The Race to Fashoda

Terje Tvedt, ‘The Race to Fashoda: Robinson and Gallagher Revisited’, Forum for Development Studies, No. 2, 1992, pp. 195–210. This article shows that the British in the 1890s had expansionist motives in the Upper Nile valley. The British strategists saw a need for increasing the amount of available Nile waters in Egypt for cotton production. A sound and efficient irrigation management, which could secure both stability at the Suez Canal, improved Egyptian finances and more cotton to Lancashire, required British occupation of the Sudan. The dominating theory links the British occupation to the question of European rivalry only, i.e., that it was the French march towards Fashoda in the late 1890s which ‘forced’ the British, out of fear and a feeling of weakness, to occupy the Upper Nile. The present article, which is based on previously unused source materials and new interpretations of much used documents, contradicts this one-factor theory. Due to the importance of the Sudan question in literature and theories of the European partition of Africa, the present article has, therefore, immediate relevance for this broader question of imperial motives and causes

Economic history · Economics · Economy · Expansionism · Partition (number theory · Political science · Race (biology · Rivalry · Sociology · African history and culture analysis · African history and culture studies · Gender Studies · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law

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