British Business and Sudan During the Mahdiya

This chapter explores British business and economic engagement with Sudan in the period before the ‘Reconquest’ of 1898/1899. It examines how commercial enterprise was suggested as means of opposing the slavery and the slave trade, and how this was, in turn, bound up with various Victorian anxieties and popular causes. The chapter begins by discussing the geo-politics of the North Africa-Red Sea region, before turning to the imperial culture in the late Victorian period. Here the notion of the ‘imperial gothic’ is used to examine how some British imperialists began to imagine Sudan as an exotic land of untold riches. From this stemmed a form of entrepreneurialism that led to the creation of a number of enterprises that sought to develop business in Sudan. Though all of them failed, by examining them and the entrepreneurs who created them, the imperial ambitions of both the British state and the business community with reference to Sudan are revealed. This paved the way for later colonial business ventures in Sudan while also prefiguring the relationship between the Sudan government and business during the colonial period.