The history of nineteenth-century South Sudan remains one of foreign encounters with indigenous peoples. This is the period of the great explorers, when the African continent was first traversed and then conquered. Starting decades earlier than the European powers’ colonial race, Egypt's imperial ambitions in South Sudan were, in this initial phase, primarily focused on the slave trade and other kinds of commerce. Later, the feverish hunt for the source of the White Nile even spurred the rulers of Egypt, and eventually Egypt's designs were geared toward territorial dominance and global prestige. When Egypt was evicted by the Mahdi in the early 1880s, the ramshackle government systems around its zaribas (Arabic: “enclosures”), slave-and-ivory trading posts, also collapsed. Mahdist rule in the South was weak, and when the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium was established in 1899, it faced the task of reconquering South Sudan.

Early contact

Although the slave trade of the nineteenth century is often seen as the beginning of the South's vexed contacts with the “outside world,” the origins of that trade, and an untold history of peaceful trade and migration, are much older. Trade in African slaves dates from ancient times. That the Sharia forbids enslavement of Muslims was subsequently an important factor in the African trade (as it was elsewhere on the frontiers of Islam). Demand locally, in northern Sudan, and in the Ottoman Empire, stimulated slave-raiding southward, from Kordofan and Darfur and the Blue Nile. Egyptian expansion up the White Nile was unattractive owing to its remoteness, the climate, the natural barrier of the sudd, and hostile relations with people living along the river.

The Sudan's other historic exports included gold, basketry and mats, ostrich feathers, gum, animals, and animal products, of which by far the most important was ivory. Estimates vary, but in the late eighteenth century, the number of slaves sent to Egypt could reach several thousand a year; routes were insecure. As elsewhere in Africa, non-Muslim people of the borderlands were themselves subject to slave-raiding from the north or became middlemen through raiding or trading with peoples to their south.