Egypt’s 1840s Sudan imperialism was state-building in the name of a future nation

Evidence

Too often scholars of nationalism and imperialism collapse the historical complexities into overly simplistic theoretical binary relationships such as colonizer/colonized. This particular moment in 1840 shows Egypt standing at empire’s edge, where meanings of empire were no longer being formed in the Ottoman model, but along a new European pattern. In the Egyptian case, the word imperialism fits this temporal limbo; this imperialism was embarked upon in the name of a future state. Selim Qapudan’s expedition fit into this desired legacy, a projection of Egypt into the future, the making of a nation whose geographic and cultural shape would emerge from its imperial extensions. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 213

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on coloniality (e.g., ‘colonialism without colonies’ debates) and to theories of nationalism as future-oriented projection — Anderson’s imagined communities and Mbembe on colonial temporalities.
• DEFINE: Useful for the reader’s comparative project: defines how ‘imperialism’ fits a pre-nation-state case like Muhammad Ali’s Egypt versus the Ottoman and later European models—a working distinction for Egypt/Sudan comparison.