In 1791, Alexander Hamilton submitted his Report on Manufactures to the United States Congress. Its central argument was that a new nation could not develop by exporting raw materials and importing finished goods. Wealth was created in manufacturing, not agriculture or trade. The role of the state was to protect infant industries until they could compete — through tariffs, subsidies, and public investment. The United States acted on this report. By the end of the 19th century, it had the highest industrial tariffs in the world and the fastest-growing manufacturing sector.
Britain, which had industrialised first and had no interest in seeing its markets threatened by competitors, spent much of the 19th century arguing the opposite case: that free trade was beneficial for all nations, that comparative advantage should determine specialisation, that government interference in markets was harmful. The argument was, as Ha-Joon Chang has meticulously documented, a ladder being kicked away. Britain had used industrial policy to climb. It was now recommending that others not use the same ladder.
Nowhere was this more explicit than in British colonial policy in Sudan.
The Colonial Deindustrialisation
When the Turco-Egyptian administration and then the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium established control over Sudan in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they encountered a society with significant craft production: textiles woven in the Nile valley towns, leather goods produced across the nomadic regions, metal working in the riverain areas, and the extensive iron-working traditions that had made Meroe, centuries earlier, the industrial centre of sub-Saharan Africa.
British colonial policy systematically dismantled this productive capacity. Manchester cotton goods, produced at industrial scale, undercut Sudanese hand-woven cloth and destroyed the market for domestic textile production. British-manufactured metal goods displaced local metalworking. The colonial economy was restructured around a single logic: Sudan would produce raw cotton for British mills, and British manufactured goods would be sold in the Sudanese market.
This is not an ideological characterisation. It is documented administration policy. Khalid Idris’s Industrial Location Analysis of Sudan — a systematic study of manufacturing geography from the colonial period through 1980 — shows that deliberate non-industrialisation policies under British rule concentrated the tiny manufacturing sector that was permitted to exist in Khartoum, created regional production inequalities that persisted after independence, and established a structural pattern that locked Sudan into raw material export.
Walter Rodney’s framework in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa names this process correctly: underdevelopment is not an absence of development. It is the active dismantling of productive capacity in the interests of the colonising power. Sudan was not undeveloped before colonisation. It was underdeveloped by colonisation — made less capable of industrial production than it had been, structurally redirected away from the manufacturing capacity its land and people could have supported.
The Ten Year Plan and Its Successors
Sudan’s first post-independence government understood the problem. The Ten Year Economic and Social Plan (1961–1970) was an ambitious attempt to build the industrial base that colonialism had prevented. It envisaged state investment in manufacturing, processing industries, and infrastructure; diversification away from cotton dependency; and the development of a Sudanese industrial working class.
The plan was abandoned by 1965. The reasons were multiple: fiscal constraints from cotton price volatility, institutional capacity gaps in the bureaucracy required to implement industrial policy, political instability, and the growing pressure from Western donors and the IMF to prioritise debt service over productive investment.
The Six Year Plan of 1977–1982 was similarly ambitious and similarly aborted — this time by a debt crisis and IMF structural adjustment conditions that required fiscal austerity and market liberalisation rather than industrial investment. The 1980s saw Sudan’s manufacturing sector contract rather than expand. State enterprises were inefficiently run and inadequately capitalised, and the structural adjustment response — privatisation without the market infrastructure to make privatisation work — produced neither efficiency nor growth.
Each plan followed the same arc: ambitious targets, inadequate implementation capacity, external financing conditions that prioritised debt service over investment, and political disruption — coups in 1958, 1969, 1985, and 1989 — that reset whatever institutional progress had been made.
Daron Acemoglu’s analysis in Why Nations Fail provides the institutional reading of this pattern. Sudan’s post-independence governments consistently built extractive rather than inclusive institutions: manufacturing enterprises that enriched political insiders rather than building competitive productive capacity; trade policies captured by import merchants rather than designed around infant industry development; credit systems serving connected elites rather than productive investment. The industrial policy failure was not primarily technical. It was institutional. And the institutions were extractive because the political economy produced extractive institutions — each government capturing the state for its own coalition rather than building the broad-based productive capacity that generates sustained development.
The IMF Conditionality Trap
From the 1970s onwards, Sudan’s industrialisation ambitions ran directly into the conditionality attached to the external financing the country needed to service its accumulated debts.
IMF structural adjustment programmes in Sudan required, in successive agreements: reduction of the fiscal deficit through cuts to public investment; liberalisation of trade and removal of protective tariffs; privatisation of state enterprises; and currency devaluation. Each of these conditions worked against industrial development.
Removing protective tariffs exposed nascent Sudanese manufacturing to competition from already-industrialised economies — precisely the competition that infant industry theory identifies as the reason protection is necessary in the first place. A Sudanese textiles mill operating at sub-optimal scale cannot compete on price with Chinese or Indian manufacturers operating at global scale behind decades of accumulated learning and investment. Exposing it to that competition before it has had time to develop does not produce efficiency — it produces closure.
Cuts to public investment reduced the infrastructure on which manufacturing depends: reliable electricity, transport networks, industrial water supply, and the technical training institutions that produce the skilled workers manufacturing requires.
Privatisation without functioning capital markets, property rights infrastructure, and competitive market conditions transferred state enterprises to political insiders at below-market prices — converting public monopolies into private monopolies while stripping them of the investment they needed to become competitive.
Joseph Stiglitz, who was Chief Economist of the World Bank during the 1990s, has documented this pattern across multiple countries. The IMF’s conditions were not technically neutral. They were ideologically committed to a particular economic model — financial liberalisation, market competition, minimal government — that the empirical record of development does not support. Countries that followed IMF prescriptions consistently underperformed those that did not. The countries that developed — South Korea, Taiwan, China, Botswana — all used selective industrial policy, state-directed credit, and infant industry protection for substantial periods.
Sudan was not given that choice. The conditions attached to its financing denied it the policy space to use the tools that historically successful industrialisation requires.
What the Industrial Location Analysis Shows
Khalid Idris’s analysis of Sudan’s industrial geography from the colonial period through 1980 is one of the most important documents in the Kandaka library. It is not polemical. It is systematic, empirical, and specific. And its findings are damning.
Manufacturing in Sudan was concentrated in Khartoum by colonial design — not because Khartoum had natural factor advantages over other regions, but because colonial infrastructure investment (railways, ports, administrative capacity) was directed at Khartoum as the export hub, and manufacturing followed infrastructure. The regional inequalities this produced — Khartoum industrialised, the periphery raw material suppliers — were not corrected by post-independence policy. They were deepened.
The result is a country where the manufacturing sector — always small — is geographically concentrated in ways that reinforce political centralisation, regional inequality, and the structural dependency of peripheral regions on Khartoum. This is not an economic geography problem. It is a political economy problem produced by deliberate policy choices over more than a century.
Sudan’s construction industry presents a parallel case. The construction sector analysis in the library documents a sector with significant potential multiplier effects — construction generates employment, creates demand for domestically produced materials, and builds the infrastructure manufacturing requires — but systematically hampered by political and institutional constraints, including the absence of a coordinating industrial policy body capable of aligning investment, regulation, and skills development.
The Post-War Reconstruction Window
The war that began in April 2023 has destroyed an estimated 48% of Sudan’s GDP and damaged or destroyed significant portions of the country’s already-thin manufacturing base. In this context, arguments about industrial policy can seem abstract.
They are not. The choices made in post-war reconstruction will determine whether Sudan rebuilds toward a more or a less industrialised structure. Reconstruction aid directed at restoring infrastructure without building domestic productive capacity will recreate the pre-war economic structure — raw material export, manufactured good import, structural dependency. Reconstruction aid directed at cooperative manufacturing of agricultural inputs, food processing, construction materials, and basic industrial goods will begin building something different.
The argument Ha-Joon Chang makes in Kicking Away the Ladder applies with particular force to post-war reconstruction. International donors and institutions will arrive with prescriptions: open markets, attract foreign investment, let comparative advantage determine specialisation. Sudan’s comparative advantage, by their analysis, is raw agricultural commodities. This is where the ladder gets kicked away again.
Sudan’s actual comparative advantage — the source of sustained productive development rather than continued commodity dependency — lies in processing its agricultural commodities domestically, building manufacturing capacity behind temporary protective walls, and using the enormous productive potential of its land and water resources to generate industrial value rather than raw material rents.
The historical precedent for this is not theoretical. The Meroitic iron industry — the subject of DA FA ALLA’s Art and Industry: The Achievements of Meroe — was precisely this: a domestic processing industry that converted raw iron ore into finished tools, weapons, and implements for regional trade. Meroe was called the Birmingham of Africa not because it had large reserves of iron ore — many places have iron ore — but because it built the industrial infrastructure to process that ore into value-added goods. Sudan has done this before. The argument for doing it again is not aspirational. It is historical.
Further Reading — Kandaka Library
- Industrial Location Analysis of Sudan — Khalid Idris. The systematic study of how colonial policy created Sudan’s manufacturing geography.
- Development Economics in Sudan: The Ten Year Economic and Social Plan — Analysis of Sudan’s first post-independence development plan and why it failed.
- The Construction Industry of Sudan: Potentials and Challenges — Sector analysis of the multiplier potential and institutional constraints.
- Sudan’s Challenges and Opportunities — ERF analysis of the transition from raw agricultural export to agro-industrial development.
- History of Modern Sudan — Robert O. Collins. The political history of the institutional failures that aborted each development plan.