Most previous accounts of Darfur's history under British rule have emphasized the limits of the colonial state's ambitions and resources, and concentrated on the legacy of ‘underdevelopment’ which colonial rule bequeathed at independence. Whilst accepting that the state was limited in scale and ambition in Darfur, this volume has shown colonial government to have played a significant role in re-casting the character of local authority. To a very significant extent this was achieved by the direct use – or alternatively the licensing – of violence at a local level in attempts to coerce people into obedience with the various projects of the state. But the state was also formed in processes of local engagement. Officials were often in demand among local elites, and sometimes among ordinary people, to intervene in the local politics of chieftaincy and territory: indeed they were often pulled into disputes by the force of local initiative. This demand for and recognition of the state's authority to adjudicate in these cases perhaps reflected Darfur's long experience of interactions between a relatively centralized form of authority and diverse local societies. The Darfur Sultanate had also exerted only a limited amount of power: its authority in its peripheries was far less regularized than that of its British colonial successor. And yet, as demonstrated in Chapter 1, the sultans intervened in the politics of these peripheral zones: the precolonial state had the capacity to appoint and depose chiefs well outside of the ‘core’ area of its power. Local elites were perhaps always outward-facing, or ‘extraverted’ in Bayart's phrase, seeking external patronage and support to reinforce their own political position within their community. In the late colonial period, this became increasingly obvious as developmental resources and political representation in new institutions intensified competition between these local elites for access to the various expanded resources of the state.

The present study has suggested that this sort of interaction and even interdependence between state and local politics was, as Berry puts it, at the ‘core of the colonial political process’. Work by Jocelyn Alexander on the politics of land in Zimbabwe has focussed on the state's ‘engagement with colonial “subjects”, through which institutions were built, consent gained, and power given effect.