Introduction

Abstract

On New Year’s Day 1956 the flags of Great Britain and Egypt were hauled down all over the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and the blue, yellow and green flag of the Republic of the Sudan was raised in their place. Thus ended the Condominium, fifty-seven years of British and Egyptian rule in the Sudan, which began after the collapse of the authoritarian Mahdist State on the battlefield of Karari in 1898 and closed with the inauguration of an independent, democratic Sudan in 1956. Dominated by the British, the Condominium is the decisive epoch in modern Sudanese history, that era in which the introduction of Western ideas and institutions by British officials combined with the less conspicuous revival of Egyptian cultural influence to change for ever the traditional patterns of Sudanese government and society. Egyptian (or in the early years Turko-Albanian) ascendancy had come to the Sudan in the nineteenth century with the armies of Muhammad Ali, only to be eclipsed after 1881 by the meteoric rise of the Mahdist State. Later, Egyptian cultural influence returned with the Anglo-Egyptian armies and remains undiminished to this day. The impact of the British was even greater. They sought to modernise the Sudan by applying technology to the subsistence economy on the one hand, while grafting the liberal institutions of England to the authoritarian, traditional society of the Sudan on the other.