Ismail hired British officers like Baker and Gordon to legitimize his Sudanese rule.

Evidence

Ismaïl then decided that the employment of British officials in the Egyptian administration of the Sudan would silence his doubters in Exeter Hall, the London headquarters of the Anti-Slavery Society, and add the desired legitimacy to his consolidation of the Nile Valley. He hired independent European military men, most of them English, to explore the uppermost regions of the Nile and to establish administrative outposts there. Men like Sir Samuel Baker and General Charles Gordon made their international reputations in the khedive’s employ as they cemented his rule in east Africa. Ismaïl hoped these English soldier-explorers would lend credibility to his projects in the Sudan in the eyes of European governments grown increasingly watchful and competitive over Africa. Political equality with Europe was crucial to Isma`ïl. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 296

Categorization

• QUESTION: Competing imperial actors embedded in Ismail’s own administration — does this prefigure the later breakdown of Egyptian control, when Gordon returned under very different circumstances?
• XREF: Directly useful to the reader’s Egypt-vs-Sudan colonial comparison: the very tool Ismail used to secure Sudan (British agents) became the lever by which Britain later displaced Egyptian authority.