Was the invasion of Sudan by Ottoman-Egypt a colonial endeavour? Can transformations in credit-debt relations help to demarcate the ‘colonial’? While accounts of Ottoman colonialism have addressed changing configurations of identity and race, legal institutions, subjecthood and space, few have touched on debt—although it lies precisely at the intersection of law, ethics and economy, while reordering space and reconfiguring life-worlds. The first part of my paper explores how transformations in debt engendered modern colonial dynamics. The Ottoman-Egyptian invasion of Sudan initiated a series of changes: taxes levied in money, land alienation and widespread indebtedness. This led to an exodus of northern peasants who joined merchants in the southern ‘frontiers,’ repaying their debts by trading in export commodities, including slaves. Penetrating previously autonomous communities, this initiated an ‘internal’ colonialism, with traders accessing credit for their ventures through the formation of Islamic partnerships. My paper outlines the importance of the Islamic juridical apparatus imposed under Ottoman colonialism, authorising new forms of credit-debt relations, effecting new forms of subjectivity and personhood. Second, I turn to the Mahdist uprising, a messianic movement led by the Mahdi—the eschatological redeemer of mankind—that stormed the nineteenth century Ottoman and European worlds, expelling foreign forces and establishing an independent government at the height of the ‘Scramble for Africa’ (1881-1898). Accounts generally oscillate between viewing it as a religious (‘fanatical’) backlash to foreign rule (as in the colonial historiography) or a cultural expression of economic grievances against excessive taxation and a curtailed slave-trade. My approach differs in that it interrogates the ways these bifurcations (religion vs. economy) were the products of forms of power that unfolded during the Ottoman period, particularly juridical power. It explores the role of new forms of indebtedness as a legal-moral rupture, and thus an impetus for the Mahdist uprising. Reading the archive of his proclamations, it engages with the Mahdi’s own critique of the kinds of money-oriented subjects Ottoman administration had fostered. It shows his critique of debt and land alienation to be part of a larger project to refashion an ethical—indeed, ascetic—subject by re-inscribing economic transactions back into the fabric of social, ethical and spiritual life. Moreover, it examines the temporal re-orientation implied by Mahdism, as it called followers to abandon a worldly future for a messianic present lived for an imminent afterlife. It thus asks: what political opportunities were afforded by the disruptiveness of messianic time?