Article ID: CBB180761412

Imagining future agricultural landscapes in a new Sudan: Entitled expertise, cultural intransience and fine warm rain in the English wilds (2020)

unapi

This article responds to work on development-centred technical and scientific expertise at the decline of the British empire in Africa. 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 regionalized 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.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB180761412/

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Authors & Contributors
Serels, Steven
Besky, Sarah
Swenson, Sarah A.
McDonald, Kate
McCabe, Jane
Beckert, Sven
Concepts
Agriculture
Imperialism
Personal archives
Colonialism
Great Britain, colonies
Technology and society
Time Periods
20th century, early
20th century, late
19th century
20th century
Qing dynasty (China, 1644-1912)
Early modern
Places
India
Sudan
Japan
Europe
Great Britain
Eritrea
Institutions
Niels Bohr Library
East India Company (English)
UNESCO
Royal Society of London
American Institute of Physics
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