Border crimes, extraterritorial jurisdiction, and the racialization of sovereignty in the Ethiopia–British Somaliland borderlands during the 1920s

Daniel K Thompson

doi:10.1017/s0001972020000303

Abstract

AbstractThis article argues that the politics of extraterritorial jurisdiction in the 1920s reshaped relations between ethnicity and territorial sovereignty in Ethiopia's eastern borderlands. A 1925 criminal trial involving Gadabursi Somalis began as what Britons deemed a ‘tribal matter’ to be settled through customary means, but became a struggle for Ethiopia's regent, Ras Tafari, to assert Ethiopia's territorial authority and imperial sovereignty. British claims of extraterritorial jurisdiction over Somalis amidst 1920s global geopolitical shifts disrupted existing practices of governance in Ethiopia's eastern borderlands and created a dilemma for Ethiopian authorities. In order to uphold international obligations, Ethiopian officials effectively had to revoke their sovereignty over some Somalis indigenous to Ethiopia. Yet Britons’ practical application of extraterritoriality to Somalis was predicated on assumed racial differences between Somalis and highland Ethiopians (‘Abyssinians’). Thus, Ethiopia's recognition of British extraterritorial jurisdiction would lend legitimacy to claims exempting Somalis from Ethiopian sovereignty due to differences in identity. The case reveals how assertions about race, nationality and ‘tribal’ identity articulated to subordinate Ethiopian rule to British interests and, in the longer term, to delegitimize Ethiopian governance over Somalis.

Highlights

When Britain restored Selassie to Ethiopia’s throne in 1941, Somali-inhabited eastern Ethiopia was maintained under British Military Administration (BMA), which was in place from 1944 to 1954, the Ethiopian government formally retained sovereignty over its territory as defined in 1897
Under the subsequent BMA, British discourse shifted from assertions of Somalis’ clan-based legal status towards foregrounding racial arguments that Somalis were properly subordinate to whites, but not to Abyssinians: ‘[D]uring the recent negotiations Ethiopians have been more or less told that we do not consider them competent to administer the outlying parts of their Empire and certainly unfit to rule Somalis.’44
I have argued that Britons’ and Somalis’ assertions about Ethiopian law’s inapplicability to Somalis during the 1925 trial conjoined two racialized logics delimiting the application of extraterritorial jurisdiction in eastern Ethiopia

Summary

Introduction

British officials often discussed ‘British Somalis’, but the Home Government clarified this with regard to the 1925 case: Somalis’ ‘national law’ meant ‘British-Indian law’ – not British law.20 Even if ‘nationality’ did not carry the valence it would decades later amidst Africa’s decolonization, assertions about Gadabursis’ nationality evoked an ambiguous category that could logically connect existing practices of extraterritorial jurisdiction to international frameworks of sovereignty. The legal reframing of Gadabursi subjecthood through the ethnicization of Ethiopian imperial law as ‘Abyssinian’ and claims of Somalis’ British nationality established new juridically relevant layers of identity that Somalis could assert, and that Britons could mobilize, to delegitimize Ethiopia’s sovereignty.

Results

Conclusion