The Gezira Scheme was a cotton irrigation project established by the British when they occupied Sudan on the heels of one of the most impressive 19th century anti-imperialist resistance movements: the Mahdiyya. Considered the largest farm in the world under a single management, the centrality of the Gezira Scheme persists until today. Built on the fertile, triangular region between the Blue and White Niles, the Scheme would come to span some one million acres, engaging at its peak half a million farmers and migrant labourers: in short, it formed the lifeblood of a newly constituted colonial economy. The Scheme’s tripartite organisation meant that profits were divided between the government, a corporation (the Sudan Plantations Syndicate) and the peasants working the land. The Scheme transformed not only the Gezira plain’s ecological and agricultural landscape, but reconstituted the native population as tenant farmers: their land forcibly rented from them by the government, resized and redistributed into geometrically organised plots, and their crops subject to regimes of agricultural inspection and the cycles of agricultural credit and debt. (Perhaps unsurprisingly the Gezira—along with the railway hub in Atbara—would become a hotbed of Sudanese labour resistance). While this agricultural scheme has often been conceived of as a means through which the metropole extracted resources from the periphery—that, providing cotton for the textile mills of Lancashire—less explored have been the ways in which the Scheme was a project of political control, an attempt to reformulate political identities in the face of the continued spectre of Mahdism. Drawing on critical political economy and STS, and archival material from Sudan and the UK, this paper re-examines the establishment of the Gezira Scheme. It considers the ways in which colonial (and capitalist) modernity was assembled in Sudan through the production of a pacified peasant identity. It does so by looking at the constitutive role of the corporation exploring how new forms of peasant discipline and productivity were organised, how profit-maximising and political imperatives were negotiated, and, finally, how the very boundaries of government and the ”state” came to be constituted through the financial and material possibilities afforded by corporate power. Ultimately, this paper asks, to what extent were the “fanatical”, insurgent subjectivities present during the Mahdiyya repressed in favour of a new subjectivity—one of a ‘sedentary’, ‘prosperous’ and pacified peasant proprietor, with a stake in the new regime? In what ways did they persist?