In this book, Alden Young traces the formation of Sudanese state institutions from the late colonial period through early independence.

He argues that rather than representing a clean break, Sudan’s postcolonial bureaucracies were continuations of colonial planning logics. The book provides a rare account of African technocrats, economic policy debates, and nation-building from an African perspective. Young draws on Sudanese archives to show how local economists negotiated between nationalist aspirations and IMF-style austerity.

It challenges binary views of independence and offers a more complex understanding of economic governance, knowledge production, and institutional memory in postcolonial Africa.

This reference was recommended by the Bartlett Pan-African Indigenist Collective.

The Collective is a space for critical dialogue, activism, and scholarship that foregrounds Pan-African Indigenist ways of knowing, being, and creating. Formed by members of the Bartlett community dedicated to uplifting the voices, knowledge, and cultural legacies of people of African heritage and their respective Indigenous communities and lands, it aims to challenge colonial legacies and inspire transformation within institutional structures, research and curricula. By integrating creative and scholarly practices, the Collective works to restore narratives that have been silenced or misrepresented. Their work advances decolonial efforts in higher education by creating inclusive spaces and centring diverse African knowledge systems. Bartlett Alternative recognises the Collective’s vital contribution to broadening intellectual and cultural horizons through radical inclusivity and exclusivity, and thanks them for sharing resources that foreground lived experience, land-based knowledge systems, and epistemic justice.

Department Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment