British and Egyptian elites agreed Sudanese slave women should be civilized.

Evidence

As the household became a metaphor for Egypt’s engagement with “modernity,” the presence of domestic servants and slaves had somehow to be addressed, and the other six Sudanese women thus served as “boundary markers” (as Anne McClintock labels the role of domestics in Victorian culture) in that they were examples of “evolutionary belatedness evidenced by their ‘feminine’ lack of history, reason and proper domestic arrangements.” Although the British opponents and the Egyptian defenders of the slave-buying pashas were divided about the boundaries between Egypt and the Sudan, it is ironic that on this boundary of slave women they were in agreement: the civilizing mission would enable slave women to be trained differently and brought into a new, modern era. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 109

Categorization

• XREF: Refines the reader’s Egypt-vs-Sudan coloniality framework: the two imperialisms converged on Sudanese women as a shared object needing ‘uplift’ — costranger and core finding for the comparison.
• DEFINE: ‘Boundary markers’ — McClintock’s term for domestic servants embodying supposed evolutionary belatedness — is a concept worth keeping alongside the reader’s existing body of thought.
• SEED: The convergence of two opposed imperialisms on women’s bodies as a civilizing boundary is a strong essay angle on how colonizers disagree about borders yet agree on gender.