May 29, 2018

Alden Young, “Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development, and State Formation” (Cambridge UP, 2017)

57 minutes

Telling the story of a former colony post-independence is tricky, no matter if it’s a colony in Latin America, the Middle East or East Asia. Where does the idea of the ’nation’ slot in? Does it exist independent of colonialism? How does one talk about decolonization in post-imperial contexts? Then, you have to consider the interlocking concepts of language, race and even war. In the Sudanese case, that story can be told through the emergence of economic developmentalism. In Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development, and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Alden Young tells the story of how the Sudanese state was shaped post-independence as a result of economic planning. Through global, regional, and national notions of how to economically plan a state, Young traces the people, resources, and policies that would have consequences for generations to follow.

Alden Harrington Young is assistant professor in the departments of History and of Global Studies and Modern Languages and director of Africana Studies, all at Drexel University. He received his BA from Columbia, his MA from the London School of Economics and Political Science and his PhD from Princeton University. He teaches African History, economic history and the history of Arab and African interactions.

Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

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