Then there were those who were deeply ambivalent about slavery yet who considered the officials of the slave trade bureaus to be trespassers broach- ing the privacy of the Egyptian family and revealing its secrets to the out- side world. This sense of invaded privacy put on the defensive those nationalists who called for the reconquest of the Sudan, because the British authorities in Egypt and participants in the antislavery movement in England heard with suspicion the nationalists' rhetoric that linked the Sudan corporeally to Egypt and interpreted such calls as defenses of slavery.

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 660