Improvising Planned Development on the Gezira Plain, Sudan, 1900-1980

Maurits Ertsen is Associate Professor of Water Resources Management at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. He is interested in irrigation practices emerging from many short-term actions of human agents or farmers’ responses to irrigation planning from a central state. Maurits is one of two Editors-in-Chief of the journal Water History.

Introduction. Settling Certain Details Coming to a Deal 1. Cotton from a Wilderness: The Early Negotiations 2. A Task of Some Magnitude: Gezira Management Logic 3. No Man Can Serve Two Masters: Designing Gezira Irrigation 4. Making the Best of a Rotten Deal: Tenant Realities and Resistance 5. Another's Week's Toil: British SPS Inspectors and Their Idea(l)s 6. Move from the Old Grooves: Gezira Continuity and Change after WWII 7. The Everlasting Rectangles: Gezira and International Development Epilogue. A Typical Battlefield: Understanding Negotiated Development