Political ecology in/of Sudan - Gold mining. Appendix 1C Source essay - Political history (Version 1)

Even just a glance into the history of gold mining in Sudan offers the luxury of trans-versing several millennia, a longue durée view that has been adopted by prospectors and historiographers alike. Past human activity written into stone and read there in different ways, portrayed, nevertheless, little of one of the most undecipherable aspects of that history, namely the situation and lives of those who actually did the mining. There is much more to be said about the metal thus extracted and the importance it was given in sub-sequent contexts of circulation and use than about that first moment when it was ripped out of the slow formation processes that led to its concentration in rocks or its transport to the surface. While this has much to say about what and who leaves a mark and why some marks are unearthed rather than others, I want to gather here the few fragments of hints to that mining and how it related to the politics of non-miners. Many, if not most, of those fragments of documentation appeared at the fringes of other stories, of conquests, of sprawling networks of accumulation and exchange, where gold’s valuable status served as a draw enticing not to leave the mineral where it was. 

Although centuries will be jumped over as gold appeared and disappeared in that regard, such a political history of gold mining still touches some central moments in the general past. Focusing on the instances when gold was extracted to be brought elsewhere, insti-gated by a major externalizing draw, this source essay goes shortly through seven instances spread over five millennia of political history. The geographical extent is widened successively, mainly parallel to the body of preserved documentation: up to the 19th century, the main stage is the northeastern desert, then Ottoman excursions lead into the Blue Nile-Tumat watershed and the Nuba Mountains, British prospection concessions first granted around 1900 cover additionally parts of Darfur and southern Sudan, and only the 21st century gold rush included close to all regions of modern-day Sudan.