Like much of Europe's nineteenth-century global empire-building, the Anglo-Egyptian conquest in 1896–8 resulted from momentum. The fall of Khartoum to the Mahdi in 1885 had not brought about abandonment of the Sudan: Gordon had been sent to conduct its evacuation. During the decade that followed, officers of the British occupation in Egypt, collaborating with publishers in England, pressed to reconquer the Sudan. But when the British government finally sanctioned an advance, in 1896, it was not to “avenge Gordon” but to deflect the Mahdists from the beleaguered Italians in Eritrea. Thereafter, the campaign continued methodically until the decisive battle of Omdurman in September 1898, not in order to rescue the Sudanese from the fanatical “dervishes” but to stymie a French advance to the upper Nile. While Sudan, north and south, should, therefore, not be considered an “accidental” acquisition, it was almost incidental, in that what mattered to imperial strategists was the Nile rather than the territory – still less the people – of its watershed. The south of Sudan was but a necessary inconvenience.

The European colonial era was comparatively brief in Sudan: it was one of the last African territories taken under European rule and one of the first to shed it (in 1956). In the case of South Sudan, effective rule was even briefer, since the first two decades were spent gaining control of the territory. Nonetheless, the colonial regime, for all its shortcomings, fashioned governance structures and practices that have largely survived up to today. There is also little doubt that it was during the latter days of colonial rule that the notion of South Sudan as a nation gained a foothold there.

Sources for the study of the period are relatively copious but remain inadequate and skewed. Written material from the first quarter of the twentieth century is mostly “official,” uninformed, and concerned with discrete administrative problems of an apparently transient military occupation. Accounts by independent travelers, who anyway tended to follow established routes, are as always impressionistic; rarely did observer and observed (or governor and governed) speak the same language.