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SUMMARY:Decolonisation in Sudan: Development Planning and the End of 'Indi
 rect Rule' - Alden Young\, Drexel Univeristy\, Philadelphia
DTSTART:20141030T120000Z
DTEND:20141030T140000Z
UID:TALK55557@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Judith Weik
DESCRIPTION:Using files from the National Records Office in Khartoum\, as 
 well as files from the Sudan Archive in Durham\, I argue that finance offi
 cials created Sudan as an economic unit. Following the end of the Second W
 orld War\, nationalist pressure on the administration in Khartoum forced t
 he government of Sudan to apply for a development grant.  This grant was t
 o be spent on the development of Sudan\; however\, no one in the Sudanese 
 administration knew exactly what that meant.  In the process of trying to 
 evaluate development proposals submitted by the different branches of the 
 government\, senior finance officials were forced to come up with a rubric
  in order to compare their appropriateness.  They adopted a “territorial
  perspective\,” which stated that projects would be compared on their ab
 ility to contribute to the overall welfare of the country\, and could not 
 be structured to benefit a particular people.  While projects could be loc
 ated in a particular location\, the project impact on the central budget h
 ad to be calculated before it could be funded.  This informal rule meant a
 n end to “indirect rule” as the governing logic of the Sudanese state.
 \n\nAlden Young is an assistant professor of African History and the Direc
 tor of the Program in Africana Studies at Drexel University. He is now wor
 king on a manuscript entitled Sudan By the Numbers: the Financial Engineer
 ing of Independence.  Dr. Young studies the history of development plannin
 g in the territory\, which became Sudan\, as a lens to look at the interpl
 ay of decolonization\, economic development and the process of state forma
 tion in post-WWII Africa. \n\nHe has also begun working on a new project t
 entatively titled Elite Retreat: Sudanese Bureaucrats\, Intellectuals\, Tr
 aders and the Search for an Alternative to the State which follows the dec
 isions of these three groups of elites to alternatively attempt to reform 
 or abandon the state-building project during the two decades between the p
 opular Sudanese revolts of 1964 and 1984/85.  Prior to coming to Drexel\, 
 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Africana Studies Department at the Uni
 versity of Pennsylvania.  He completed his PhD in the History Department a
 t Princeton University in 2013.
LOCATION:Seminar Room S1 Alison Richard Building\, 7 West Road\, Cambridge
  CB3 9DT
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