Imagining Future Agricultural Landscapes in a new Sudan: entitled expertise, cultural intransience and fine warm rain in the English wilds

This article sits in response to work on the rolling out of development-centred technical and scientific expertise at the decline of the British empire in Africa. Specifically, it focuses on the imagining of future agricultural landscapes in Sudan, exploring how such imagining was framed by the social and colonial worlds in which scientific knowledge about agricultural capacity in the north and south was produced. It draws on a private archive of letters, photographs and objects compiled by Roger Brain, an agricultural scientist engaged in research and census work for the University of Khartoum in Sudan between 1953 and 1959. His archive reveals the underlying assumptions, conventions and anxieties that framed the ways in which he viewed and understood the landscapes in which he worked. I argue that this framing shaped regionalised notions of inevitable technological transformation in the north, and notions of a fragile cultural distinctiveness coupled with a deep nostalgia for rural intransience in the south. Ultimately I suggest that this shaped the production of scientific knowledge by Roger Brain and others like him, woven through the production of policy and planning regarding Sudan’s economic future after independence.