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5 - Between an Anvil and a Hammer

The Reign of Ali Dinar, 1898–1916

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

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Summary

ALI DINAR AND THE BRITISH

In November 1896, the Khalifa Abdallahi ordered Mahmud Ahmad, governor of the west, to bring his army east to help defend the Mahdist state against Anglo-Egyptian invasion. Since the fall of Khartoum in January 1885, powerful forces in Britain and Egypt had looked to “reconquest” of the Sudan as the only outcome consonant with British imperial interests and worthy of British dignity. Others had just as firmly opposed all-out war, preferring to adopt a defensive posture and await events. The European – and, indeed, African – diplomatic background to the decision finally to make a limited advance along the Sudanese Nile in March 1896 is part of the final chapter in the Scramble for Africa, one that would end only in 1916 with the annexation of Darfur.

European opposition to British occupation of Egypt had not ceased in 1882. Egypt's strategic position and glamorous place in the European imagination rendered it a special case, one further complicated by the fact that, at least until 1914, Egypt remained legally a province of the Ottoman Empire. The anomalies of British occupation have interested scholars far more than they did British proconsuls in Cairo, but they affected every aspect of British policy in Egypt and of British and Egyptian policy toward the Sudan. This is not the place to delve again into Bismarck's realpolitik or the legal ramifications of the Capitulations, the Caisse de la Dette, and the Mixed Tribunals.

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Darfur's Sorrow
The Forgotten History of a Humanitarian Disaster
, pp. 87 - 114
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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