Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Debt Bondage and Chattel Slavery in Early Rome
- 2 Slavery, Debt and Bondage: The Mediterranean and the Eurasia Connection from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century
- 3 Clientship, Social Indebtedness and State-Controlled Emancipation of Africans in the Late Ottoman Empire
- 4 Pawnship and Seizure for Debt in the Process of Enslavement in West Africa
- 5 The Business of ‘Trust’ and the Enslavement of Yoruba Women and Children for Debt
- 6 The Africanization of the Workforce in English America
- 7 Credit, Captives, Collateral and Currencies: Debt, Slavery and the Financing of the Atlantic World
- 8 Unpayable Debts: Reinventing Bonded Labour through Legal Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
- 9 Indigenous Debt and the Spirit of Colonial Capitalism: Debt, Taxes and the Cash-Crop Economy in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1956
- Notes
- Index
9 - Indigenous Debt and the Spirit of Colonial Capitalism: Debt, Taxes and the Cash-Crop Economy in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1956
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Debt Bondage and Chattel Slavery in Early Rome
- 2 Slavery, Debt and Bondage: The Mediterranean and the Eurasia Connection from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century
- 3 Clientship, Social Indebtedness and State-Controlled Emancipation of Africans in the Late Ottoman Empire
- 4 Pawnship and Seizure for Debt in the Process of Enslavement in West Africa
- 5 The Business of ‘Trust’ and the Enslavement of Yoruba Women and Children for Debt
- 6 The Africanization of the Workforce in English America
- 7 Credit, Captives, Collateral and Currencies: Debt, Slavery and the Financing of the Atlantic World
- 8 Unpayable Debts: Reinventing Bonded Labour through Legal Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
- 9 Indigenous Debt and the Spirit of Colonial Capitalism: Debt, Taxes and the Cash-Crop Economy in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1956
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In late December 1933, a group of twenty-three Ja'aliyyin tenants in the Gezira Scheme submitted a petition to the local government asking for financial assistance. The Gezira Scheme had been officially inaugurated in 1924 on 240,000 faddans in the fertile Jazira plain between the two Niles south of Khartoum. The scheme, which focused on the commercial cultivation of cotton for export, was worked on a tenancy system and managed jointly by the Anglo-Egyptian government and the Sudan Plantation Syndicate (SPS), a private firm. C. G. Davies, the district commissioner of the Gezira, visited the petitioning tenants, who explained that the returns in the scheme were insufficient to meet their needs and that they feared that they would have to make the choice between paying for the labour necessary to work their plots and purchasing sufficient dhurra (sorghum, the staple grain) to feed their families. Davies was sympathetic to the tenants' complaint. When he brought the petition to the attention of the SPS's local managers, they insisted that the tenants were exaggerating and that, as Anglo-Egyptian officials subsequently recounted, ‘the general feeling in the Gezira still was that those inside the scheme were better than those outside’. Nonetheless, the SPS's management agreed to accompany Davies on an inspection tour.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Debt and Slavery in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds , pp. 133 - 142Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014