Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan FROM THE PUBLISHER
Histories written in the aftermath of empire have often featured conquerors and peasant rebels but have said little about the vast staffs of locally recruited clerks, technicians, teachers, and medics who made colonialism work day-to-day. Even as these workers maintained the colonial state, they dreamed of displacing imperial power. This book examines the history of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1898-1956) and the Republic of Sudan that followed in order to understand how colonialism worked on the ground, affected local cultures, influenced the rise of nationalism, and shaped the postcolonial nation-state.
Relying on a rich cache of Sudanese Arabic literary sources, including poetry, essays, and memoirs, as well as on colonial documents and photographs, this perceptive study examines colonialism from the viewpoint of those who lived and worked in its midst. By integrating the case of Sudan with material on other countries, particularly India, Sharkey gives her book broad comparative appeal. She shows that colonial legacies--such as inflexible borders, atomized multi-ethnic populations, and autocratic governing structures--have persisted, hobbling postcolonial nation-states. Thus countries like Sudan are still living with colonialism, struggling to achieve consensus and stability within borders that a fallen empire has left behind.
SYNOPSIS
A history of British rule in the Sudan, emphasizing *how* the British ruled---in large part by training a native elite to participate in government. The author places her work in the larger context of British imperialism, with particular attention to India.
FROM THE CRITICS
Foreign Affairs
This well-researched study looks at how British colonialism in Sudan created a penny-wise machinery of domination by training native subalterns who, in due course, formulated their own national identity and ideology of anticolonialism. The British drew their clerks, teachers, and technicians from a narrow upper stratum of "Arabized" families from the riverain north in the hope of co-opting this potentially disruptive element of indigenous society. For half a century, one academic institution, Khartoum's Gordon College, trained almost all the members of this all-male, monocultural elite, who then went on to inherit leadership of Sudan at independence in 1956, leaving the non-Arabic-speaking, non-Muslim peoples of the country's peripheries almost as excluded from status, opportunity, and power as they had been at the dawn of the colonial period. This arrangement made perfect sense to the British at the time, as it did to their anointed political heirs, but Sudan has paid the price ever since. To paint a fuller historical picture, more might have been said about the colonial experience of Sudan's southern and other peripheral peoples.
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