The Ladder Sudan Was Never Allowed to Climb: A Century of Deliberate Non-Industrialisation

1961 1970 1989 2023 Each plan aborted — 1961 Ten Year Plan, 1970 Six Year Plan, 1977 IMF austerity, 1989 coup, 2023 war 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. ...

March 1, 2025 · 9 min · Kandaka

A History of Modern Sudan — Robert O. Collins

Robert O. Collins · Cambridge University Press · Available in the Kandaka Library Collins’s A History of Modern Sudan is the standard English-language reference for Sudan’s political history from the Turco-Egyptian conquest of 1820 through the late post-independence period. It is the work that contextualises every economic analysis, every development plan failure, and every institutional crisis discussed elsewhere in the Kandaka library. You cannot read the World Bank’s 2015 Country Economic Memorandum, or the Industrial Location Analysis, or any analysis of the Gezira Scheme, without the political and institutional history this book provides. ...

September 1, 2024 · 3 min · Robert O. Collins

Industrial Location Analysis of Sudan

Khalid Idris · Academic study · Available in the Kandaka Library The most rigorous empirical study of Sudan’s industrial geography available in the Kandaka library. Idris traces the location decisions of Sudan’s manufacturing sector from the colonial period through 1980, using systematic data to show that the geographical concentration of industry in Khartoum was not a natural market outcome — it was produced by deliberate colonial infrastructure investment and perpetuated by post-independence policy failure. ...

March 1, 2024 · 2 min · Khalid Idris