ABSTRACT
Egypt and Sudan began their political and economic development independent of imperial Britain on the basis of different resource endowments, with very different infrastructural developments and with very different relationships with the occupying power, Britain (see Figure 7.1). Egypt became nominally independent in 1922 after forty unhappy years of British occupation (itself following some years after the heavy French involvement at the beginning of the nineteenth century). The frustration of the Egyptian people with the next three decades of dependent monarchy exploded in the July 1952 Revolution when the ineffective King Farouk was toppled and Colonel Nasser, later President, came to power. Sudan’s independence occurred in a much more clear-cut fashion in 1956 as power was handed over directly by the British colonial government to an independent government of the Sudan during the first phase of withdrawal by Britain from its African colonies in the 1950s. The British presence in the Sudan, though comprehensive, had been very thinly spread and the development of the country was at a very preliminary stage, so that by the 1960s there were only a few miles of tarmac road, very limited rail communications and one major agricultural scheme, the Gezira. The development of water resources by controlling dams had begun but the volume of water commanded within the Sudan was less than 30 per cent of that which would be at its disposal according to the Nile Waters Agreement of 1959 between Egypt and the Sudan.
