Note 21 — Chapter V

M. Biovès, in absolving our diplomacy of the charge made against it by most Egyptian writers that the abandonment of the Soudan was forced on the Khedive by Cromer with an intention of taking the abandoned provinces for England later, missed this point. The idea in 1883 was not perhaps of a full acquisition by England of the Soudan, but certainly of a region ruled by Englishmen in English interests, what Stead called “Sarawaking the Soudan” after the model of Rajah Brooke’s government in Borneo.