Egypt’s conquest replaced merchant knowledge of Sudan with military knowledge

Evidence

When Muhammad al-Tunisï traveled to the sultanate of Därfür, for example, the most concrete knowledge of the Sudan was owned by merchants, most notably the slave traders who regularly traveled the famous darb al-arbaïn trail.These traders communicated recent events that had occurred throughout the vast regions of the Sudan once they arrived at the wikalat al-jällaba (slave market) in Cairo, which is how Muhammad al-Tunisï was able to discover important facts about his own father in Darfur. But with the official Egyptian expansionist campaigns into the Sudan in 1820, Muhammad Alï institutionalized the relationship between Egypt and the Sudan. Selim Qapudan’s fact-finding mission was completely different from Muhammad al-Tunisï’s. It was the means by which Muhammad `Alï hoped to discover the origins of the Nile, whether Sudanese gold existed, and whether the inhabitants of the uppermost regions of the Nile would be suitable as slaves for his increasingly modernized military. Selim Qapudan’s voyage was an important and officially sanctioned postscript to the conquest of the Sudan, and a preamble to a new way of knowing about the Sudan and the Sudanese. Compared to al-Tunisï’s account, where some of the Sudanese were family, even if they were not familiar, Selim Qapudan’s account narrated an experience with colonized subjects, or those whom Egypt expected to colonize. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 133

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts merchant-based informal knowledge networks with official state intelligence gathering — resonates with the reader’s framework on different colonial ‘tools.’ The shift from trade-based relations to military fact-finding missions exemplifies a broader pattern of how pre-colonial contact became colonial administration.
• DEFINE: The passage ‘institutionalized the relationship’ contrasts informal pre-conquest trade ties against the formal administrative relation imposed by conquest — a useful working definition of institutionalization.