Abstract

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Sudan’s political economy was dominated by four contending political-economic blocs: two sectarian parties based respectively on the interests of the business class in trade and agriculture; orga­nized labour anchored in the railway, irrigated farming and the state bureaucracy; and an emergent informal sector tied to the rise of private financial services (Islamic banking). At that time, Sudan’s politics was insti­tutionalized and fiercely ideological. The north-central parts of Sudan had the deserved reputation of a devel­opmental state with well-run bureaucratic institutions, symbolized by the Gezira Board which administered the largest irrigated farm in the world, which incubated both an effendiya class of technocrats and organized labour. The country’s peripheries were governed on the basis of the ‘native administration’ system of adapt­ed provincial aristocracy, which nurtured neo-patrimonialism. The tribal aristocracy emerged as a class in its own right, while the bourgeoisie of the provinces were drawn from Khartoum and the adjoining riverain ar­eas, and, having made their profits in the provinces, invested them in the centre. The inner peripheries (the Nile north of Khartoum, Gezira and the Blue Nile, the Gedaref mechanized farms, northern Kordofan) were gradually drawn into the capitalist economic relations of the center, based on the industrial organization of labour in the railways and the commercial farming sector. The furthest peripheries (southern Sudan, Darfur, the Nuba Mountains) were ‘closed districts’ at best labour reserves and at worst territories administered with the utmost economy

Keywords

Marketplace, Parliamentary, Islamist, state borrowing, Pillage, Marketized