I discuss Sudan’s decolonization and its first seven years of independence, 1954-1961. I address how the first cohort of Sudanese officials charged with managing the national economy dealt with the dislocations caused by the retrenchment of Britain’s economic presence in Africa and the Middle East. It might appear sufficient to answer that the Sudanese state, like many other developing nations at the time, responded to dislocation by seeking a greater role for itself in economic affairs. This observation has become commonplace. Consequently, much has been written about the transition of decolonizing nations from open economies to closed economies. There are a bevy of theories offering causal explanations for this historical process. However, little is known about the decision making process of the post-colonial officials who were responsible for constructing these new economies. Reconstructing the logic of officials at different levels of the economic decision-making apparatus, I deal critically with the economic models and the bureaucratic reasoning that determined the approach to regulating and economy pursued by officials within the Sudanese Ministry of Finance and Economics. I situate these ministers and officials’ deliberations about economic policy within the context of the domestic and international political constraints that they faced. I pay close attention to the ways in which British, American and Egyptian competition in the Middle East imposed constraints on policy-makers in Sudan. Domestically, economic policy formation and implementation was constrained by interest groups. I reconstruct not only the economic policies advocated in Khartoum, but the recommendations put forward by international organizations and foreign governments. My research is based on archival and printed material collected in a number of locations: the National Records Office in Khartoum, the Sudan Archive, National Archives, London, the National Archives and Records Administration, Maryland, and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group Archive.