12/4/23, 10:14 AM The Making of Modern Ethiopia, 1896-1974.

- Document - Gale Academic OneFile

Given the contemporary debates in and about Ethiopia,--particularly on the political articulation of regional and
linguistic identity--new literature on the country, whether fictional or academic, is likely to be concerned in large
part with reinterpreting the country's modern history. Each book in this exceedingly heterogeneous selection in
its own way attempts to reinterpret the past whilst offering insights into the economic factors constraining the
future.

The Making of Modern Ethiopia by an Ethiopian historian now based in Temple University, Philadelphia, is a
short yet hugely ambitious book. The author sets himself two objectives. The first is to write `an Amharic social
history of modern Ethiopia written in English' (p. ix) with the aim of interpreting existing writing on social
issues (explicitly Richard Pankhurst's Social History of Ethiopia, 1992, p. xi), within a theoretical framework.
This is notionally informed by the structuralist--Marxist `world systems' approach of Immanuel Wallerstein,
Giovanni Arrighi et al. Both had a hand in supervising Teshale's thesis, written at Binghampton in the late 1980s
from which The Making of Modern Ethiopia is derived.

The author portentously declares that `the world-system perspective that puts Ethiopia in the periphery of the
capitalist world economy ... is of critical importance for locating the framework of the historical processes that
transformed Ethiopia from a world empire of long "civilizational project" into a peripheral region of the
capitalist world economy' (p. xxii). In practice, much of this theoretical baggage has been jettisoned from the
book, which contains little on the internal evolution of the economy or on the trading relations which tied
Ethiopia into regional or global economies. Rather it is the second objective that shapes the text: to provide a
social history `from below', incorporating those excluded from the dominant historiography, including on the
one hand `women, peasants, nomads, pastoralists' ... and on the other people marginal to the dominant, highland
Ge'ez civilisation, in explaining the process of state formation in Ethiopia from the late nineteenth century.
Clearly, providing such a broad, all-encompassing history in a single volume is hardly possible. By outlining
such an audacious and ultimately infeasible set of objectives, Teshale inevitably leaves himself vulnerable to
attacks from Ethiopianist historians and lay readers alike.

Yet to dismiss the book uniquely for being over-ambitious and consequently somewhat unfocused would be
unfair. It has two obvious merits. First, in its analysis of the expansion of the state (in particular regarding
highland-Oromo relations in the nineteenth century, and again in the epilogue on post-1974-91) it provides a
timely caution for those, in government, in the diaspora and in donor communities, favouring simplistic analyses
of the links between ethnicity and politics. Secondly it has the merit of raising many of the methodological
problems facing historians of the Horn. The book critically positions itself within Ethiopianist historiography.
Teshale divides historical writing on Ethiopia into three broad categories. These he defines as...

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Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1998 Edinburgh University Press
http://www.eup.ed.ac.uk/
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Styan, David. "The Making of Modern Ethiopia, 1896-1974." Africa, vol. 68, no. 1, winter 1998, pp. 135+. Gale
Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A20900331/AONE?
u=anon~51b5dd45&sid=googleScholar&xid=b433d4b3. Accessed 4 Dec. 2023.

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