Grinsell, Samuel; (2024) River Lines and Railway Lines: Colonial Military Technonatures in the Making of Sudan’s Capital Region, 1880s–1920s. In: Thelle, Mikkel and Høghøj, Mikkel, (eds.) Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750. (pp. 125-144). Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, Switzerland.

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Abstract

British colonialists represented Khartoum as a triumph of colonial modernity raised from the ashes of shameful defeat. This story obscured the complex interrelationships between Khartoum and the two other towns on the banks of the confluence of the Blue and White Niles: Omdurman, the capital of independent Sudan from 1885–1898; and Khartoum North (Bahri), the area that developed around the railway sheds thrown up by invading Anglo-Egyptian forces in 1898. Khartoum was originally built by the Ottoman-Egyptian forces that conquered the territories of Sudan in the 1820s. When Anglo-Egyptian armies reconquered the region in the 1890s, the same logic drove them: the need to control and measure the Nile’s flood. The invading army arrived on rails laid through the desert, bypassing the meanders of the river to strike directly at Omdurman. The rebuilt Khartoum, and its relationship with Omdurman and Khartoum North, was shaped by both the river and the railway. This chapter analyses the first years of this new urban system, seeking to understand how it was made by the intertwined trajectories of water and rail. Cultural and material histories will be read together through the diaries, travel accounts and planning documents produced by colonialists engaged in remaking this space. These will show that the British rulers of Sudan sought safety from a landscape that they deeply feared in a closely controlled urban technonature. They sought to make Khartoum into an idealized image of colonial order and to forget the violence that produced the city.

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