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2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

9. Conclusion: Business, Imperialism and the Organization of Economic Development in Sudan

Author : Simon Mollan

Published in: Imperialism and Economic Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter discusses the principal conclusions of the book. It first of all asks whether Sudan was economically different from other sub-Saharan African colonies within the British Empire and concludes that it was comparable in terms of development policy and indebtedness. The conclusion then considers the main historiographical debates used to frame the book. The second section examines the issue of business imperialism and concludes that the centrality of business to the colonial state, and its influence, diminished over time. The third section of the chapter discusses imperialism in Sudan with reference to the ‘Gentlemanly Capitalist’ theory of British imperialism and similarly concludes that it was this historiographical theory is not especially applicable to Sudan. As a counter explanation the chapter then discusses the significance of the state as an economic actor in Sudan. The chapter concludes by looking at the legacies of imperialism that, even through decolonization, established a degree of continuity in the position of Sudan in relationship to the main economic powers in the international political economy. The chapter closes by discussing the potential for a theory of ‘imperial organization,’ based on empirical studies such as this book.

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previous chapter War, Decolonization and After

Simon Mollan, “Business, State and Economy: Cotton and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1919–1939.” African Economic History 36 (2008): 95–124; Alden Young, Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development, and State Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

W Travis Hanes III, “Sir Hubert Huddleston and the Independence of the Sudan.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 20, no. 2 (1992): 248–273; Heather J Sharkey, Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (University of California Press, 2003).

Katharine West, “Theorising about ‘imperialism’: A Methodological Note.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 1, no. 2 (1 January 1973): 147–154, doi:10.1080/03086537308582369; Charles Jones, “‘Business Imperialism’ and Argentina, 1875–1900: A Theoretical Note.” Journal of Latin American Studies 12, no. 2 (1980): 437–444; D.C.M. Platt, Business Imperialism, 1840–1930: An Inquiry Based on British Experience in Latin America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); Peter J. Cain and Anthony G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: 1688–2000 (London: Pearson Education, 2002); John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade.” The Economic History Review 6, no. 1 (1953): 1–15; Fieldhouse, The West and the Third World: Trade, Colonialism, Dependence, and Development; David Kenneth Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire, 1830–1914 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson London, 1973); David Kenneth Fieldhouse, Black Africa 1945–1980: Economic Decolonization and Arrested Development (London: Routledge, 1986).

Robert Tignor, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire: State and Business in Decolonizing Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya, 1945–1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Nicholas White, British Business in Post-Colonial Malaysia, 1957–70: “Neo-Colonialism” or “Disengagement”? (Abingdon: Routledge Curzon, 2004).

Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies 1850–1960 (London: Routledge, 1993), 275.

Fieldhouse, The West and the Third World: Trade, Colonialism, Dependence, and Development. See especially Chapter 6, ‘The Concept of a Colonial Economy’, 164–186 for a survey of this area. A more econometric approach is Paul Collier and Jan Willem Gunning, “Explaining African Economic Performance.” Journal of Economic Literature 37, no. 1 (1999): 64–111. Gunning and Collier outline an agenda for research to establish more completely why Africa has grown so slowly. The issues they identify range from a lack of social capital, to government mismanagement of development policy and finance, to geography, demography and the incidence of disease. This is developed further by Collier in subsequent work. See Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done about It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); P. Collier, “Resource Rents, Governance, and Conflict.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 4 (1 August 2005): 625–633, doi:10.1177/0022002705277551.

Geoffrey Jones, “The State and Economic Development in India 1890—1947: The Case of Oil.” Modern Asian Studies 13, no. 3 (1979): 353.

Fieldhouse, The West and the Third World: Trade, Colonialism, Dependence, and Development, 168; Havinden and Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies 1850–1960, 160–183.

Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism: 1688–2000, 579. Idealising the indigenous population in terms of custom, political authority, tribal structure and so on continued through much of the Condominium. See Cherry Leonardi, “Knowing Authority : Colonial Governance and Local Community in Equatoria Province, Sudan, 1900–1956” (University of Durham, 2005). Especially, ‘Chapter One: Knowing the Native’, 45–76.

Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism: 1688–2000, 575–577; Stephen Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy 1914–1940 (Routledge, 2005), passim.

Martin Daly, “The Development of the Governor-Generalship of the Sudan, 1899–1934.” Journal of African History 24, no. 1 (1983): 89.

Wm. Roger Louis quotes Margery Perham who described Sudan as ‘the pawn in our Egyptian policy’ in 1953. See Louis, “The Dissolution of the British Empire”, 340.

Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy 1914–1940, 294.

SAD 418/5/46-58 ‘The Gezira Scheme: a talk given at the Sudan Cultural Centre on February 17th 1943 by A. Gaitskell’; SAD 408/2/11-13 ‘A Broadcast on the Gezira Scheme from Omdurman Station, 18th January 1943’. For interest, Gaitskell’s brother was Hugh Gaitskell, Labour Minister in the United Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s.

Fieldhouse, The West and the Third World: Trade, Colonialism, Dependence, and Development, 213.

Havinden and Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies 1850–1960, 174, 176–177. These data are used to calculate the Table 9.1 below and can be found reproduced in ‘Appendix A: Sudan Government Debt’.

See Appendix B for data relating to comparative colonial indebtedness.

Gallagher and Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade”; Platt, Business Imperialism, 1840–1930: An Inquiry Based on British Experience in Latin America.

Jones, “‘Business Imperialism’ and Argentina, 1875–1900: A Theoretical Note”, 437.

Jones, “‘Business Imperialism’ and Argentina, 1875–1900: A Theoretical Note”, 437. This was directed at Schumpeter and J.A. Hobson.

Jones, “‘Business Imperialism’ and Argentina, 1875–1900: A Theoretical Note”, 438.

Jones, “‘Business Imperialism’ and Argentina, 1875–1900: A Theoretical Note”, 438–439.

Simon Mollan, “Business Failure, Capital Investment and Information: Mining Companies in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1900–13.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37, no. 2 (2009): 229–248.

FO 957/98 Sudan Cotton Growing 1950, Memorandum: ‘Nationalization of the Gezira Scheme Completed’.

J. Stone, ‘Colonial Economic Policies in Africa’ (no date), in Donald Hawley, Khartoum Perspectives : A Collection of Lectures given at the Sudan Cultural Centre Khartoum in the 1940s and 1950s, ed. Donald Hawley (Norwich, n.d.).

Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism: 1688–2000, 62–103, 107–150, passim; Raymond Dumett, Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: The New Debate on Empire (London: Routledge, 1999), Introduction.

Mollan, “Business Failure, Capital Investment and Information: Mining Companies in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1900–13.”

George Sanderson, “The Ghost of Adam Smith: Ideology, Bureaucracy, and the Frustration of Economic Development in the Sudan, 1934–1940.” In Modernization in the Sudan (New York: Lilian Barber Press, 1985), 101.

Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonization, 1918–1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 304–305, 343–344; Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), passim; Keith Jeffery, “The Second World War.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Judith Brown and Wm Roger Louis, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 314. In the case of Sudan the Atlantic Charter was linked to an emerging ‘nationalistic spirit’ in many parts of the country. See GGR, 1942–1944, p. 9.

David Kenneth Fieldhouse, The West and the Third World: Trade, Colonialism, Dependence, and Development (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 89.

For a discussion of sovereignty in colonial/imperial states see: Michael W Doyle, Empires (Cornell University Press, 1986), 30–47; Stephen D Krasner, “Rethinking the Sovereign State Model.” Review of International Studies 27 (2001): 17–42; Carolyn M Warner, “The Rise of the State System in Africa.” Review of International Studies 27, no. 5 (2001): 65–89. It is not clear that the breached sovereignty of colonial states is fundamentally different from other breaches of state sovereignty that have punctuated the history of international relations. As Krasner comments: ‘[b]reaches of the sovereign state model have been an enduring characteristic of the international environment. … Mutual recognition has not always gone to juridically independent territorial entities. There has never been a golden age for sovereignty.’

The nature of imperial economic institutions including states might therefore be a fruitful avenue for further inquiry. See: John Foster, “The Institutionalist (Evolutionary) School.” A Modern Guide to Economic Thought, 1991, 207–232; Geoffrey Martin Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (London: Routledge, 2001). Especially, Part IV, ‘The millennium: the second coming of history’, 271–355.

Simon Mollan, “The Free-Standing Company: A ‘Zombie’ Theory of International Business History?.” Journal of Management History 22, no. 2 (2018).

Marcelo Bucheli and R Daniel Wadhwani, Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Robert C H Chia and Robin Holt, Strategy without Design: The Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Tor Hernes, Understanding Organization as Process: Theory for a Tangled World (Routledge, 2002).

James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (Oxford University Press, 2011); Alexander Motyl, Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

Title: Conclusion: Business, Imperialism and the Organization of Economic Development in Sudan
Author: Simon Mollan
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Imperialism and Economic Development in Sub-Saharan Africa
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-27635-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-27636-2

Copyright Year: 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27636-2_9