Essential background for an understanding of the social and economic issues confronting the Sudan today.

Sharkey 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.

This book uncovers how colonial administrators, postcolonial governments and international aid agencies have promoted stability and their own visions of the rule of law in Sudan.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a pioneering generation of young women exited their homes and entered public space, marking a new era for women's civic participation in northern Sudan. A provocative new public presence, women's civic engagement was at its core a bodily experience. Amid the socio-political upheavals of imperial rule, female students, medical workers, and activists used a careful choreography of body movements and fashion to adapt to imperial mores, claim opportunities for political agency, and shape a new standard of modern, mobile womanhood. Khartoum at Night is the first English-language history of these women's lives, examining how their experiences of the British Empire from 1900–1956 were expressed on and through their bodies. Central to this story is the tobe: a popular, modest form of dress that wrapped around a woman's head and body. Marie Grace Brown shows how northern Sudanese women manipulated the tucks, folds, and social messages of the tobe to deftly negotiate the competing pulls of modernization and cultural authenticity that defined much of the imperial experience. Her analysis weaves together the threads of women's education and activism, medical midwifery, urban life, consumption, and new behaviors of dress and beauty to reconstruct the worlds of politics and pleasure in which early-twentieth-century Sudanese women lived.

Imperial Sudan completes a study of the formative colonial period during which Britain and Egypt ruled the country. The previous volume, the acclaimed Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898-1934, appeared in 1986. The current book takes the narrative to independence in 1956 and thus, with Empire, constitutes the first comprehensive survey of the political and economic history of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Dr Daly examines the structure of the colonial regime, its role in Anglo-Egyptian relations, and the development of Sudanese nationalist politics during the inter-war years. He surveys economic and social developments, including government finance and development policy, transport and communications, agricultural production, and social services. He reveals the Sudan's important role in the Second World War, when the Sudan Defence Force held back Italian invasion. The complicated path to self-government and self-determination, which culminated in independence in 1956, is explained in great detail. The book ends with the transfer of power, and the author reflects on the legacy of the Condominium.