Sudan: A Case Study of Economics in Arabic

The origins of Sudan’s economy as an internationally recognized unit of economic analysis lay in the Interwar struggle to define Egypt’s sovereignty between Britain and the Egyptian Monarchy.  A struggle that burst into the world of high politics between 1919 and 1936, when the League of Nations ratified the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, reaffirming Egypt’s sovereignty with reservations. Sudan, which remained under the protection of the British and Egyptian crowns, was one of those reservations. However with Egypt’s privileges in Sudan now adjudicated by the League, the Egypt crown was allowed to send an economic expert to Khartoum in 1938 Abdullah Fakri Abaatha.

I explain how the idea of Sudan as an economic region evolved as it entered the public discourse in Arabic. I then explore the ways in which this dialogue went on to create a narrative among the emerging circles of Sudanese nationalists about British rules hindering the country’s agricultural productivity and potential income.  I then look at some of the early writings in Arabic about Sudan, which conflate the idea of Sudan as an economic unit with the idea of Sudan as a geographic unit. Here, I investigate the impact of economic ties to these other materially oriented disciplines such as geography and agricultural sciences on the development of concepts such as “limitless growth,” which became a hallmark of mid-20^th century ideological frameworks such as “modernization theory.”

Finally, in the third section of the paper, I discuss the work of the Sudanese economist Saad eldin Fawzi, who in 1958, just as Sudan’s first National Income Account survey was finalized, wrote that the basis of Sudan’s economy was not geography but rather the constitution of Sudan. The economy for Fawzi was essentially a political construct, and Sudan as a political concept would underline the country’s first ten-year growth plan.