"Taming the Desert": Civilization, Trains and Warfare in the Sudan

This chapter surveys the British debate on colonial trains and railways in connection with Britain’s military engagement in the Sudan in the 1880s-1890s. It draws on a large corpus of memoirs, reportage, articles published in periodicals, letters and fiction, and follows step by step the course of the events with the concomitant railway-planning and vicissitudes in railway-building. In so doing, it illustrates the role of the railway in discursive articulations of imperialism, touching on such issues as the overriding preoccupation with the conquest and mastery of space, the unquestioned conviction that improved communications were crucial to progress, economic and otherwise, or the way “native” rulers’ involvement in railway-building (i.e. their participation in the civilising process) was construed by British commentators. Throughout, it highlights the strange and characteristic mixture of dreamy visionarism and matter-of-fact logistics that – according to Daniel Headrick (Tools of Empire, 1981) – connotes the “African railway imaginary” in the nineteenth-century.