Dynastic Centralization .... in Late Imperial Period

This article was downloaded by: [INASP - Ethiopia ]
On: 22 January 2014, At: 05:48

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Cambridge Review of International

Affairs
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccam20
Empire and modernity: dynastic

centralization and official nationalism
in late imperial Ethiopia
a
Fouad Makki
a
Cornell University
Published online: 26 Jul 2011.
To cite this article: Fouad Makki (2011) Empire and modernity: dynastic centralization and official
nationalism in late imperial Ethiopia, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 24:2, 265-286, DOI:
10.1080/09557571.2011.558056
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2011.558056
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
Cambridge Review of International Affairs,
Volume 24, Number 2, June 2011
Empire and modernity: dynastic centralization and official

nationalism in late imperial Ethiopia
Fouad Makki
Cornell University
Abstract Conventional accounts of modern state-formation either underplay its

contradictory and variegated character or neglect its international dimensions. Against
Downloaded by [INASP - Ethiopia ] at 05:48 22 January 2014
these approaches, alternative theories of state-formation have emerged centred on the

constitutive significance of intersocietal relations and differential temporalities. This
article develops the latter approaches in relation to the Ethiopian state. Contrary to
widespread assumptions of Ethiopia’s political insularity, it suggests that at three crucial
turning points geopolitical exigencies provided the critical impetus for the political and
cultural reconstitution of the state. Late nineteenth century European colonial
encroachment triggered a reaction in the form of an Ethiopian imperial expansion to
rival them. And the political shock of Italian occupation 40 years later provoked a
concurrent project of dynastic centralization and official nationalism in the post-
restoration period. But precisely because divine monarchy and nationalism are antithetical
orders by virtue of their opposed principles of sovereignty, the attempt to conjoin them
generated deep social and cultural contradictions that erupted in two successive
revolutions that were internationally overdetermined and resulted in a profound
reconstitution of the Ethiopian state.
At the end of the nineteenth century, in the context of the European scramble for
Africa, a reunited Ethiopian state was able to incorporate several autonomous
polities into its expanding realm and use the sinews of empire to defeat Italian
attempts at colonial conquest. As the only major indigenous polity in the continent
to have escaped direct European domination, the imperial regime was uniquely
placed to respond to the challenges posed by the new regional constellation of
forces from a position of relative political autonomy. For the most part, this
entailed the selective appropriation and layering over of modern political forms
on an ancien régime characterized by rigid social and cultural hierarchies. It was
only after the profound political shock of the Italian invasion 40 years later that the
restored monarchy was compelled to embark on a sustained process of dynastic
centralization and the cultural reconfiguration of state-society relations with
profound implications for rulers and subjects alike.
I would like to express my thanks to Justin Rosenberg, Phil McMichael and the three
anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this
article.
ISSN 0955-7571 print/ISSN 1474-449X online/11/020265–22 q 2011 Centre of International Studies

DOI: 10.1080/09557571.2011.558056
266 Fouad Makki
These transformations have typically been explained in terms of the contrast

between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, the two conditions coexisting temporarily as
the former gave way to the latter through a series of graduated stages (Gilkes 1975;
Hess 1970; Levine 1965; Marcus 1983). Within the terms defined by this
supposedly universal schema the emplotment of Ethiopia’s history appeared
unproblematic. What mattered were not so much the different starting points, but
the certainty of converging historical paths in a singular process of modernization.
Despite the considerable diversity of perspectives concerning the political and
cultural forms this would take, some version of the above—which combines
assumptions about the role of modernizing elites and the social logic of
technological rationalization—has been constitutive of modernization approaches
since the 1950s. In different accents and conceptual registers it was a vision shared
by protagonists across the ideological divide of the Cold War (Engerman et al
2003; Latham 2000).
Over the past few decades, this narrative of modernization, in both its liberal
and radical versions, has largely lost its power to persuade, and it is now doubted
whether social change can be so readily subsumed within the ideal typical
constructs of tradition and modernity (Ferguson 2005; Mitchell 2000). And in this
article I want to suggest that rather than a transition to some generic form of
modernity, the post-restoration transformations in Ethiopia are better understood
in the sociologically and historically more specific terms of the crystallization of an
absolutist state and the parallel elaboration of a state-sponsored nationalism.
Against ingrained assumptions of unilinearity and ‘ontological singularity’
characteristic of modernization approaches, I suggest that international processes
of ‘uneven and combined development’ (Trotsky 1960 [1932]; Löwy 1981) were
decisive in shaping both the form and temporality of these transformations. Seen
from this perspective, the Ethiopian state’s relative autonomy from a colonially
mediated integration into the global order was not a decisive measure of its
insulation from geopolitical pressures and their causal imperatives. Although the
antiquated political form of the imperial monarchy appeared to defy historical
time, in so far as it could not survive without the world market and international
alliances, it necessarily encountered the limits of relative autonomy and was forced
to adapt to their imperatives at the risk of extinction. Acknowledging the
significance of these geopolitical imperatives implies the need to integrate
the Ethiopian social formation into the more general historical sociology of the
international of which it is a part.
Ethiopia’s rulers in the mid-twentieth century responded to these international
exigencies through the construction of a dynastically centralized state and a state-
sponsored project of nationalism. But precisely because divine monarchy and
nationalism are antithetical orders by virtue of their opposed principles of
sovereignty, the attempt to conjoin them generated deep social and cultural
contradictions. Dynastic centralization undermined the social basis of the old
order by generating new social layers that challenged the legitimacy of the royal
state. Official nationalism likewise fractured the ethnoreligious cultural core of the
empire and set in motion a process of ethnolinguistic politicization that threatened
the very existence of the empire. These combined contradictions culminated in a
profound social revolution that overthrew the ancien régime. The concerted effort
by the postrevolutionary state to carry through the old imperial projects of state
centralization and official nationalism only served to accentuate the accumulating
Empire and modernity in late imperial Ethiopia 267
contradictions. The repressive methods deployed to neutralize all opposition to

the political unity of the state fuelled an even more powerful resistance from a
coalition of armed ethnonationalist movements that in 1991 established a federal
republic based on ethnically defined administrative units. Both these revolutions
were overdetermined by the distinct international political and ideological
conjunctures of the early 1970s and the late 1980s, as well as by Ethiopian social
actors’ view of revolutions as engines of modernity that will drag Ethiopia out of
its backwardness (Donham 1999, 3).
My intention in this article is to employ this conceptual framework to illuminate
the transformations of state and society in twentieth century Ethiopia. The
argument unfolds in five interrelated sections. In the first section, I provide a
synoptic synthesis of the key analytic terms that frame the overall argument:
absolutism, official nationalism and ‘uneven and combined development’. This is
followed by four sections that in succession provide theoretically informed
accounts of (i) the socio-historical configuration of the imperial social formation

that delimited the state’s capacity to respond to the challenges posed by European
penetration into the region; (ii) the internationally mediated dynamics of absolutist
state formation following the Italian occupation of 1936–1941; (iii) the concurrent
elaboration of a reactive project of official nationalism in the context of the
international spread of the nation state norm and nationalist challenges from
within the empire; and (iv) the cumulative and explosive contradictions generated
by this hybrid and unstable formation that culminated in two successive
revolutionary upturns that were in turn decisively shaped by revolutionary actors
acute sense of Ethiopia’s relative place in the world. A brief concluding section
resumes the central argument.
Absolutism, nationalism and uneven and combined development

The transition from a universe of dynastic states and sacred realms to a modern
interstate system of secular republics is conventionally conceived as having been
accomplished in two related phases. In a first phase, situated between the sixteenth
century and the period of the late Enlightenment, territorial expansion and the
suppression of competing centres of power generated a parallel process of
dynastic centralization in much of western Europe. Carried through conquests or
dynastic alliances from certain ‘core’ areas, such as southeast England, the Ile de
France around Paris and Castile in Spain, the emergence of centralized monarchies
fundamentally reconstituted the mediaeval political space of Latin Christendom.
In a second phase unfolding from the late eighteenth century onwards,
geopolitical competition and a series of cultural and economic transformations
created a dense social texture within these dynastically unified territorial states
that promoted a shared sense of national identity. And as a result of these
transformations, a Europe of ‘some five hundred more or less independent
political units’ in 1500 was transformed into one of ‘about twenty-five’ by 1900
(Tilly 1991, 15). Through a wide-ranging and contested historical process spanning
some two centuries, the modern nation-state was extended to the rest of the world
with colonial states performing the historically analogous role of administrative
centralization previously carried out by dynastic states and establishing the
institutional and material foundations for post-colonial nation-state formation.
268 Fouad Makki
Viewed along these lines, it would appear that the modern nation-state was an
almost inevitable outcome of the transformations inaugurated by dynastic and
colonial states. And this is the standard approach in mainstream International
Relations theories that take the Treaty of Westphalia as the moment in which a
modern interstate system came into being.1 In parallel registers but with differing
emphases, this approach also informs the works of a number of influential
historical sociologists from Shmuel Eisenstadt and John Kautsky to Charles Tilly,
Michael Mann and Anthony Giddens (Tilly 1992; Mann 1993; Giddens 1985;
Eisenstadt 1963; Kautsky 1982). As all of these approaches emphasize, there are
clearly definite processes of institutional growth within states that allow territorial
as against particularistic attachments to take shape. But to view the development
of nations and nationalism as an effect of administrative intervention and
structural homogenization diminishes the profound transformations in the
cultural complex of power and in forms of collective consciousness that they

represent. Structural changes in state and economy may or may not generate a
unified public and a common grammar of subjectivity. A purely evolutionary
optic elides both the distinctive claims that state and nation embody, and the
differential historical temporality in which they are each inscribed. Rather than a
normative evolution from empires to modern states, or an ancillary outcome of
structural transformations, the nation-state represents a distinct cultural artefact
that in time came to provide the very basis of state legitimacy in the modern world
(Eley and Suny 1996; Balakrishnan 1996).
Against the grain of these macrosociological studies, Perry Anderson has
argued that while absolutist state formation transformed the haphazard
multiplicity of political units into an organized and interconnected state system,
it was essentially a premodern and prenational state form. Absolutism entailed
the displacement upwards of the ‘parcellized sovereignty’ once exercised by the
nobility, a process that endowed the absolutist monarchies with new military,
juridical, and fiscal instruments for the appropriation of surplus and the
centralization of social power. But property relations continued to be politically
instituted and this sociological feature distinguished absolutism from modern
forms of sovereignty characterized by the formal separation of the political sphere
from the economic domain. Instead of the negation of feudalism, absolutist states
were in fact a ‘redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination, designed to
clamp the peasant masses back into their traditional social position’ (Anderson
1974, 18, emphasis in original). They were consequently characterized by a series
of inner contradictions. A centralized bureaucracy could be established, but the
sale of office continued to be a common practice. Centralized armies were
introduced, but instead of a national conscript force they were ‘a mixed mass in
which foreign mercenaries played a constant and central role’ (30). Diplomacy
could become normalized, but the instrument of diplomacy was to a large extent
marriage, ‘peaceful mirror of war, which so often provoked it’ (39). And far from
being the incubators of nations, absolutist states were intimately tied to sacred
realms and divine centres, and ‘the ideological conceptions of “nationalism” as
1
For a critique of these foundational assumptions in the field of International Relations,
see Rosenberg (1994) and Teschke (2003).
such were foreign to the inmost nature of Absolutism’, for the ‘ultimate instance of
legitimacy was the dynasty, not the territory’ (38 –39, emphasis in original).
The emergence of nation-states conceived as politically sovereign
communities of horizontal solidarity and limited geographical reach represented
a break from these early modern forms of rule and legitimation. As Benedict
Anderson (1991, 19) suggests in a celebrated study of the origins and spread of
nationalism:
[t]hese days it is perhaps difficult to put oneself emphatically into a world in which
the dynastic realm appeared for most men as the only imaginable ‘political’ system.
For in fundamental ways ‘serious’ monarchy lies transverse to all modern
conceptions of political life. Kingship organizes everything around a high center.
Its legitimacy derives from divinity, not from populations, who, after all, are
subjects, not citizens. In the modern conception, state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and
evenly operative over each square centimeter of a legally demarcated territory.

But in the older imagining, where states were defined by centers, borders were
porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another.
The very possibility of imagining the nation, he argues, arose historically when
and where three fundamental cultural concepts lost their grip on the imagination
of people: the idea that a particular sacred language offered privileged access to
ontological truth, the notion that dynastic monarchies were divinely ordained; and
a conception of time in which chronology and history become indistinguishable.
Print in the vernacular, below the sacred languages and above the spoken
dialectics, permitted a different style of collective imagining. And in the context of
the late eighteenth century Age of Revolution, in which questions of empire and
citizenship, slavery and racial hierarchies, cultural difference and universal
human rights were being fiercely contested, the crisis of religious belief and the
breakdown of divine kingship became linked to the ideal of a secular nation as
the constitutive source of political legitimacy. The association of a people with a
culture originated here and found its paradigmatic political expression in the idea
of the nation-state as the embodiment of popular sovereignty (Anderson 1991;
Burke 1978; Fontana 1994).
The first plurality of nations emerged in this context and the ideal of the nation-
state spread across all continents through a succession of modular forms—from the
Creole nationalisms that represented the separation of overseas settler communities
from metropolitan homelands, to the linguistically based romantic nationalisms in
Europe and the state-sponsored official nationalisms that emerged in reaction to
them, to the anticolonial nationalisms in the twentieth century, and the wave of
nationalisms that sundered the Soviet and transformed the Ethiopian empires on
the eve of the twenty-first century. Each concentrated moment of nation state
formation was characterized by a particular social and political articulation that
built on earlier dynamics in nonlinear and contradictory ways. And it is this
dialectic of the universal and the particular, crucially mediated by print-capitalism,
which accounts for the extraordinary spread of the national ideal across societies
with social structures and cultures as varied as industrial Japan and agrarian
Ethiopia. To reduce nationalism to the functional needs of industrial capitalism, as
Ernest Gellner suggests in an otherwise authoritative study of nations and
nationalism (1983, 140), is to miss this cumulatively consequential international
270 Fouad Makki
dimension of nation-state formation as well as the complex political, cultural, and

discursive mediations it typically entails.2
The global extension of the nation state form was not a reflection of some
predetermined stage in the steady planetary march of capitalist modernity. Its
emergence was far from a straight forward process, punctuated as it was by wars,
civil wars, rebellions, and revolutions. Over the past two centuries, societies the
world over have certainly come into contact with the material and cultural
underpinnings of modernity, and this has had an irresistible impact on their social
and political evolution. Situated in the space of empire and differentially integrated
into the world market, they have necessarily evolved under the combined systemic
pressures of these overarching world-historical processes. But they were not
thereby transformed into mere mirror images of the West as The Communist
Manifesto and Rostovian growth theories once assumed. Capitalism did not
expand across space and time in a uniform and linear dynamic since it inevitably
encountered societies constituted by social and cultural institutions that—while

forced to respond to its expansionary dynamics—were never seamlessly
integrated into it. The implications of this variegated international dynamic
of capitalist expansion were not self-evident initially even to Marx, who in the first
edition of Capital had stated that ‘the country that is more developed industrially
only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’ (Marx 1976
[1867], 91).3
It was arguably Leon Trotsky who in an attempt to understand Tsarist Russia’s
belated industrialization, articulated the two-fold import of capitalism’s complex
and contradictory world-historical expansion. On the one hand, Trotsky
recognized that societies outside the original epicentre of capitalism would be
forced by ‘the whip of external necessity’ to ‘make leaps’ and adapt institutionally
to the geopolitical challenges and economic opportunities of capitalist develop-
ment. But precisely because of the relational and cumulatively consequential
nature of capitalist development as much as because of the intrinsically uneven
levels of social and material development of human societies, a repetition of the
paths traversed by the pioneer industrial powers was historically foreclosed. This
same sociological unevenness inadvertently entailed a ‘privilege of historic
backwardness’ since the existence of the industrialized West ‘permits or rather
compels the adaption of whatever is ready in advance’ making it possible to skip ‘a
whole series of intermediate stages’ (Trotsky 1960, 4– 5). This typically gives rise to
a process of combined development and ‘the drawing together of the different
stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with
contemporary forms’ (5 – 6). So rather than the reproduction of a succession of
predetermined historical stages within discreet political entities, social develop-
ment was inescapably a complex, relational and differentiated process. And since
geopolitical pressures preclude a slow and organic cultural and institutional
adaptation to the forces of modernity, it makes the societies undergoing these
2
As Tom Nairn’s (1977) conception of nationalism illustrates, Gellner’s study of
nationalism, freed from its functionalism, is not without its merits. Nairn creatively
extended Gellner’s argument by tying the spread of nationalism to the ‘uneven
development’ characteristic of capitalist industrialization.
3
In his exchanges with the Russian populists, Marx later revised this assessment
(compare Shanin 1984; Anderson 2010).
transformations profoundly unstable and contradictory. The international

dynamics of uneven and combined development thus rule out the possibility of
a straightforward reproduction of the social and political forms that had
historically congealed in the West. Geopolitically mediated temporal compression
generated socio-political disarticulations that profoundly destabilized societies
outside the original core of capitalist development, making them exceptionally
vulnerable to periodic social and political convulsions.
In a series of recent interventions, Justin Rosenberg has sought to extend the
analytical reach of Trotsky’s original formulation by conceptualizing it ‘not as a
concrete abstraction of the international impact of capitalist society, but as a general
abstraction of the significance of inter-societal coexistence per se’ (Rosenberg 2006,
319, emphasis in original). This reformulation is arguably suggestive of ways in
which the persistent analytical lacuna that has long plagued geopolitical and
sociological theories alike might be overcome.4 While International Relations
theories generally reify political multiplicity in abstraction from the social nature
of the societies concerned, classical social theories characteristically conceptualize
social development in abstraction from geopolitical coexistence (312). The
multilinear and interactive dynamics of social development are consequently
‘repressed’ only to return as untheorized exogenous factors (Callinicos and
Rosenberg 2008, 17; see also Allinson and Avienas 2009, 13). By conceiving the
international as ‘that dimension of social reality which arises from the co-existence
within it of more than one society’, Rosenberg suggests that this intrinsic
multilinearity and relationality generates a lateral field of causal determinations
that constitutively enter into the social reproduction of individual societies
(Rosenberg 2006, 308; 2010).
Space here precludes a more sustained reflection on absolutism, nationalism,
and uneven and combined development. But before proceeding to an analysis of
the particular sociological and historical terrain of twentieth century Ethiopia, it
might be helpful to indicate briefly the conceptual import of the interlinked studies
discussed above for the analytic framework I am here proposing. Perry Anderson’s
study of state formation in early modern Europe operates with a complex notion of
differential historical temporality whereby the transition to capitalism is made
possible by the ’concatenation of antiquity and feudalism’ (Anderson 1974, 420),
and in which no chronological identity is presumed between the various levels—
economic, political and ideological—of the absolutist social formations. Much of
his analysis is devoted to exploring the necessary unevenness between these levels
and the significance this has for the social dynamics and historical trajectory of the
absolutist states. Benedict Anderson’s account of the origin and spread of
nationalism, on the other hand, invokes Walter Benjamin’s notion of empty
homogeneous time as the dominant temporal experience of modernity and deploys
it to great effect to examine the serial reproduction of the nation form across varied
cultures and societies. This enables Anderson to historicize a central paradox of
nationalism: while all nationalisms claim to be unique, they are all modular
variants of a universal form characteristic of modernity at large. In their own
contrasting ways, both these magisterial studies are profoundly sensitive to the
complex time-space coordinates of state and nation formation, and absolutism and
4
See Callinicos and Rosenberg (2008); Allinson and Avienas (2009); and Ashman (2009).
272 Fouad Makki
nationalism are conceived as international processes that crystallize unevenly as

particular regimes or nation states within a relational space. But neither explicitly
theorizes the sociological substratum and causal mechanisms of the ‘international’
that constitutes this relational space per se. Following on the brief exposition of
Trotsky and Rosenberg, I have suggested that the theory of uneven and combined
development might provide a key to this missing link.
Solomonic Ethiopia: old state, new society

On the eve of the twentieth century, the Abyssinian state was transformed into the
new Ethiopian Empire through a sustained process of territorial expansion.
Advance towards this was initiated by Emperor Tewodros and was followed up
by Yohannes IV and consummated by Menelik II. The new empire incorporated a
population and territory more than twice that of historic Abyssinia. It was a
polyglot realm encompassing various ethnolinguistic communities and formerly

autonomous sultanates, chieftaincies and kingdoms. In a series of treaties signed
with France, Britain and Italy between 1897 and 1908, the boundaries of the
empire were delineated and, having secured international recognition, imperial
rulers set out to consolidate control over the newly incorporated regions. Donald
Donham has suggested that this process of establishing a unified system of rule
over the variegated empire can be fruitfully analysed in two distinct periods,
1896– 1935 and 1941– 1974, separated by the brief but politically crucial interlude
of the Italian occupation (1994, 34 – 38).
In the first of these periods, while the monarchy claimed sovereign sway over
the empire, the infrastructural power of the state was still ill defined. Given the
heterogeneous social character of the empire, there was no structural congruence
between state and society. Territorial expansion basically represented a
straightforward extension from an adjacent geographical base and lines of
communication between the hierarchy of centres and peripheries were
consequently short. But without an elaborate system of bureaucratic adminis-
tration, power remained a personal delegation. As Michael Mann suggests in a
review of premodern empires:
[t]he political radius of practicable rule by a state was smaller than the radius of a
military conquest. An army could conquer large tracts of territory by concentrating
forces, but ruling over the incorporated regions require a dispersal of forces, which
was bound to eliminate the military advantage of the conquerors. (Mann 1986, 170,
emphasis in original)
For most of the pre-1935 period, there was no serious attempt to centralize
monarchical authority in the Abyssinian north, while in the newly conquered
territories imperial rulers were content to govern in a mixed and contradictory
system that included direct administration through state appointees in some places,
or indirect rule through assimilated local notables in others (Donham 1986, 37–44).
Socially, once imperial frontiers had stabilized and the avenue for horizontal
expansion was closed off by the presence of adjacent European colonial states, the
augmentation of surplus could only take place through intensive appropriation
rather the extensive absorption of new territories. Given the prevailing social-
property relations and the imperial character of the state this meant an ever
more oppressive system of surplus appropriation that reduced the southern
peasantry to servile status. The social relations that eventually crystallized in these
regions were in many ways akin to serfdom, but the precise form this took varied
from region to region and was in part dependent on whether or not local rulers
cooperated or resisted the imposition of imperial power. In the areas that submitted
without much resistance, the power of local rulers was left intact as long as the
tribute demanded of them was paid (Markakis 1974, 106– 107). In the areas that did
not passively submit, however, there was a more far-reaching process of predatory
dispossessions and the imposition of coercive relations of power.
It was in this politically and socially complex context that Menilek II (1889 –
1913) attempted to address the administrative limit of the tributary order. One of
these was the very poor transportation network, and to overcome it the regime
initiated postal, telegraph and telephone systems and began the construction of
roads to link the imperial core with provincial centres. Menelik also permitted the
construction of the railway from French occupied Djibouti to Addis Ababa and
encouraged various small-scale commercial initiatives. But these projects were few
and far between and the threat of renewed regionalism was never wholly checked.
The reassertion of royal unity was necessarily combined with provincial devolution
and the oscillation between center and periphery was a reflection of a social order
that lacked a structural impulse to centralization. Extending Weber’s insight on the
structural differences between patrimonial and feudal forms of rule, Donham
suggests that:
[i]t seems that neither the emperor nor regional chiefs decisively won the struggle to
control fiefs. The powers of each waxed and waned in different periods . . . As a
consequence, a society-wide elite stratum with its own high culture never
crystallized. In its stead a core-periphery structure developed in which fiefs in core
areas tended to become more or less hereditary while those in peripheries were
more firmly controlled by emperors. (1986, 9 – 10)
The absence of an integrative institutional mechanism at the apex of the power
structure was exacerbated by the lack of any stable system of dynastic succession.
Successors to the throne were not determined according to a fixed rule like
primogeniture, although a claim to membership in the Solomonic line was
normally a prerequisite. The cumulative logic of this system was the periodic
eruption of centrifugal tendencies. And this was precisely what happened at the
time of Menilek’s death in 1913 when factional feuds broke out and the
regional nobility were reluctant to support the emergence of a strong successor
(Marcus 1975).
A weakening of the imperial centre consequently marked the interlude
between Menilek’s death and the consolidation of Haile Selassie’s power as
regional lords asserted more autonomy. It was not until 1930 when Haile Selassie
was crowned Emperor that some cautious measures could be undertaken to
strengthen the relative power of the centre. Haile Selassie continued Menilek’s
policy of extending the communications network and promoting various
commercial enterprises. A rudimentary air force was set up and military schools
were established in 1934 to train a professional army, and a Belgian military
mission was invited to improve the organization of the armed forces. All these
measures enhanced the coercive reach of the imperial state and enabled it to
partially contain rival centres of power (Zewde 1995, 32). So while the territorial
expansion of European imperial powers into the region compelled the Ethiopian
274 Fouad Makki
state to respond to the geopolitical threat they posed, the possibility of

constructing an effective political structure to contain this challenge was
constrained by the social and infrastructural limitations of the ancien régime. The
social ground for a vertical political centralization was absent since no
fundamental transformations in agrarian relations had yet taken place (Tibebu
1995; Crummey 2000). And without a developed bureaucracy, it was impossible to
establish a centralized administration over the erstwhile empire. Organizationally
weak and administratively disaggregated, power remained a personal delegation
and the state’s institutional capacity proved much more circumscribed than the
adjacent colonial states it sought to imitate.
Imperial restoration and dynastic centralization

It was this fragile political structure that collapsed abruptly in 1935 in the face of
Italian aggression. The occupation over the next five years reconfigured several
aspects of the imperial system through policies designed to undermine the
legitimacy of the emperor:
[t]he gabbar [tributary] system, which had upheld the political position of
northerners, was quickly abolished . . . and the Italians cultivated the support of
southern peasants by reducing their tributes and by building mosques in Muslim
areas. When, therefore, Haile Selassie was restored to power in 1941, he returned to
a changed country. Many of the soldier-settlers in the south had been killed in the
war, and the anti-northern feelings of the southern peasants had been fanned and
given political shape. In the north, many of the nobility had also died or had been
disgraced by collaboration with the Italians. (Donham 1994, 36 – 37)
The dramatic wartime upheaval had fissured the old order and the reconstituted
state did not represent a mere return to the status quo ante. The most consequential
difference was the dramatic increase in the weight of the monarchy within
the complex of imperial power. By seriously weakening the regional nobility, the
Italian occupation had inadvertently created propitious conditions for the emergence
of a centralized monarchy. This represented a major break from a structure of power
in which neither the monarchy nor the nobility had been able to impose a stable
modus vivendi. In the coming decades, Haile Selassie steadily weakened the
autonomy of the regional nobility by appropriating several key functions that were
the mainstay of their traditional power. Most importantly, the disaggregated
tributary system that had underpinned the position of the provincial lords was
abolished in 1941 and a Ministry of the Treasury was established for centralized tax
collection. This in turn facilitated the conversion and integration of the traditional
lords into subordinate salaried agents of the emerging absolutist state (Zewde 1991,
91; Tareke 1991). The formation of a new system of state courts further removed the
juridical powers the lords exercised and accelerated the shift of power to the
centralizing monarchy (Zewde 1984; Rahmato 1988).
The formal resemblance of Ethiopia’s semiabsolutist state with those of early
modern Europe by no means implies they were homologous structures. Precisely
because of the different world time of its formation, Ethiopian absolutism could
draw on international alliances and technical advances that were unavailable to
the European monarchies. Whereas in post-Renaissance Europe the expansion of
commerce and commodity relations had provided the technical and economic
means for absolutist state formation, it was international and primarily United
States’ material and strategic assistance that facilitated the transition from one
political order to another in mid-twentieth century Ethiopia. In a historical irony
that illustrates the international geopolitical dynamics of uneven and combined
development, the hegemonic postwar capitalist state served as the midwife of
absolutism in Ethiopia. As the only major state in Africa outside the European
colonial zone, and, given the importance to the United States of recently
incorporated Eritrea as one link in the network of intelligence stations it operated
before the age of satellites, Ethiopia acquired strategic significance for the United
States. Over the next 20 years, Ethiopia became the centrepiece of the United
States’ Africa policy and between 1952 and 1974 the Haile Selassie regime received
military aid totalling $270 million—over half of all US military aid to Africa—and
economic aid totalling some $350 million (Ottaway and Ottaway 1978, 193).
Over the same period, the World Bank contributed economic aid in amounts
similar to that of the US and this international support enabled the monarchy to
redress some of the infrastructural limits of the pre-1935 political order by
improving the transportation network and administrative mechanisms of the
absolutist state.
The increase in state revenue made possible a qualitative transformation of the
old system of retinues, which henceforth took the form of a modern civil service
and a standing army. The army was professionalized and became a dominant
priority, growing to some 65,000 by the early 1970s and consuming a large
proportion of the state budget. Its composition was rigidly controlled and it gave
the emperor unparalleled coercive resources (Halliday and Molyneux 1981, 71;
Levine 1968). The newly established administrative institutions likewise required
educated personnel and administrators to staff them, and a major investment in
higher education was required before a meaningful civil service could be
established. By the early 1970s, there were an estimated 20,000 secondary-school
graduates in the army and civil service (Halliday and Molyneux 1981, 71), while
the proportion of nobles in the central government steadily dropped from 53 per
cent in 1948 to 13 per cent in 1966 (Clapham 1969, 68). As their privileges were
eroded, the nobility had little choice but to look to the greater power of the central
state to protect their interests. Their integration into the central state apparatus
also meant they no longer required private retinues and they steadily evolved into
a more settled class of urban absentee lords. Resources that were in the past used
to enlarge the number of followers could now be productively invested in
commerce, real estate or commercial agriculture. But the crucial mediation for the
transformation of the nobility was not the development of new commercial
relations as much as the internationally mediated changes in the role and structure
of the state itself. Only a handful of the old nobility were interested in pursuing
commercial agriculture or industry (Rahmato 1984, 34).
Imperial legitimacy and official nationalism

Changes in the structure of power and the dynamics of the tributary system
brought with them unintended cultural transformations. At the turn of the
twentieth century, the Ethiopian Empire had evolved with a largely Orthodox
Christian cultural core and numerous other ethnic and religious communities
276 Fouad Makki
ranged on its peripheries. The Emperor, by right of conquest and divine sanction
(seyuma egzabiher) ruled polyglot subjects in a hierarchy that reinforced cultural
and social difference. Faith and dynasty constituted the cultural foundations of
imperial power and the monarchy was indifferent to the principle of nationality.
At the core of the imperial cultural complex were the Habesha who conceived of
themselves as a primarily Orthodox Christian community with their own Church
set apart from the Constantinople-centred Church. Christianity had arrived at the
Aksumite court in the first half of the fourth century and diffused down to
the Abyssinian peasantry in the subsequent centuries. After the demise of the
Aksumite Empire in the eighth century, it was the only significant institution save
that of the monarchy to have survived, becoming a central institution of the
Abyssinian kingdom that crystallized into a distinct polity in the eleventh century.
From the tenth century onwards, there was also a diffusion of Islam into the
region forming a crescent-like outer boundary along the north, east and south of
the Abyssinian highlands. A pan-Christian Habesha identity was cemented in

relation to the dar al-Islam, and the perceived Muslim ‘Other’ spurred the
consolidation of Orthodox Christianity as the cultural core of the empire. In this
relational context, Orthodox Christianity was a source of terrestrial identity as
much as a force of spiritual salvation. Territory and religion did not of course
always coincide and there were minority communities of Jews and Muslims in
historic Abyssinia; but for the most part they were confined to occupations
removed from cultivation, with Muslims working primarily as traders and Jews
serving as potters and blacksmiths. Christian identity was essentially tied to the
rist system of land tenure and found expression in sayings such as, ‘the Muslim
has no rist just as the sky has no pillar’. Moreover, while the Habesha were
differentiated internally by language and region, and although at the local level
loyalty was to particular face-to-face communities, Christian Orthodoxy was
foundational to an overarching sense of identity, and the strength of this sacred
mode of imagining is apparent in Abyssinian perceptions of the Beta Israel, the
historic community of Ethiopian Jews. These ancient adherents of Judaism were
locally known as Falashas, a term connoting strangers even though they spoke the
same language as their Amhara neighbours and used the same script for their
sacred texts as that of the Orthodox Church. The relationship between Amharic
and Tigriña speakers, on the other hand, provides a contrasting confirmation of
Abyssinian identity as preeminently ethnoreligious. For close to a millennium,
these two linguistically distinct communities identified with each other as
Orthodox Christians and accorded legitimacy to members of the Solomonic line
regardless of ethnicity.
But for most of the first half of the twentieth century, while the lisane negus (the
king’s language) was the de facto language of state, there was no bureaucratic
apparatus that could engage in the cultural construction of power save that of the
Orthodox Church. Geographical mobility was limited and material backwardness
sustained separate social and cultural spaces. Illiteracy was the fate of the
overwhelming majority of the empire’s inhabitants who retained their primary
adhesion to religion and locally circumscribed face-to-face communities. By
contemporary nationalist standards, the monarchical state paid little attention to
the cultural identity of its subjects, and in the first two-thirds of the twentieth
century, politicized ethnicity was not a significant feature of the imperial order.
This nexus of culture and power began to undergo a deep transformation in
the post-1941 period as dynastic centralization, the establishment of an

administrative language-of-state, the extension of modern schools and the
emergence of a modern mass media made language a deeply contentious issue. In
the subsequent decades, the identity of the imperial state became permeated by
the ethnic culture of the politically dominant Shewa Amhara. Amhara culture
supplied the state’s language, its myths of origin, its legends and values, and its
most ubiquitous symbols. The boundaries of what it meant to be ‘Ethiopian’
increasingly came to be shaped by this culture. To this end, much like the state
sponsored nationalisms of Russian and Magyar nobilities in an earlier era, the
Ethiopian dynasty sought to naturalize itself by promoting a project that could
culturally bind dynasty and society together. In many ways this was the cultural
concomitant of dynastic centralization and is akin to what Benedict Anderson has
called ‘official nationalism’: ‘a willed merger of nation and dynastic empire’, and a
set of ‘conservative, not to say, reactionary, policies, adapted from the model of the
largely spontaneous popular nationalisms that preceded them’, and once

‘refracted into non-European cultures and histories, they were picked up and
imitated by indigenous ruling groups in those few zones . . . which escaped direct
subjection’ (Anderson 1991, 86, 110, emphasis in original). Imperial Ethiopia was
one such state and can be situated within this zone. But it was also a territorial
empire whose dynamic of expansion and incorporation was in many ways
analogous to that of the Tsarist and Ottoman empires:
[i]n contiguous empires, where the distinction between the nation and the empire is
more easily muddled than in overseas empires, ruling elites may attempt to construct
hybrid notions of an empire-nation, as in tsarist Russia or in the Ottoman Empire in the
nineteenth century. Responding to the challenges presented by the efficiencies of the
new national states, imperial elites promoted a transition from ‘ancien régime’ empires
to ‘modern’ empires, from a more polycentric and differentiated polity in which
regions maintained quite different legal, economic, and even political structures to a
more centralized, bureaucratized state in which laws, economic practices, and even
customs and dialects were homogenized by state elites. (Suny 2001, 30)
The project of official nationalism in post-restoration Ethiopia was articulated in
reaction to three historical developments. In the first place, it represented a
response to the international extension of the nation state norm following the
demise of the European colonial empires and the decolonization of much of Africa
and Asia. Secondly, it was a reaction to a series of sociopolitical changes
introduced by the Italians during the occupation that were intended to undermine
the legitimacy of the monarchy. In the period from 1936 to 1941, the Italian East
African Empire was divided into six administrative regions whose boundaries
were largely informed by religious and ethnic considerations. A number of
elementary schools were set up in these administrative regions and the use of local
languages for instruction was emphasized. Mosques were constructed for
Ethiopian Muslims and centres of Islamic education were established in towns
like Harar and Jimma. Lastly, official nationalism was a reaction to the emergence
of an embryonic Eritrean nationalism from the 1940s that frontally challenged the
dynastic state and the imperial realm. All these developments combined to induce
the formulation of a state-sponsored nationalism as a dynastic project. The term
zega that eventually came to designate citizenship had historically referred to
uprooted persons deprived of access to land thus reduced to the status of landless
278 Fouad Makki
subjects (Mengistie 2004). Its subsequent interpellation into a kind of hybrid

subject/citizen category was emblematic of both the conservative and preemptive
nature of official nationalism, and the international imperatives of popular
sovereignty and the nation state norm to which it was in part a response.
This project of state-sponsored nationalism was not a self-conscious affair from
the start. It was more a by-product rather than an integral part of the project of
dynastic centralization. But the changes it promoted inaugurated a major
reconfiguration of the cultural markers of imperial identity from a primarily
ethnoreligious to an ethnolinguistic one. It is perhaps unsurprising that its first
casualty was the core Orthodox Christian or Habesha cultural identity itself, which
now fractured along Amhara and Tigriña ethnolinguistic lines. And in both Eritrea
and in Ethiopia proper, a new generation of Tigriña youth had by the late 1960s and
early 1970s began to clothe themselves in the language of nationalism.5 The notion
of ethnicity as distinct from religion gradually came to inform both government
and popular perceptions as Shewan Amhara ethnic identity became a marker of

privilege and access to civil service jobs and promotion in the military hierarchy
was premised on a relatively fluent command of Amharic. The extension of secular
education and the more general process of secularization that accompanied the
establishment of a bureaucratic administration, were key determinants of the
relative decline of an Orthodox Christian identity at the imperial core (McCann
1991). By the late 1940s, in a telling gesture of these changes, Haile Selassie was
making statements that would have appeared heretical in an earlier period:
haymanot yegil naw agar yegara naw (religion is a personal choice, but the country is
common to all). If nationality had hitherto been of small account to the imperial
regime, administrative centralization made the choice of language in which one
was educated socially consequential. In these circumstances, there was very little
prospect for the non-Amharized to secure high political office and, as John
Markakis observed, ‘it was easier for a non-Amhara to pass through the eye of a
needle than to enter the charmed circle of power and privilege in imperial Ethiopia’
(1984, 4).
But it is important to emphasize the relative lateness of this process. Although
Amharic had long been the language of the imperial Court, its use for
administrative purposes was very restricted. When Menilek II opened the first
modern school shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, Amharic did not form
part of the school curriculum. Egyptian Copts staffed the school and French was the
medium of instruction. The primary function of the school was to produce a group
of administrators who could conduct diplomatic and trade agreements with
European powers.6 The Department of Education itself was a mere adjunct to the
office of the Abune (Archbishop), and the influence of the Church was paramount.
5
Eritrea was an Italian colony from 1890 to 1941; and after an interregnum of little over a
decade under British rule, it was federated to Ethiopia by the United Nations. A nationalist
movement advocating sovereign status had emerged there in the 1940s and developed into
a major insurgency by the 1960s. So, unlike the region of Tigray in Ethiopia where an
ethnolinguistic nationalist movement emerged in the mid-1970s, the Tigriña-speaking
youth in Eritrea were integrated into a preexisting nationalist movement that had hitherto
been dominated by Tigre-speaking Muslims.
6
Both Lij Iyassu, who briefly succeeded Menilek II in 1913, and Teferi Mekonnen, the
future emperor Haile Selassie, were in its first class.
The use of local vernaculars by foreign missionaries in the recently incorporated

territories was not restricted until after 1942, and even the first ‘national’ anthem
was composed in Tigriña rather than Amharic (Fisseha 2000, 161). As James
McCann has suggestively argued, it was only in the nineteenth century that the use
of Amharic for diplomatic correspondence and for tax records became common:
[a] millennium-long tradition of clerical literacy as part of highland Christian society
should not presume its use in political communication. . . . Though Amharic appears in
a few royal songs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and during the brief
ascendancy of Roman Catholicism in the seventeenth century, the main body of
Ethiopian literature until the nineteenth century was composed in the liturgical
language, Ge’ez. The written royal chronicles, which were composed in Ge’ez until the
mid-nineteenth century, served less to record events than to associate secular
leadership with the symbolic legitimizing power of religious dogma. The use of the
vernacular Amharic language in written form and for overtly political purpose is a
relatively recent phenomenon in the history of Ethiopian literacy. (McCann 1991, 4–5)
By the first decade of the nineteenth century, Amharic had indeed become the
language of secular writing, and by 1840 official letters in Amharic outnumber those
in Ge’ez five to one (McCann 1991, 5). But it was mostly in the court of Emperor
Tewodros II (1855–1868) that Amharic achieved the status of an administrative
language. Though he was classically trained in Ge’ez—the sacred language—
Tewodros used scribes to produce written Amharic texts including a large body of
diplomatic correspondence, the first Amharic royal chronicle, tax records and palace
inventories (Rubenson 1987, vi). McCann suggests that the nonstandardized form of
these documents reveals their embryonic character. The inconsistency in the spelling
of place names, dates and use of figures indicates the absence of conventions and the
persistence of the oral form. Deployed primarily in correspondence with foreigners,
the written form was not the primary means by which the Court communicated the
edicts of the emperor to his subjects (Pankhurst 1979; Asfaw and Appleyard 1979).
This evidence strongly suggests that the political culture of the state, and the
dominant form of imperial social discourse, was fundamentally oral well into the
second half of the twentieth century. Socially, both local notables and peasants
preferred the ambiguity of the oral form since it was context bound and variable.
Tribute was as much a symbolic representation of authority as a form of payment.
Since orally based political culture tended to preserve local autonomy, the
centralization of state power and revenue collection acted to subvert this social
relationship. The imposition of written codes of obligations transformed the local
social universe in which lord-peasant relations were articulated and made the
services of the gult (tribute) holders increasingly superfluous. In this most
fundamental sense, the transformations that accompanied the transition to an
absolutist state led to a breakdown of the cultural norms governing social
reproduction in the tributary system at large.7
7
According to Marcel Mauss, in all known traditional societies the ‘gift’ played a central
status maintaining function. A gift is a relationship between persons. If it is depersonalized,
the gift loses its defining features of prestige, subordination and obligation. ‘To give,’ wrote
Mauss, ‘is to show one’s superiority . . . To accept without returning or repaying more, is to
face subordination, to become a client and subservient’ (1967, 72 –73).
280 Fouad Makki
If this description of the changes in the cultural coding of tributary relations is

correct, it becomes easier to appreciate the political transformations that dynastic
centralization generated. By weakening the autonomy of local structures of power,
royal absolutism transposed locally variable and contingent tributary relations
into the abstract and depersonalized forms of state-subject relations, one that was
increasingly mediated by written conventions and a bureaucracy notoriously
impervious to local circumstances. With the disembedding of tributary relations
from their local integuments, the cultural ensemble of authority relations was
profoundly remade, and the social and cultural identity of the absolutist state
became the magnetic pole of political contestation and mobilization for newly
emergent social strata such as the intelligentsia.
The demise of the ancien régime and revolutionary transformations

It is in the context of these unevenly combined political and cultural processes that
the emergence of a self-conscious ethnic intelligentsia has to be understood.
Although of little weight numerically, they played a crucial role at key turning
points in twentieth century Ethiopian history. Bahru Zewde has argued that in the
1930s, these intellectuals had acquired a heightened sense of the empire’s relative
‘backwardness’ and looked to Japan as a model of how a non-Western
monarchical society could enter the ‘modern world’ (Zewde 2002). The
Constitution of 1931 they helped to draft was modelled on that of the Meiji
Constitution. Preoccupied and beset by a sense of being ’behind’ within a
hierarchically structured interstate system, some of these intellectuals developed
an ambivalent attitude towards Ethiopia’s very independence. Afawarq Gabra-
Iyassus, a prominent intellectual who had collaborated with the Italians when
they invaded in 1936, expressed this in the following terms:
I did what I did because I believed that if Italy took over Ethiopia, civilized it and
made it prosperous, the day will then come when the Ethiopians, having become
civilized, strong and prosperous, will free themselves from Italy, just as the United
States did with England. (Zewde 2002, 56)
By the 1960s, the sensibility of being behind had become if anything more acute,
although the collective ideological and political orientation of the intelligentsia
had undergone a dramatic transformation. Instead of Japan, many now looked
towards the Soviet Union as a model of how a backward state was transformed
into a modern industrial power, and Marxism became a crucial aspect of their
appropriation of modernity in the circumstances of an absolutist empire (Donham
1999, 122 – 130). The expansion of education had also generated new layers of
intellectuals from different ethnic backgrounds who were becoming increasingly
alienated from the imperial culture. As a group, these radicalized students and
intellectuals saw themselves as a modernist vanguard that would lead the charge
to drag Ethiopia out of its ‘traditional backwardness’. And the revolution was
conceived as the locomotive of history, a means of accelerating the
developmentalist project of catching up with the West. And if a model of such a
revolution was necessary, world history had already supplied it:
[t]he Bolshevik revolutionary model has been decisive for all twentieth-century
revolutions because it made them imaginable in societies still more backward than
All the Russias. It opened the possibility of, so to speak, cutting history off at the
pass. (Anderson 1991, 156– 157)
But the spatiotemporal dynamics of uneven and combined development implied
that the Ethiopian revolution could never be a simple repetition of the Russian
Revolution or the latest instantiation of a world revolution. Global ideological and
discursive themes were necessarily refracted and articulated with internal social
and political dynamics to shape the character of the revolutionary process. As
Michael Löwy (1981, 105) suggests:
[i]f we necessarily refuse to consider world revolution as a demiurge of the
historical process irresistibly asserting itself in every corner of the globe, we must
avoid the opposite extreme of submerging analysis in the national exceptionalism of
every revolution. For if uneven development is highly inflected by national
particularisms, it is also an expression of the combined nature of the historical
process: each new historical development is conditioned by the totality of previous

history, especially by previous revolutionary events.
By the early 1970s the political impetus and novelty of the postrestoration reforms
was running out of steam. The more the monarchy plunged forward with the
‘modernization’ of the state, the more it encountered a fatal contradiction.
Modernization required mobilization of populations without putting at risk the
social basis of the dynasty itself, which had of course become the very emblem of
backwardness. The peasantry remained mired in poverty and widespread
unemployment and inflation created hardships in the towns. There was no
significant conversion of the landowning nobility into a capitalist agrarian class,
and there was little discernable dynamic of commercialization or capital
accumulation in the other sectors. But because of its international alliances, the
monarchy was able to attract financial assistance and import advanced technology
to strengthen its relative position. The dynamics of uneven and combined
development had thus produced in Ethiopia a social structure with a small and
politically enfeebled strata of urban merchants and workers, an immiserated
peasantry, a politically radicalized intelligentsia and a bloated absolutist state
apparatus that had become a dead weight on society at large.
The inner contradictions of this amalgam came to a head in the early 1970s and
the scope of the mass mobilizations in 1973 – 1974 took the regime by surprise.
Besieged on all sides by mass protests, and with the army—its main pillar of
support—showing signs of fracture, the regime was compelled to make a series of
concessions that emboldened the emerging opposition. The crisis took a new
turn when a group of noncommissioned officers entered the political arena.
The Provisional Military Administrative Council (or the Derg as they were called,
after the Amharic word for Council), systematically removed the concentric
circles of power surrounding the imperial throne until the emperor was
essentially isolated. On 12 September 1974, the last of the Solomonic emperors
was unceremoniously deposed (Clapham 1988; Donham 1999; Lefort 1983;
Tiruneh 1993).
The popular mobilizations that toppled the monarchy constitute by all
accounts one of the most profound social revolutions in twentieth century Africa.
Through a radical agrarian reform, the tributary system and landlordism were
abolished. Espousing new ideological orientations and mobilizing a much
enhanced institutional capacity, the new rulers set out to remake Ethiopian society.
282 Fouad Makki
The revolution had shattered the class hierarchies that had underpinned imperial
power, but questions concerning the cultural identity of the state remained open
and new contradictions emerged as the broad movement that had toppled the
regime started to break up. While intellectuals from the peripheries affirmed the
primary claims of nationality, those of class were asserted by revolutionary
factions whose members were mostly drawn from the cultural core of the empire
or whose ethnic origins were subsumed by a supra-ethnic Ethiopian identity into
which they had become assimilated.8 It was from this milieu of a radicalized
intelligentsia that the leadership of many of the dissident ethnonationalist
movements emerged:
[t]he non-Amhara among them [the radical students] began to give thought to the
suppression of their mother tongues, the denigration of their native cultures and
effacement of their history. Though the main radical activity in the early 1970s was
the formation of Marxist study groups, some groups comprised members of one
nationality only and added the study of their culture and history to their activities.
(1987, 101)
Meanwhile, by unilaterally usurping power at a crucial moment of political

fluidity, the Derg suspended the process of democratic self-assertion and
negotiation just when it barely started. Although the young officers did not
explicitly promote the culture of the politically dominant core ethnie, they
continued to search for ways to ‘fit the gigantic body of the empire into the tight
skin of the nation’ (Anderson 1991, 86). This entailed a kind of imperial
refurbishing aimed at creating a political order able to confront the challenges of
popular sociocultural mobilizations. But in the face of continued resistance in
Eritrea and spreading ethnonationalist agitation in the rest of the country, the
regime increasingly garrisoned itself within the narrow imaginative range of the
old regime’s cultural symbols and mobilized to anchor them by force (Donham
1999, 142 –150). In the process, it substituted the state for the people, the
dictatorship for democracy and passive obedience for active citizenship. The
emancipatory ideal implied by the notion of popular sovereignty dissipated
behind the imperatives of order. It thereby accelerated the spread and
consolidation of various armed nationalist movements that fought to assert new
conceptions of the nation. Mobilizing rural peasant populations, these ethnonation-
alist movements spearheaded what Anthony Smith has called vertical demotic
nationalisms against the ‘official nationalism’ of the state (1986, 18).
In May 1991, after a long and bitter war nationalist forces from Eritrea and the
peripheries advanced on the centre to deliver the final quietus to the
postrevolutionary regime. With Eritrea becoming a sovereign state, the old
empire was transformed into a federal republic along ethnically defined
administrative lines. So far, while the regime has studiously avoided the cultural
8
The distinction between the two wings of the Ethiopian left entails some
simplifications and the actual ideological configuration of political forces was more
complex. Many of the ethnonationalist groups were self-defined as Marxist-Leninist, and
the leading figures of the multiethnic revolutionary organizations included the non-
Amhara. This is true most famously of the Tigrayan Berhane Meskel, the key theoretician of
the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party; and the Oromo Haile Fida, leader of the
All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement.
paraphernalia of the old imperial order, it has not been able to create a novel set of
civic and cultural symbols that could provide the emotive glue to hold multiethnic
Ethiopia together. In this sense, the political and cultural questions generated by
the uneven and combined dynamics of Ethiopia’s development arguably remain
as vexing today as they were half a century ago.
Results and prospects

Discussing the fate of ‘Ethiopia’ after the collapse of the Aksumite Empire in the 8th
century, Edward Gibbon once famously remarked, ‘[e]ncompassed on all sides by
the enemies of their religion, the Ethiopians slept near a thousand years, forgetful of
the world, by whom they were forgotten’. Until, that is, ‘they were awakened by the
Portuguese’ in the sixteenth century (Gibbon 1907 [1776], 196). Gibbon’s obiter
dictum was part of a legendary and fanciful history of European perceptions of
‘Ethiopia’ that date back to the late medieval era. Later historians have tended to
reproduce this image of an isolated kingdom with its venerable Jewish, Christian
and Muslim communities ensconced within a formidable mountain fortress. These
iconic images continued to shape scholarly work well into the twentieth century
and were reinforced by the country’s sovereign political status in an age of high
colonialism.
Yet for much of the past millennium, intersocietal exchanges have been a
constitutive element of the production and reproduction of social power in the
agrarian polities of Ethiopia. While European overseas expansion gradually
reconfigured these exchange networks, they were never able to completely
subsume and reorient them towards a singular relationship with the European
metropole. This international dimension was typically accorded no more than
episodic significance in the dominant approaches that informed much of the
historical and sociological literature on Ethiopia. And within the space of
Ethiopia conceived as a discrete entity, social change was understood in the
standard terms of the transition from tradition to modernity. From this vantage
point, questions about the appropriate temporal and spatial boundaries of social
analysis did not appear to pose any difficulties. They were simply assumed to be
those of linear time and politically delimited space. Within this homogeneous
spatiotemporality, events could then be narrated as if they shared a common
beginning and end point. In this article, I have instead sought to situate
processes of state formation in Ethiopia within the uneven and combined
exigencies of a wider international setting. Such a perspective unsettles the
reductive polarity and unilinear framework of the ‘tradition-modernity’ couplet
and foregrounds a differentiated and relational conception of social change within
a world-historical framework. In so doing it reopens questions once considered
closed, and loosens the rigid connections and teleologies that previously
sustained them.
Notes on contributor
Fouad Makki (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Development
Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States. Email:
fmm2@cornell.edu
284 Fouad Makki
References
Allinson, JC and A Anievas (2009) ‘The uses and misuses of uneven and combined
development: an anatomy of a concept’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 22:1, 47–67
Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined communities: the origin and spread of nationalism (London:
Verso)
Anderson, Kevin B (2010) Marx at the margins: on nationalism, ethnicity, and non-western
societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
Anderson, Perry (1974) Lineages of the absolutist state (London: Verso)
Asfaw, Girma-Selassie and David Appleyard (eds) (1979) The Amharic letters of Emperor
Theodore of Ethiopia to Queen Victoria and Her Special Envoy (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Ashman, Sam (2009) ‘Capitalism, uneven and combined development and the
transhistoric’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 22:1, 29 – 46
Balakrishnan, G (ed) (1996) Mapping the nation (London: Verso)
Burke, Peter (1978) Popular culture in early modern Europe (New York: Harper and Row)
Callinicos, A and J Rosenberg (2008) ‘Uneven and combined development: the socia-
relational substratum of “the international”? An exchange of letters’, Cambridge Review
of International Affairs, 21:1, 77 – 112

Clapham, Christopher (1969) Haile Selassie’s government (New York: Praeger)
Clapham, Christopher (1988) Transformation and continuity in revolutionary Ethiopia (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press)
Crummey, Donald (2000) Land and society in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia: from the
thirteenth to twentieth century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press)
Donham, Donald (1986) ‘Old Abyssinia and the new Ethiopian Empire: themes in social
history’ in D Donham and Wendy James (eds) The southern marches of imperial Ethiopia:
essays in history and social anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 37 – 44
Donham, Donald (1994) Work and power in Maale, Ethiopia, second edition (New York:
Columbia University Press)
Donham, Donald (1999) Marxist modern: an ethnographic history of the Ethiopian revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press)
Eisenstadt, SN (1963) The political system of Empires: the rise and fall of the historical bureaucratic
societies (New York: Free Press of Glencoe)
Eley, G and RG Suny (eds) (1996) Becoming national (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Engerman, David C, Nils Gilman, Mark H Haefele and Michael E Latham (eds) (2003)
Staging growth: modernization, development, and the global cold war (Boston: University of
Massachusetts Press)
Ferguson, James (2005) ‘Decomposing modernity: history and hierarchy after development’
in Ania Loomba et al (eds) Postcolonial studies and beyond (Durham: Duke University
Press), 166– 181
Fisseha, Abebe (2000) ‘Education and the formation of the modern Ethiopian state, 1896–
1974’ (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Fontana, Biancamaria (ed) (1994) The invention of the modern republic (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press)
Gellner, Ernest (1983) Nations and nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press)
Gibbon, Edward (1907) The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, Volume 5 (1776),
(London: Oxford University Press)
Giddens, Anthony (1985) The nation-state and violence (Oxford: Polity Press)
Gilkes, Patrick (1975) The dying lion: feudalism and modernization in Ethiopia (London: Julian
Friedmann)
Halliday, Fred and Maxine Molyneaux (1981) The Ethiopian revolution (London: Verso)
Hess, Robert L (1970) Ethiopia: the modernization of autocracy (Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press)
Kautsky, John (1982) The politics of aristocratic empires (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press)
Latham, Michael E (2000) Modernization as ideology: American social science and ‘nation
building’ in the Kennedy era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press)
Lefort, René (1983) Ethiopia: an heretical revolution? (London: Zed Press)
Levine, Donald (1965) Wax and gold: tradition and innovation in Ethiopian culture (Chicago:
Chicago University Press)
Levine, Donald L (1968) ‘The military in Ethiopian politics: capabilities and constraints’ in
Henry Binen (ed) The military intervenes (New York: Russell Sage Foundation), 5 – 34
Löwy, Michael (1981) The politics of combined and uneven development: the theory of permanent
revolution (London: Verso)
Mann, Michael (1986) The sources of social power: Volume I. A history of power from the beginning
to AD 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Mann, Michael (1993) The sources of social power: Volume II. The rise of classes and nation-states,
1760–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Marcus, Harold (1975) The life and times of Menelik II: Ethiopia, 1844– 1913 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press)
Marcus, Harold (1983) Ethiopia, Great Britain, and the United States, 1941– 1974 (Berkeley:
University of California Press)
Markakis, John (1974) Ethiopia: anatomy of a traditional polity (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
Markakis, John (1984) ‘Material and social aspects of national conflict in the horn of Africa’
in Sven Rubenson (ed) Proceedings of the seventh international conference of Ethiopian
studies (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies), 551– 557
Markakis, John (1987) National and class conflict in the horn of Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press)
Marx, Karl (1976 [1867]) Capital: a critique of political economy, Volume I (London: Penguin
Books)
Mauss, Marcel (1967) The gift: forms and functions of exchange in Archaic societies (New York: Norton)
McCann, James C (1991) ‘Orality, state literacy, and political culture in Ethiopia: translating the
Ras Kassa Registers’, Working Paper 10, African Studies Center, Boston University, Boston
Mengistie, Habtamu (2004) Lord, Zèga and peasant: a study of property and agrarian relations in
rural eastern Gojjam (Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press)
Mitchell, Timothy (2000) Questions of modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)
Nairn, Tom (1977) The break-up of Britain: crisis and nationalism (London: New Left Books)
Ottaway, David and Marina Ottaway (1978) Ethiopia: empire in revolution (New York:
Holmes and Meier)
Pankhurst, Richard (ed) (1979) Tax records and inventories of Emperor Tewodros of Ethiopia
(London: School of Oriental and African Studies)
Rahmato, Dessalegn (1984) Agrarian reform in Ethiopia (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of
African Studies)
Rahmato, Dessalegn (1988) ‘Political power and social formation under the old regime: notes
on Marxist theory’ in Taddese Beyene (ed) Proceedings of the eighth international conference of
Ethiopian studies, Volume 1 (Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies), 463–478
Rosenberg, Justin (1994) The empire of civil society: a critique of the realist theory of international
relations (London: Verso)
Rosenberg, Justin (2006) ‘Why is there no international historical sociology?’, European
Journal of International Relations, 12:3, 307– 334
Rosenberg, Justin (2010) ‘Basic problems in the theory of uneven and combined
development, part II: unevenness and political multiplicity’, Cambridge Review of
International Affairs, 23:1, 165– 189
Rubenson, Sven (1987) Acta Aethopica: correspondence and treaties 1800– 1854 (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press)
Shanin, Theodore (1984) Late Marx and the Russian road: Marx and ‘the peripheries of capitalism’
(New York: Monthly Review Press)
Smith, Anthony (1986) The ethnic origins of nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell)
Suny, Ronald G (2001) ‘The empire strikes out: Imperial Russia, “national” identity, and
theories of empire’ in Ronald G Suny and Terry Martin (eds) A state of nations: empire and
nation-making in the age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 23 – 66
Tareke, Gebru (1991) Ethiopia: power and protest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Teschke, Benno (2003) The myth of 1648: class, geopolitics, and the making of modern
international relations (London: Verso)
Tibebu, Teshale (1995) The making of modern Ethiopia, 1896–1974 (Red Sea Press)
Tilly, Charles (1991) ‘Reflections on the history of European state-making’ in Charles Tilly
(ed) Conquest and coalescence: the shaping of the state in early modern Europe (London:
Edward Arnold), 3 – 83
286 Fouad Makki
Tilly, Charles (1992) Coercion, capital and European state formation AD 990– 1992 (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell)
Tiruneh, Andargatchew (1993) The Ethiopia revolution, 1974– 1987: a transformation from an
aristocratic to a totalitarian autocracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Trotsky, Leon (1960) The history of the Russian revolution, transl Max Eastman (1932), 2nd
edition (New York: Pathfinder)
Zewde, Bahru (1984) ‘Economic origins of the absolutist state in Ethiopia, 1916– 1935’,
Journal of Ethiopian Studies, 17, 1 – 24
Zewde, Bahru (1991) A history of modern Ethiopia, 1855– 1974 (Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa
University Press)
Zewde, Bahru (1995) ‘Hayla-Sellase: from progressive to reactionary’, Northeast African
Studies, 2:2, 99 –114
Zewde, Bahru (2002) Pioneers of change in Ethiopia: the reformist intellectuals of the early
twentieth century (Athens: Ohio University Press)

Dynastic Centralization .... in Late Imperial Period

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Dynastic Centralization .... in Late Imperial Period

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This article was downloaded by: [INASP - Ethiopia ]

On: 22 January 2014, At: 05:48

Cambridge Review of International

Empire and modernity: dynastic

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2011.558056

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Empire and modernity: dynastic centralization and official

Abstract Conventional accounts of modern state-formation either underplay its

these approaches, alternative theories of state-formation have emerged centred on the

ISSN 0955-7571 print/ISSN 1474-449X online/11/020265–22 q 2011 Centre of International Studies

These transformations have typically been explained in terms of the contrast

contradictions. The repressive methods deployed to neutralize all opposition to

accounts of (i) the socio-historical configuration of the imperial social formation

Absolutism, nationalism and uneven and combined development

cultural complex of power and in forms of collective consciousness that they

evenly operative over each square centimeter of a legally demarcated territory.

dimension of nation-state formation as well as the complex political, cultural, and

encountered societies constituted by social and cultural institutions that—while

transformations profoundly unstable and contradictory. The international

nationalism are conceived as international processes that crystallize unevenly as

Solomonic Ethiopia: old state, new society

polyglot realm encompassing various ethnolinguistic communities and formerly

state to respond to the geopolitical threat they posed, the possibility of

Imperial restoration and dynastic centralization

Imperial legitimacy and official nationalism

the Abyssinian highlands. A pan-Christian Habesha identity was cemented in

the post-1941 period as dynastic centralization, the establishment of an

largely spontaneous popular nationalisms that preceded them’, and once

subjects (Mengistie 2004). Its subsequent interpellation into a kind of hybrid

and popular perceptions as Shewan Amhara ethnic identity became a marker of

The use of local vernaculars by foreign missionaries in the recently incorporated

If this description of the changes in the cultural coding of tributary relations is

The demise of the ancien régime and revolutionary transformations

process: each new historical development is conditioned by the totality of previous

Meanwhile, by unilaterally usurping power at a crucial moment of political

Results and prospects

of International Affairs, 21:1, 77 – 112

You might also like