The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium — Joint Sovereignty in Name and British Dominance in Practice (1899–1956)
On 19 January 1899, a few months after the defeat of the Mahdist state at Karari, the Condominium Agreement was signed in Cairo between Britain and Egypt, signed for Egypt by Boutros Ghali and for Britain by Lord Cromer. The agreement defined the territory of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan as that lying south of the 22nd parallel, and stipulated that the Governor-General — holder of supreme military and civil command — would be appointed by Khedival decree on the recommendation of the British government, and could not be removed except with its consent.
The first Governor-General was Lord Kitchener, commander of the campaign to retake Sudan, succeeded in the same year by Sir Reginald Wingate, who remained in office until 1916. In practice, as academic studies agree, sovereignty was joint in text only; the Governor-General administered the country from Khartoum as if it were a British colonial administration, and the British civil administrators who arrived from 1901 formed the nucleus of the "Sudan Political Service", while Egyptians held the middle posts and Sudanese the lower posts at first.
Economic development was concentrated in the northern Nile Valley: the port of Port Sudan was opened in 1906 as a replacement for Suakin, and the Gezira Scheme was launched in 1911 in partnership between the government and a private British company to grow cotton for British textile mills, and the Sennar Dam was completed in 1925, expanding irrigated agriculture and making cotton the pillar of the country's exports. In 1916 Britain annexed Darfur to Sudan and ended its sultanate, thereby roughly completing the borders of modern Sudan.
The sharp turning point came in November 1924 with the assassination of the Governor-General, Sir Lee Stack, in Cairo. Britain ordered the withdrawal of all Egyptian troops and employees from Sudan, and in 1925 the "Sudan Defence Force" was formed under Sudanese leadership as a replacement for the Egyptian units, and Britain ruled Sudan alone until the 1936 treaty allowed a limited Egyptian return. From 1924, too, the north and the south were administered in practice as two separate territories with different languages and policies, a division whose effects left a long imprint on the country's history.
The Condominium ended with the Self-Government Agreement signed between Britain and Egypt in 1953, after the July 1952 revolution in Egypt, and parliamentary elections and a transitional period paved the way to the declaration of independence. On 1 January 1956, fifty-seven years of the Condominium formally ended, and the Republic of Sudan arose as an independent state.
📚 Sources: U.S. Library of Congress — Country Studies: «Sudan — The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, 1899–1955» (countrystudies.us); «The Sudan Handbook» (Rift Valley Institute) — Chapter «The Condominium»; The Historical Encyclopaedia of the History of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (History of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan). — Editorial Team