British anthropologist Evans-Pritchard wrote The Nuer from a historical and ideological context rooted in the British colonial enterprise in Africa.

While Evans-Pritchard’s work in some ways represented a rebuff of the colonialist project, an understanding of that context is nonetheless essential to understanding his anthropological research. The British colonial empire reached its greatest extent in the early 20th century, when Evans-Pritchard received his education and prepared to undertake research surveys in Africa. The United Kingdom exercised control over much of eastern and southern Africa at this time, and Sudan—the area in which Evans-Pritchard worked with both the Azande and Nuer people—was under joint British and Egyptian rule. The name for this government, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, is somewhat misleading, as Egypt itself was essentially functioning as a British protectorate during the period in question. Sudan had been under British administration since the 1898 defeat of the Sudanese Mahdist state at the hands of an Anglo-Egyptian army under Lord Kitchener. The Anglo-Egyptian rule over Sudan (which was essentially a gloss for British administration) lasted until 1956.

The Nuer experienced two different levels of colonialism, often simultaneously. The most direct level was from the national government in Khartoum, Sudan, exercised over them by ethnically Sudanese Arab groups in the 19th century and by the Anglo-Egyptian regime in the 20th century.