Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

For more than half a century, from 1899 to 1956, the lands of today's Sudan and South Sudan were ruled under an unusual arrangement: a condominium, in which Britain and Egypt formally shared sovereignty. On paper the governor-general was appointed by the Egyptian khedive, but in practice he was always a British officer, and Khartoum was run much like any other British colony. The arrangement ended when Sudan became an independent republic on 1 January 1956.

Egypt under Muhammad Ali had invaded Sudan in 1820, and his successors pushed Egyptian rule far up the Nile. In 1881 a Sudanese religious leader, Muhammad Ahmad, proclaimed himself the Mahdi and led a revolt that captured Khartoum in 1885, killing the British general Charles Gordon, and set up a state of his own. According to one estimate, Sudan's population fell from about eight million to three million between 1885 and 1898 through war, famine and disease. From 1896 to 1898 an Anglo-Egyptian army under Herbert Kitchener reconquered the country in the Mahdist War, culminating at the Battle of Omdurman. An agreement of January 1899 then placed the territory south of the 22nd parallel under joint rule.

Kitchener was the first governor-general, followed in 1899 by Reginald Wingate. Army officers at first filled most posts, but from 1901 civilian recruits from Britain formed the Sudan Political Service, with Egyptians in middle-ranking jobs and Sudanese mostly in junior ones. Courts followed codes modelled on those of British India, while Islamic law courts formed a separate branch under a chief qadi. Mahdist risings in 1900, 1902–1903, 1904 and 1908 were brief. In 1916, during the First World War, British forces invaded the Sultanate of Darfur, whose sultan Ali Dinar had sided with the Ottomans, and added it to the condominium.

Economic investment concentrated on the Nile valley. Port Sudan opened in 1906, and the Gezira Scheme, launched in 1911 and greatly enlarged after a dam near Sennar was finished in 1925, made irrigated cotton the backbone of the economy. The south was treated very differently. Under the "closed door" ordinances of the 1920s and 1930s, northern Sudanese were barred from working there, Islam and Arab dress were discouraged, and Christian missions provided most schooling. Northern nationalists condemned this separate development as an artificial division of the country.

Egyptian nationalists wanted a united kingdom of the Nile valley, while Britain resisted. In 1924 Ali Abd al-Latif, a Muslim Dinka and former army officer, led the White Flag League in demonstrations; his arrest sparked a mutiny by Sudanese soldiers that was crushed. After the governor-general Sir Lee Stack was assassinated in Cairo in November 1924, Britain expelled Egyptian troops and officials, leaving Egypt's role largely nominal. Sudanese nationalists later split between those, led by Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi, who sought independence, and those around Ali al-Mirghani, who favoured union with Egypt.

The Sudan Defence Force fought the Italians on the Eritrean and Ethiopian fronts in 1940–1941. After the war an advisory council for the north was set up and a 1947 conference at Juba agreed to unite the administrations of north and south. In 1951 Egypt repudiated the condominium, but after its 1952 revolution the new leadership accepted Sudanese self-determination, and on 12 February 1953 Britain and Egypt agreed a transition to self-government. Ismail al-Azhari became chief minister in 1954. In August 1955 southern troops mutinied at the prospect of serving under northern officers, killing several hundred northerners. Seventy southerners were later executed, and some mutineers escaped to organise armed resistance.

Our 1914 map shows the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan as a vast territory south of Egypt, bordered by Ethiopia to the east and, to the south, by the East Africa Protectorate and other British territories. Its lands today form the Sudan and South Sudan.