Sudanese had defeated British armies alone yet were treated as Egyptian subjects

Evidence

If, as Hobsbawm writes, the “populations of large territorial nation-states are almost invariably too heterogeneous to claim a common ethnicity,” then how did Egyptian nationalist leaders develop a position for the Sudanese? Here, after all, were people once considered a subject population, a people who, after 1884, had, almost alone in the conflictual world of the British empire, fought and triumphed over British-led armies, a people who, after 1898, were again fellow victims of British imperialism. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 89

Categorization

• QUESTION: The author leaves hanging how exactly Egyptian nationalists reconciled Sudanese martial success with their subjugation—a thread worth following in later chapters.