Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development, and State Formation by Alden Young (review)

Alden Young’s new book, Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development, and State Formation, takes African political economy on a science and technology studies inflected cultural turn. Young innovatively situates government policies and Sudanese economic thought into conversations on late colonialism and development studies. This book challenges the dominant historiographical narrative of African states as “rapacious and predatory, with official institutions serving little purpose other than legitimization and patronage” (19). Instead, it examines early Sudanese financial policymakers’ decisions in light of the possibilities and limitations of newly independent states.

Young charts the creation of Sudan’s economic ideology from the late Anglo-Egyptian Condominium period to 1966, allowing readers to see continuities despite political ruptures. These continuities illuminate the forces shaping late colonial and early independence financial policy makers in Sudan. His work pays special attention to the intellectual and professional world of these men, where “globalized conceptions of development interacted with local utopias in the minds of policy makers. Sudan was created through the interaction of imaginaries both globalized and nonnglobalized” (13). His study frames the imaginaries of the planners in two ways: first, the “cognitive infrastructures” embedded in the tools of these economic thinkers, such as “national development programming and their assumption of the nation-state as the unit of financial analysis” (14); second, the social world of the planners, which influenced their decisions, for example by making some investments appearing risky and others safe. Alongside these two imaginaries, Young situates these policymakers’ worldview within the physical infrastructure (railroads, road, waterways, etc.) of early independence Sudan.

To underscore the importance of this intellectual and physical inheritance, Young situates his project within the long genealogy of Sudan’s modern colonial encounters. His first chapter, “From Colonial Economics to Political Economy, 1820–1940,” explains why Mekki Abbas, the first Sudanese director of the cotton-producing Gezira Scheme, envisioned Sudan’s future prosperity akin to ancient Mesopotamia. In doing so, Abbas distanced independent Sudan from Britain and Egypt, highlighting the extractive colonial legacies of both empires through slavery and large-scale cotton production. Chapter 2, “Planning and the Territorial Perspective, 1945–1951,” explores how the national economy became the primary unit of economic measurement in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Young shows that economic unity bound the Sudan together in the years following World War II, even in the midst of competing forms of development schemes or regional projects. Chapter 3, “Calculable Development, 1951–1954,” addresses the question of how the Sudanese economy should be governed. Young focuses on debates among colonial officials as to whether planning should be done by prose (imagine development in possible futures) or numbers (development should be calculable using historic data to create linear future projections and then one spends accordingly). The implications of colonial decisions to go with quantitative futures tied Sudanese economic development to cotton exports. Chapter 4, “The New Finance Officials, 1954–1958,” uses the Gezira Scheme, which at this point covered 2 million acres and provided half the government’s revenue, to trace the transformation of a colonial civilizing mission into an economic developmental one. The fifth chapter, “The Nation, in Whose Name they Could Act: The Military and National Income Accounting, 1958–1964,” examines the impact of new globalized accounting systems. The scale of these systems made it easier to compare Sudan’s GDP to that of Britain or Turkey, but obscured the inequality between “the Omdurman-Sennar-Kosti triangle and the rest of the country” (126). Perceptions based on the nation as the most important unit influenced policymakers’ decisions to focus on national economic growth, thereby increasing reliance on cotton at the expense of equality among regions within the nation. The final chapter, “A Nation-State Alone Cannot Transform Its Destiny, 1964–1966,” examines the “cosmopolitan nature of Sudanese economic discourses” as the country became increasingly reliant on international creditors after the October Revolution (144). Young’s conclusion, “Towards a New African Economic History,” redirects the field from its focus...