In this impressive monograph on the creation of the Sudanese economy and state in the mid-twentieth century, Alden Young demonstrates the value of taking bureaucracies, ideas, and institutions seriously in African studies. It is well established that decolonisation was not a moment of absolute rupture in African history, but rarely have the continuities of the 1940s to 1960s period been so clearly and astutely demonstrated.

Young's book builds on Frederick Cooper's paradigmatic work on decolonisation and development in Africa in two central ways.Footnote ¹ First, Young's account of the primacy of state-led developmentalism from the 1940s to 1960s in Sudan sheds new light on the way that development discourse tended to remove a technocratic elite from the concerns and lived realities of the people they governed. In particular, Young places significance on an economising logic that emerged from an interaction between the new global science of development economics and the pre-existing interests and mentalities of elite planners and officials in Sudan. In Sudan, both colonial and postcolonial officials focused on large-scale irrigation projects and the export sale of cotton as presenting the most reliable pathway to development and modernity. By the 1960s, officials posited economic growth as measured by the new aggregative statistical tool of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita as the central measure of developmental success, a measure by which Sudan's developmental performance could be easily compared with its Arab neighbours. This competitive and single-minded focus on growth, and the way this concentration elided distributive questions, had great significance for the course of Sudanese politics. Imagining and planning a cotton-oriented economy was made possible by the relative ease of data collection for this sector, in contrast to the poor quality of data available for more remote rural areas, whose activities were typically regarded as ‘traditional’ and often ‘non-economic’. It was very difficult to plan for sectors of the economy of which the state had limited understanding or knowledge; the limited transportation infrastructure bequeathed by colonialism reinforced these tendencies. This economistic bias towards cotton and against ‘traditional’ economies (like livestock) coincided with existing cultural prejudices held among Sudan's riverine Arab elite towards many of the diverse populations of rural Sudan and thus reinforced the toxic, long-established core-periphery political geography in Sudan that would be so central to the postcolonial conflicts in the country.

The second issue that Cooper raises, to which Young pays attention, pertains to the question of how the nation-state emerged at independence as the key political form — instead of larger or smaller forms of political community. In Sudan's case, other postcolonial political possibilities included forging a union with Egypt or, at the other end of the scale, creating an autonomous region in Southern Sudan. Here, Young makes a particularly important intervention in demonstrating that finance officials and development planners played a key, autonomous role in imagining ‘Sudan’ as the key economic and political unit, and in strengthening the centralised nature of statehood. As the planning apparatus evolved, the power of finance officials to set policy also grew. The evaluation of proposed development projects according to the value they would generate for ‘the Sudanese economy’ (or national budget, in earlier years) was of great significance for defining Sudan as an economic and political unit, for it undermined earlier colonial state practices of provincial autonomy and attempts to isolate and ‘protect’ specific ethnic groups from what one inter-war governor general called the ‘septic germs of modernity’.Footnote ² This imagining of ‘the economy’ was a gradual process that unfolded over the mid-twentieth century, rather than an abrupt innovation after 1945.

This book is grounded in a mastery of a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary literature. By emphasising the significance of global and local ideas and institutions in Sudanese history, Young aims to move debate beyond the dominant ‘neo-patrimonial’, ‘predatory’, or ‘failed’ state narratives that have been assigned to postcolonial Sudan and many other African states. Young shows that Sudan's economic policy choices were entirely orthodox in the mid-twentieth century international context, and the country's planners were seen to be competent officials in the eyes of international financial institutions. Young even shows that ideas about stabilization and transparency, usually associated with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s, were adopted by Sudanese officials in the mid-1960s in order to attract international financial support. This emphasis was less about external compulsion than it was about the way Sudanese officials emerged out of a cosmopolitan — and relatively conservative — intellectual milieu.

The chronological focus of this work leaves some questions open: to what extent did a professional economistic bureaucracy survive into the 1970s in Sudan or in Africa more broadly? Arguably, the paradigm of the ‘neo-patrimonial’ state has been derived and applied more to this later period than to the years under examination here. But Young's own arguments, in acknowledging the close ties among bureaucratic, political and economic elites, hint at the way that development economics might provide a useful cover for policies that served to generate wealth among elites, especially those personally invested in the cotton economy.

Overall, Young's work is a resounding success in demonstrating the value of paying heed to hitherto neglected bureaucratic records and policy debates. It shows that the postcolonial state in Sudan was shaped by the economising logics of planners and finance officials, men who primarily conceived of their role as bringing development and modernity to Sudan, even as their narrowly economistic vision failed to engage with the issues of redistribution and justice that would ultimately produce decades of conflict.