The Economic Roots of Modern Sudan | Alden Young

E466 | As a site of recent civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, Sudan's history is often framed by violence. In this podcast, our guest Alden Young offers an alternative framing of Sudan's modern history, as we discuss Sudan's economy and its relationship to the broader Middle East from the 19th century onward. We discuss Sudan's unique experience of colonialism under Ottoman/Egyptian rule and how the issue of slavery intensified as Sudan's ties to Egypt and the broader Ottoman world intensified during the 19th century. We also discuss how colonial planners slowly reoriented Sudan's economy towards agricultural export and away from pastoralism. We explore the Gezira scheme, a long foretold irrigation project that would become the centerpiece of Sudanese economic development after independence during the 1950s. And we consider the fate of the class of Sudanese economists and technocrats who straddled the late colonial and postcolonial periods. On our website, we also offer an activity module for university classrooms based on this podcast, a documentary about the Gezira scheme from the 1950s, and the novel Season of Migration to the North by Sudanese author Tayeb Salih. More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/07/sudan.html Alden Young is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and a faculty member in the International Development Studies program at the University of California, Los Angeles. His first book Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development and State Formation was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. His current research project, Elite Retreat: The Making of Sudanese Political Economy and Business in the Era of Dollar Hegemony examines how Sudanese intellectuals and businessmen conceptualized the rise of the Arab Gulf beginning in the 1970s and sought or were compelled to build new economic, political and labor relationships between Sudan and the Gulf region. Chris Gratien is Assistant Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. He is currently preparing a monograph about the environmental history of the Cilicia region of the former Ottoman Empire from the 1850s until the 1950s. CREDITS Episode No. 466 Release Date: 11 July 2020 Recording Location: Recorded remotely between East Syracuse, NY and Princeton, NJ Music and Audio Elements (by order of appearance): Kai Engel - Augmentations; A.A. Aalto - Canyon; Soft and Furious - So What; "Independence Sudan" (1956) - British Pathe; They Planted A Stone (1954); مصر المحروسة - الطيب صالح; Aitua - The Trap Sound production by Chris Gratien Bibliography courtesy and images of Alden Young available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/07/sudan.html