Slavery in Sudan developed through overlapping Nile Valley, Red Sea, and inland systems rather than a single institution. Captives from the Sudanese borderlands and interior were moved toward Egypt, the Red Sea, and Arabia, while others were retained as domestic servants, agricultural laborers, soldiers, porters, or concubines. The categories recorded by traders and officials were often unstable, and labels based on origin, religion, or supposed ethnicity could obscure individual histories.

Slavery survived the collapse of Ottoman-Egyptian rule and continued under the Mahdist state. After the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of 1898, the colonial government concentrated first on suppressing slave trading and raiding rather than immediately emancipating every enslaved person. Administrators also feared disrupting households and labor supplies, so legal non-recognition of slavery did not by itself create a single, decisive abolition date.

Emancipation therefore unfolded unevenly into the twentieth century. Wage labor, international antislavery pressure, and tighter restrictions on sale and movement weakened slaveholding, but enslaved people were also active participants: flight, negotiation, relocation, and claims to new legal protections helped turn formal policy into practical exit. Historians consequently describe Sudanese abolition as a process extending into the interwar period, while treating later forced labor, civil-war abduction, and modern trafficking as related but analytically distinct forms of coercion.

Further reading

Ahmad Alawad Sikainga, "Routes to Emancipation in Egypt and the Sudan", Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2022).

M. W. Daly, Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1934 (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

International Labour Organization, "What is forced labour, modern slavery and human trafficking?" (for distinctions among modern coercive-labor categories).