Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

A condominium in name and a British possession in fact. After Kitchener destroyed the Mahdist state at Omdurman in 1898, the territory was placed under the joint sovereignty of Britain and Egypt, an arrangement invented chiefly to keep other European powers out without formally annexing anything. Egypt paid much of the cost and supplied many of the junior officials; Britain appointed the governor-general and made the decisions. The fiction mattered later, because it gave Egypt a legal claim to the Sudan that shaped every negotiation about the country's future for the next fifty years. Administration was split in a way that proved far more consequential than the condominium itself. The north was governed through Arabic and Islamic institutions, while the Southern Policy of the 1920s sealed the three southern provinces off, restricted northern traders and officials, and handed schooling to Christian missions working in English. For a generation the two halves were run as separate countries that happened to share a governor. The economic centre was the Gezira Scheme, an irrigated cotton triangle between the Blue and White Niles that made the Sudan a single-crop exporter and concentrated wealth and education in the centre and north. The Southern Policy was reversed only in 1946, leaving the south nine years to prepare for a state it had been deliberately excluded from building. Independence came on 1 January 1956, after Sudanese politicians outmanoeuvred both Cairo's union proposals and London's timetable. A southern mutiny at Torit had already broken out in August 1955, four months before the flag changed. The civil war that began there ran, with one interval, for half a century and ended in 2011 with the country splitting along very nearly the line the Southern Policy had drawn.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration