of study circles and discuss ideas. And that's why I think what the Egyptians did was really influential, right? Because they're introducing new ideas, a new rhetoric that can also be pushed in these sort of circles.

And I think that's why the idea of union with Egypt was so strong, at least initially. But the idea was that they would be like district commissioners. They would work usually in local government. That was their training that they were expected to do. So they were expected to replace British officials working in places like Bar Gazal or Western Sudan or the East. But as it becomes clear that Sudan is going to become self-governing around 54, they're rapidly pulled into the Ministry of Finance without any explicit training in finance. And within a year or two,

they become things like undersecretary of the department, right? So they, I mean, they're promoted very quickly. And it's because these are some of the first generation of Sudanese graduates to come from places like Oxford and Cambridge. I mean, they have their undergraduate degrees, usually in PPE, and they rise to this high level really quickly. But their first experiences are sort of in what I might call economic diplomacy. So, you know, they go to the IMF, they go to the ILO,

they travel to India, they negotiate with the British, and they're getting these sort of international ideas about economic management and underdevelopment. And cotton becomes really important, right? So there's a number of tropes. One is that Britain and then later Egypt are denying the Sudanese the right to exploit the amount of Nile waters that they should be allowed to exploit, which actually is blowing up today as a crisis again with the creation of the Renaissance

Dam in Ethiopia. Negotiations have just broken down between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan on how to split this water. But that will be one of the signal achievements of the 1950s negotiations, right? The 1959 Nile Water Treaty. So they do win the right to 25% of the Nile water. So for the first time, they're actually included. And that's because of this nationalist discourse that's boiled up from the 30s and 40s that Sudan needs to be formally included. It needs to have the right to irrigate more and more land. And this trope that will go on even to today, that there's all this vastly uncultivated land in Sudan, which is not really true because much of this land is cultivated, but it's not cultivated in irrigated ways that the state recognizes.

I mean, it's being used in subsistence farming and things like that. So the state is constantly saying there's all this new land that can be irrigated. And that's a trope that they get from the British who, the British came in and they said the Mahdus state had caused famine. The Mahdus state had destroyed the territory. The whole place is deserted, right? So these are the kind of colonial tropes that the British use. And then I saw it in the Egyptians in 36, right? They're like vast parts of Sudan are disorganized and unused, right?

And so there's this trope that comes from both Britain and Egypt that, you know, Sudan is disorganized and unused, right? And so there's this trope that comes from both Britain and Egypt that, you know, Sudan is disorganized and unused. And then you see the nationalists adopting this too to say, look, you guys have been responsible. You've underdeveloped the state. If you simply allow us to take over the big cotton schemes, if you allow us to irrigate the land, we will develop it. And it goes on and on, right?

And it continues into the present, this idea that there's still, you know, vast, empty swaths of Sudan that can be commercially developed, if only they would be developed correctly using the correct tools. While independence promised to take Sudan in a new direction, Sudanese economic development ultimately hinged on a project that was decades in the making. You're hearing footage from an award-winning 1954 documentary entitled They Planted a Stone. Released on the eve of Sudanese independence, it detailed the Gezierski, a giant irrigation project for the land south of the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile. In the heart of Africa, torrential rains in the mountains of Uganda, rains whose path twists like a snake as it searches for a way from the watershed to the sea.

From the peaks of Ethiopia, another flood spates down into the flat plain of the Sudan. Blue Nile and White Nile meet, search on to the north, through the desert wastes, down the river valley of Egypt, the country with no rain, to the sea, 4,000 miles from its source. It would become the cornerstone of Sudanese economic development. But the Gezira scheme revealed the extent to which the economics of independent Sudan relied on ideas that stretched deep into the colonial period. So the Gazira scheme in Sudan, I mean, it gets its start actually, interestingly, from a series of American speculators who, in the post-Civil War period, are kind of roaming the earth,

trying to build new plantations. Post-American Civil War. They get to Sudan in sort of the late 19th, early 20th century, but they're like American Southerners, and they have this idea that, you know, along the Nile in Sudan, they could create, you know, recreate this kind of vast plantation society that they had known in the American South. And of course, they're going to grow cotton and all these things, use probably slave and semi-slave labor. It seems like a very attractive idea

to these Southerners, but they can't get the capital to do it. And British capital is like, we don't really know if we need more cotton. I mean, Egypt is producing huge sums of cotton, but it sort of takes off after 1919. And so after the revolts in Egypt in 1919, the British start to be like, well, for security reasons, they developed this idea. The Gezira region could be developed as what they call a second Nile Valley. And you see these explicit documents of British military figures saying, if we were to ever lose the Nile Valley to uprisings and things like that, here we could have a second artificial Nile Valley. And so it's this idea that you could hold Egypt hostage, right? Just lower down. I mean,

sort of like what they're talking about today. You could build dams. You could basically just cut Egypt off if it got up. And so that's when it starts to take off in the 1920s. it if it got up a D. And so that's when it starts to take off in the 1920s. But it gets hit by the Great Depression. And so it begins to be built, but it can't really be utilized. And it's not really brought to its full capacity until the run-up to World War II. And with the run-up of World War II, the cotton prices are really high. And in the post-World War II period, the Gazira scheme becomes the largest irrigated scheme in the world. And in the post-World War II period, the Gazira scheme becomes the largest irrigated scheme in the world. And the British colonial officials that worked in Lord Haley's report, the first, his name is Franco, the first professor of colonial economics or in later development

economics at Oxford, he says the Gazira scheme is one of only two useful capital expenditures in the whole continent of Africa, the other being the Rand Mines in South Africa. And it's so big that in the 1960s, it's one of only two man-made structures from the colonial period that you could see from outer space using NASA satellites. And so it's this huge investment of capital, right?

This idea that there could be a second Nile Valley or a second Mesopotamia. Mekhi Abbas is the one who says that it's the second Mesopotamia, and he's just come home from Oxford, and he's being groomed to be a political leader in Sudan. He writes this book, The Sudan Question, in which he fully articulates this question of water nationalism and this turn against Egypt, right? This idea that they're the ones who've been holding us back along with Britain. And he's close to Marguerite Perham, who was like one of these figures of the late British empire.

And these are the same people who had been in Iraq. They'll be in like Nigeria. So it's this sort of late colonial discourse, right? And it plays into these sort of British ideas about what does it mean to govern? And so one of the designing one of the signal features of the Gazira scheme is that it becomes a it's supposed to be a partnership between the landowners who become tenants. Right. They're not allowed to own their own land. Their farmers, their tenants who buy into a government managed scheme. there are tenants who buy into a government-managed scheme. One shareholder is the government, one shareholder is the gazira corporation, and one shareholder are the tenants themselves.

And it's supposed to provide this kind of not just economic profitability, but also political education, right? You're supposed to be creating a kind of managed ownership class within Sudan. And this class will become the backbone of the independence movement, right? I mean, these are the ones who have the kind of surplus capital to move into government jobs, to send their children to good schools. They're the ones who have the best services. And they also replicate the kind of Ottoman structures, right?

Because once you become a tenant holder, you preserve your tenant holdership in your family, even after you've moved to Khartoum and maybe become a banker or a university professor, and you bring in laborers from the South and from the West to work the fields. And so you get this kind of reproduction of tiered status again. I mean, the early post-colonial project, because they emphasize water nationalism so much, the thing they decide they're going to do is they're going to invest the majority of the state's resources. And it was actually, Sudan at this time, like Egypt,

is actually a creditor nation to Britain. So Britain owes Sudan money. And they decide they're going to invest all of their resources in tripling the size of the Gezira scheme, which was already the largest irrigated project in the world. They want to make it three times as large. And they bring in the World Bank. They raise sums of money from places like Germany, early loans from Kuwait. And they invest this project in building these new dams, the Rosaries Dam, expanding it. But cotton price itself is collapsing. And they kind of know the cotton price is collapsing as they're doing this, but the idea is that Sudan is the low-cost producer, right? So they'll be able to grow their way out of the collapsing cotton price,

the collapsing terms of trade. And here you see early on this fight within the ministry. Some people, of course, are reading, seeing the new ideas coming out of Latin America and South Asia, and they're like, look, this is never going to work. And others are doubling down on this idea that this is a great idea, that Sudan can invest and grow its way out of its economic problems. And then the idea is that Sudan shouldn't invest in the other regions, the historically marginalized regions of the country, because it should put all of its resources into the Gazira scheme. And then once the Gazira scheme achieves success, it'll be able to break out and then later develop their other regions of the country. But of course, this proves to be completely unacceptable. And along with a

number of other problems, such as Arabization, the question of the role of Islam, political representation, I think the decision to invest most of the state's resources in the Gazira scheme becomes one of the attenuating factors for the development of the Sudanese civil war. The Gazira scheme did not end up making a lot of economic sense. But to understand how it became so central in Sudan's development strategy, it's necessary to understand the ideological assumptions underlying the economic understandings of Sudanese planners. So I mean, today, maybe looking back 2020 hindsight, you'd be like, okay, clearly, in the 1950s, they should not have invested the majority of their money

in the majority of the state's like borrowing and financial capacity in a capital-intensive project to export a commodity, a single commodity that had declining terms of exchange. This seems a little bit mad. But in order to think about it, though, you have to think... What I wanted to argue, and I think this is one of the reasons I actually wrote the book, is this question of how do policymakers make decisions? And what I came to realize, and I think this is one of the reasons I actually wrote the book, is this question of how do policymakers make decisions? And what I came to realize is that we often think of political economy as kind of like a neutral science. There are laws of political economy. You can kind of make some disputes about the calculations, but that they're kind of similar.

And as I was writing and working on Sudan, you discover that, and I think this is true almost in every place, but one of the things is that what's seen as value, right, what's seen as like economically modern or what development means itself is a culturally loaded term. And so in the case of Sudan, I could see the tables, right? I mean, as they're working out that they're going to do this, they develop listings of countries, you know, per capita GDP, because what they want to do is they want to increase Sudan's per capita GDP. And in order to make kind of common sense of what that means, right, they produce a list of countries. And so you can see at the top is the U.S. because the U.S. is just up there.

And then there's countries like Turkey. And at the bottom are countries like Tanganyika in Nigeria. And I was thinking about it. I mean, you're like, okay, this is sort of neutral maybe, but it's also sort of racially coded. And so Sudanese policymakers, they don't think they can become like the U.S., right? I mean, that's not in their cards. can become like the U.S., right? I mean, that's not in their cards. But they are like, you know,

the region of Khartoum has a similar per capita, the region of Khartoum and the Gazira scheme have a similar per capita GDP to what they say is Turkey. And of course, this is like, you know, Turkey, they're measuring supposedly an average for the whole country versus like an average for what is the wealthier region of Sudan.

But they think they can increase, basically, the economy that they see to be closer to Turkey and the northern Arab countries and further distance Sudan from what they sort of see as the African part of the country, right? And they could see it in these numbers, right? They're like, okay, the South is really poor, possibly poorer than places like Tanganyika.

They list the West as incredibly poor. But in order to do this, they also make all sorts of other assumptions about value. So for instance, they'll say things like, so-and-so has a herd of 10,000 cattle. But we're not going to estimate the value of this cattle because it's not an economic object. It's a cultural possession. And you're thinking to yourself, okay, this guy has 10,000 cattle. He's clearly doing something with these cattle besides like cultural production. Because I mean, how do you maintain 10,000 cattle?

Or I found like funny lines in the 1960 plant, five-year plant, or 10-year plant, where they say, okay, cotton is actually not Sudan's largest export. And you're like, okay. And then like a single paragraph, like a small paragraph, they, cotton is actually not Sudan's largest export. And you're like, okay. And then like a single paragraph, like a small paragraph, they're like, actually, Sudan's largest export is livestock. But they almost never return to the question of livestock. And you're like, okay, if the largest export is livestock, shouldn't Sudan be focusing on the development of its livestock

and not the development of its cotton estates? And these are the kind of questions that began to make me wonder. So the livestock that's being exported is coming from two different places. I mean, from the sort of south and west and going on hoof to Cairo. And the other livestock is going to the Gulf. Already in the 1950s and 60s, Sudan is exporting vast amounts of livestock across the Red Sea. I mean, some is going into places like Ethiopia, Eritrea, but majority of it going across the Gulf. And why don't you emphasize those things? And I looked at

the list of like the richest people in Sudan, and they often come from like livestock or gum Arabic trade, which are things that peasants collect. Gum Arabic is used to make Coca-Cola, the color that it is. And Sudan is one of the world's leading producers of this product. But it's also cultural, right? I mean, you can see it in the British documents that there was an idea, and I think this is where Mesopotamia plays in as well, right? This idea that there's a stage of development that these societies pass through. It's an irrigated stage. So you can, the whole thing about Oriental despotism and irrigation is playing in, that you domesticate people from what they call shift agriculture or herding into this sort of centralized scientific agricultural schemes.

The state also controls this much more directly, right? I mean, cotton is only sold through the state itself, which is another legacy of the colonial regime. There's these marketing boards that buy all the cotton and pay out these fixed sums. And so there's these series of built-in biases that shift where the state thinks development is possible and what kind of development it wants to do. It wants to become a country of settled, irrigated agriculturalists who have the kind of cultural norms of the dominant group in Sudan, which is this Gezira scheme, Khartoum elite.

They're very committed to the idea that everyone should speak Arabic because Arabic becomes this kind of cultural language in which, and they're using the kind of rhetoric of people like Walter Rostow. So there's these stages of growth. I mean, I remember finding copies of Walter Rostow's book in the archive files. And so it's this idea that, you know, you're going to move the country towards this stage, this stage of greater prosperity. And

then you can see the kind of metaphor of liftoff, right? The idea that Sudan will be able to move itself almost from Africa closer to a place like Turkey. The speculative economics behind the Gezira scheme represented a major continuity between the colonial and post-colonial period. Another continuity was Khartoum's relationship with South Sudan. One of the other topics in the book is this question about South Sudan. And I write the book mostly from the point of view of these, you know, northern Sudanese elites sort of following a subset of the kind of characters that Heather Sharkey developed. So sort of this Effendia class of people.

But one of the other debates that I found surprising was this question about South Sudan. And so for South Sudan, it was interesting to see what it would mean to develop South Sudan. So in the late colonial period, there's this argument that actually happens primarily among British officials. And it's British officials who decide that South Sudan can't be developed, right? I mean, and the argument is about development planning in prose

or development planning in numbers. So one of the arguments made by British officials, particularly based in South Sudan and coming often from Central Africa, was that in order to develop South Sudan, you couldn't do financial management. You had to basically articulate a vision for a new society. And so you needed to write down kind of like a dream plan for a new society without like first calculating the numbers. But that's quickly squashed within the Ministry of Finance, which

is like in order to make investments in South Sudan, we need to calculate the rate of return from the very beginning. And I think that logic becomes a logic that underlines much of development planning, both for South Sudan, but for the whole of Sudan. And I think it becomes a problem for post-colonial development and economic planning in general. This question of, do we need to calculate the possible rate of return from the very beginning, before we even begin to embark on a project like this? One of the most

internationally famous Arabic language novelists is a Sudanese author, Tayyab Saleh. I put an idea in it about the issue of colonialism, and the issue of closeness and what is called identity in these days. He was trained in many of the same institutions as the early founders of the independent state, and his works explore the influence of colonialism in Sudan and the position of the post-colonial elite. The characters that he's writing about are the kind of characters that I'm writing about in this book, right? And it's this question of about, one, you know, going away, going to Europe, coming back with these sort of new ideas,

and sort of redeveloping, how do you fit in? And one of the complaints that I would often hear, actually, as I was like, kind of finishing my research, is that the families, that these families that, you know, had started as kind of simple public servants, they often actually expand it, right? I mean, and so many of them, because of the dictatorships, because of the civil wars, go on and become international public servants. So they join what people say is this other sector, right? So there's a struggle between how close do you stay to your community and these large clan networks that you have, and how much do you become kind of a public servant that passes between Abu Dhabi and Kuwait and London and New York.

And I would often hear this complaint that so-and-so is actually my relative, but he's like a ghost to us now. You know, he doesn't provide the hospitality that we expect. He doesn't see us anymore. He's closed off. You know, their family house has become closed. And I was just surprised by this

idea that is still a kind of scar that seems to exist in Sudanese society now. Who sort of became the departed? And the idea that they're not necessarily departed because they've left the country, which I mean is one thing, right? So many Sudanese people have left the country, particularly after the 1970s. But many of these individuals, to the extent that they're still alive and their families, they actually live in Khartoum, or Omdurman, but they live as though they're abroad, right?

I mean, they live in a world that's now become kind of cut off from the rest of Sudanese society. I think that's one of the central, like cultural issues of this period, right? Is the creation of an elite that started out often as public servants, but became incredibly detached from the rest of Sudanese society. I mean, these are people who work for like Shell or the World Bank and their children work for Shell and the World Bank.

work for Shell and the World Bank. And I think it caused this kind of feeling of regret, right? A feeling of loss or a feeling that something has been taken from Sudanese society in general. And you see it throughout this early period. I mean, these guys, I remember I was in a house in Omdurman and someone was telling me, he was like, you know, I was in school with Nehru. I was in a house in Omdurman and someone was telling me, he was like, you know, I was in school with Nehru. And like, you know, I became the minister, I became the ambassador to the United Nations as soon as I came home from Cambridge. And so it's this idea that these guys took off and they never actually sort of looked back ever again. Yeah, that's become one of the paradoxes I've been trying to think through is that like, you know, many people talk about the development of a national Sudanese economy. The way I describe it in the end of the

book in the last chapter is that there becomes this kind of question of dual loyalties, right? Are you loyal to this idea of economics as an international profession, which has these sort of global standards, and you are going to be able, someone who shifts throughout these networks? Or are you trying to build something in Sudan itself? And I think for many of the Sudanese professional class, and that's one of the questions of failure, success or failure. Sudan does develop and maintains

a massive professional class that expands throughout this period. But in order to maintain that professional class, the Khartoum and Omdurman elites have to globalize it. And so much of that class now, you know, builds either the Gulf states or lives in Europe or the North America. And that globalization was required to nurture

the expansion of sort of the Sudanese professional class. But at what cost to the Sudanese state? Towards the end, I kind of also wonder about the possibility of the project of national development. Was it possible for Sudan to develop within Sudan itself? Or was, you know, the globalization of the Sudanese middle class always inevitable? I think there's been this new work on the NIEO, the New International Economic Order. Would it have required, you know, the kind of reimagining of the global economy

sort of in the 1970s and 80s if Sudan, you know, was going to be allowed to sort of develop into the kind of middle-income country that many of its 1950s and 60s planners imagined. At the end of our conversation, we return to the familiar questions of success and failure in Sudan's history. What Jung has shown is that contrary to what some might think, Sudan's economic planners were actually very successful

in their understanding and implementation of modern theories surrounding economics and development. In many ways, it was those theories themselves that ultimately failed Sudan. Yeah, I think that's the core argument of my book, that they basically became very good economists, even if they had started not as economists. And they've been able to reproduce standard orthodox economics amongst their children. And they've been able to reproduce standard orthodox economics amongst their children. And they go on to great positions, like Mahmoud Beharie becomes the first head of the African Development Bank. Abdel Rahim Margani becomes the head of the Kuwaiti Arab Bank for Development. I mean, you see the Sudanese sort of everywhere, right? I mean, they take up

these international positions. They become kind of great economic advisors. But the logic of economics that they understand and that they develop from economic science does not allow for the development of a country like Sudan. Thank you for listening to this interview with Alden Young about his book, Transforming Sudan. To find out more about that book or check out other resources related to this topic, visit our website, OttomanHistoryPodcast.com. Thank you.