Society, State and Nationality in the Recent Historiography of Ethiopia

Abstract

Events since 1974 have challenged fundamental assumptions about Ethiopian history, calling in question the country's borders and internal coherence, the nature of its social order, the centrality of its monarchy and Zionist ideology to the maintenance of the polity, and the viability of the peasant way of life. In so doing they challenge a young, but vigorous, historiography, one founded in the 1960s with the creation of a History Department at what is now Addis Ababa University and of an international coterie of scholars. Its early stages were marked by archivally-based studies of Ethiopia‘s international emergence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and of trade and politics. Its later stages were marked by a steady growth in the number of contributors and in the emergence of major new themes many of which depend on the use of indigenous sources, both oral and written. Class and class relations; economy, state, and society; the Kushitic- and Omotic-speaking peoples; the use of social anthropology—such are the concerns of contemporary historians of Ethiopia. These concerns inform new work on agrarian issues and on the roots of famine, on urbanization, on the nature of the twentieth-century state, on the revolution itself and on the roots of resistance and social unrest, and on ethnicity. Meanwhile, more traditional work continues to glean insights from the manuscript tradition and to bring to light major new texts both Ethiopian and foreign. The article surveys this material and concludes by noting the persistence of certain limitations—the lack of work on women or on pastoralism, the scarcity of it on Islam, the heavy emphasis on that part of the country lying west of the Rift Valley, and the absence of an integrating synthesis—and the prospective integration of work on Ethiopia into the mainstream of African historiography.