The trial revealed Egyptian nationalism at a peculiar nexus: Egypt was colonized by the British and yet often eager to recolonize the Sudanese in some way or another. The racial constructions inherent in these circumstances were also complex. Shaghlüb, the Bedouin slave trader, could claim a slave as his wife with none of the taboo of racial miscegenation that a similar marriage would have borne in Great Britain or the United States.

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 54