R. S. O'Fahey's The Darfur Sultanate is the indispensable history of Darfur, from the date of the foundation of the kingdom in the early seventeenth century to its demise in 1916 and incorporation into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. During those three centuries, Darfur was a ‘Sudanic’ state, one of a string of comparable kingdoms along the southern edge of the Sahara desert, which combined absolute and sacral kingship with Islamic faith and law. From its beginnings as an ethnic kingdom in the mountains of Jebel Marra, Darfur subsequently developed into a complex multi-ethnic empire. By 1800 it had surpassed its better-known rival on the Nile, the Funj kingdom, in territory and power. But Darfur was no match for the Khartoum traders and their Turko-Egyptian masters, who whittled down its size and influence before conquering it in 1874. Imperial rule was never consolidated. Within a decade, the Mahdist rebellion established a millenarian state within the boundaries of modern Sudan, including Darfur – which was never fully subjugated. On the defeat of the Mahdist armies in 1898, a scion of Darfur's ruling dynasty, Ali Dinar, restored the sultanate until scheming British officers contrived his downfall in 1916.

O'Fahey's history is unlikely to be surpassed, not only because it represents a lifetime's work by the leading historian of the region, but also because its author had access to the colonial archive before its inadvertent destruction in the 1970s, and had the opportunity to record numerous precolonial documents, especially land records, before they succumbed to the weather, fire or the deliberate vandalism of militia leaders determined to rewrite Darfur's history to suit their claims on the land. In turn, some of O'Fahey's most illuminating passages consist in his revisiting themes from his earlier writings, including the subject of land rights. He is careful to examine the hakura system of land grants – misunderstood in much contemporary writing and misrepresented as ‘tribal land ownership’ in the text of the Darfur Peace Agreement – emphasizing that it is a feudal system of individual land grants from a sovereign. Two different forms of hakura existed in the sultanate: one an estate granted to an individual for farming (often using slave labor), and the other an administrative arrangement whereby the sultans awarded tax collection and other privileges to an individual in return for a tribute payment and loyalty. The latter has subsequently merged with the British colonial practice of tidying up ethnic geography by creating tribal dars (homelands), helping to create the modern-day confusion.

An underlying theme in O'Fahey's history is that Darfur developed its own institutions of government which in turn created a unique, functioning state and society. The quarter century of turmoil and bloodshed that followed the overthrow of the sultanate in 1874 arose from repeated efforts to impose external rule on the region. O'Fahey leaves open the question of whether the current ninety-year experiment in ruling Darfur from Khartoum is fated to fail, but hints strongly at his own sympathies, concluding that ‘the issue of Darfur's place within the Sudan remains unresolved’.

If O'Fahey recounts Darfur's story from the vantage point of Darfur itself, Martin Daly approaches it through the prism of Sudan as a whole. Daly is the premier historian of Sudan's colonial period and master of the archives. His account is strongest in describing Darfur's two episodes of rule from Khartoum – the brief Turko-Egyptian and Mahdist occupations and the 38 years of British imperial rule. Both Ottomans and Mahdists maintained Darfur as a ‘military province’, denying it the civil administration reserved for the ‘metropolitan provinces’ of the Nile. The British maintained a comparable system of neglect through the ‘closed districts’ ordinance. At no time did Britain's Sudan Political Service post more than ten political officers to Darfur. They ruled through one of the most comprehensive systems of indirect rule – known then and now as ‘native administration’ in Darfur – found in Africa. Some of Daly's most powerful descriptions are of the deliberate deprivation of education and development, and enforced backwardness, that this policy entailed.

Daly's history is not, as the title misleadingly suggests, a story of destruction and genocide. Rather it is an account of intrigue and power games in a region deprived of modern development, in which Khartoum's overlords generally got their way, but Darfur's potentates displayed skill and endurance in manipulating their far-away masters to their local advantage. Frustrated British administrators coined the term ‘tajility’, from the Arabic tajiil (to forestall), to describe the capacity of frontier chiefs to maintain their bailiwicks using canny pre-emption, calculated indecision and equivocation. United Nations and African Union diplomats in Sudan today are considering reintroducing the term.