Mehmed Ali’s grandson Ismail took control in 1863, and under his regime Egyptian

control was extended southward throughout today’s Sudan, Uganda and eastward
to Eritrea. These expansions were of the looser imperial type, not state expansion:
power was highly devolved at every level, little influenced by Ottoman Tanzimat
regularization efforts, being based on tribute rather than standing legal and
bureaucratic integration.

When Ismail first took control of northern Sudan for Egypt, his primary mission was
to extract slaves and gold. Therefore, he introduced heavy taxation of all the settled
people, which led them to revolt and kill him in 1822. Though levels of official
taxation were reduced somewhat, tax collectors often used brutal methods. Tax
collectors were culturally and linguistically separate from their Sudanese
constituents, generally being from the Caucusus and being known as bashibazouks
or untrained soldiers. Sudanese had been unused to paying taxes at all.

In order to augment Egypt’s tax base, Ismail had turned Zubayr’s small empire into
the new Egyptian province of White Nile in 1871. Two years later Zubayr expanded
White Nile to include Darfur. Zubayr claimed to have conquered Darfur in the name
of the Egyptian Khedive, but another Sudanese military-political leader, Ahmed
Bilali, also claimed to have conquered Darfur in the name of the Khedive. Bilali was
granted the governorship. Small overlapping empires within empires meant that
one way to expand one’s range of power was to appeal to leadership of a higher
level empire for support. Neither the Khedive nor the Hukumdar in Khartoum had
the motivation, nor the power, to conquer Zubayr, but with just a word, they could
empower a rival.

Under Ismail, Egyptian colonization of Africa reached its peak, with loans by
European banks and exploration and military service by European soldiers. Ismail
incurred perilous European debt for various projects, primarily the Suez Canal, but
including expansion in Sudan. Ismail increasingly indebted himself to European
businesses and employed British and other European officers and officials in his
service, to the point where in 1876 he was obliged to set up a public debt
commission, the Caisse de la Dette, controlled by commissioners from various
European governments, with increasing control of Egypt’s finances in order to
ensure repayment of government loans. Egypt’s debt to European banks was mostly
accumulated from Ismail’s reign, which began in 1863.

Mehmed Ali ruled Egypt from 1805 to 1849, carefully avoiding external debt and
expanding government control geographically and administratively. Ismail was
more tempted than Mehmed Ali to indebt himself to European bankers, perhaps
because he was overconfident in the longevity of the bubble in cotton prices created
by the American Civil War, and that the revenues enabled by this bubble would
enable him to pay off the debts.

Eve Troutt Powell suggests that Egyptian forms of imperialism and racism toward
Sudan were influenced by Egypt’s simultaneous experience on the other end of
imperialism, not that racism or imperialist tendencies were unknown in Egypt
before the modern age. Even if Mehmed Ali was not under the thumb of European
pressure the way Ismail was, he certainly felt the growing power of Europe, and
sought to emulate it.
Khedive Ismail sold Egypt’s shares of the Suez Canal in 1875 to Disraeli’s
government to pay off some of Egypt’s debt to banks, but this further reduced
Egypt’s ability to produce income to pay off the rest of its debt.41 Sudan was useful
to Ismail as a tax-producing machine to help pay off Egypt’s debt, and though tribute
to Egypt was not new, spreading the borders of Sudan brought an expanded tax
base. The gentlemanly capitalists, if there were any in Sudan, were rarely British or
European but rather Turks and other Arabs like Zubayr, growing rich off of the
movement of ivory, slaves, and ostrich feathers from formerly disconnected areas.

Arguably the Mehmed Ali administration was more Turkish than it was Arab, and
hence less Egyptian, and Ismail was in this tradition, but while his grandfather
spoke little Arabic, Ismail spoke Arabic, the language of most Egyptians. He may or
may not have been truly Egyptian, but he was certainly more Egyptian than British
and French imperialists.

Ismail continued Mehmed Ali’s modernization but also Abbas and Said’s lead on
ending monopolies and increasing debt, Europeanizing Egypt by following the
European zeitgeist of free trade. Railway and canal projects were intended to create
an industrial and commercial hub that would move Egypt towards contemporary
status with the developed Mediterranean powers. Ismail took control of Egypt after
the brief reigns of Abbas and Said. Abbas and Said had slowly yielded to European
financial hegemony. When he took over after Abbas and Said, Mehmed Ali’s
grandson Ismail encouraged big government again, including both domestic public
works projects and imperial expansion, including into Zubayr’s Bahr al- Ghazal and
up the White Nile in Equatoria.56 However, Ismail lacked his grandfather’s sense of
fiscal responsibility. Ismail fell victim to the great curse of spiraling debt, paying off
huge loans by taking bigger loans on harsher terms, and as his financial situation fell
deeper into ruin, continued to spend lavishly, doing his very best to project his
prestige as a ruler and ignore realities. He allowed his advisors to do whatever they
could to raise funds, and turned a blind eye to details, allowing advisors themselves
to skim immense amounts for themselves.

The various Egyptian regimes had different levels of interest in control over Sudan,
culminating in Ismail’s expansion, but it continued to be a very loose form of control,
empire on the cheap, especially when it came to British abolitionism, which
Khedives had little interest in spending money on. While the British Anti-Slavery
Society had the ear of various ministers, those like Cromer who had control in Egypt
had little motivation to push abolitionism.

When Ismail took power in 1863, the tide turned considerably for Sudan. He
invested in a bigger administration, including a rudimentary river police force, and
variously backed abolitionist governors or slave-trading businessmen, whichever he
thought could more aptly bring order.

Khedive Ismail enjoyed the prestige of an empire expanding 1500 miles southward
toward the source of the Nile, both trying to encompass this entire river that was
critical to Egypt as virtually its only fresh water source, and impressing British elites
by succeeding in this quest that had long stymied explorers. Slavery had been
outlawed in the British empire in 1833, but with little enforcement in Egypt and
Sudan, and abolitionism became an ever-larger motivation for the British
governments and the British men, namely Samuel Baker and Charles Gordon, who
worked for the Khedive in southern Soudan. Baker and Gordon made abolition a
priority. Ismail, and the quick succession of powerless governors he placed in
Khartoum, however, felt abolition in these regions would stymie any other state-
building efforts, and that an unenforced but stated stance against slavery would help
them rule more effectively.