48 PDF
48 PDF
48 PDF
Berhanu Abegaz
A Tributary
Model of State
Formation
Ethiopia, 1600-2015
Advances in African Economic, Social
and Political Development
Series editors
Diery Seck
CREPOL - Center for Research on Political Economy, Dakar, Senegal
Juliet U. Elu
Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA, USA
Yaw Nyarko
New York University, New York, NY, USA
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For Tesfaye, Teferi, Workuha, and Tsehay
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In memory of Aklilu and Alemnesh
Foreword
vii
viii Foreword
The Safavids and the Moguls broadly followed the Ottoman template. While Islam
provided a universalist ideology which most subject peoples in the three empires
shared (the Hindus under the Moguls being an exception), the system was essen-
tially tributary in character with an alien power elite holding sway over disparate
peoples and cultures. A brief discussion of precolonial African states (Gondar in
Ethiopia, Dahomey, Asante, Mali, and Kongo in West and Central Africa) concludes
the survey.
Gondar is addressed in much greater detail in its own terms. A successor state of
the Kingdoms of ancient Axum, Zagwe, and the Solomonid States, Gondar (1555–
1770), it perfected the tributary-military model of state formation but ultimately
succumbed to internal strife. Why, asks the author, was this robust state unable to
transform itself into a tax-based, territorial, national state? In search of an answer,
he posits the following hypothesis: “[T]tributarism is self-limiting since it relies on
an indirect rule and puts a high premium on extractive contests over smallholder
surpluses. By undermining the emergence of an autonomous farmer class and a
business class, endemic predation stunts the fiscal basis of the state and undermines
the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of its hapless subjects.”
An excellent account of Gondar’s complex land tenure system is provided, dem-
onstrating persuasively how the interplay of economic and political constraints mili-
tated against economic growth and thereby forestalled the emergence of a secure
revenue base so crucial for a modern nation-state. It is perhaps useful to add here
that the Ethiopian tributary state had succeeded in establishing the rudiments of the
rule of law, one of the defining attributes of a modern nation-state. According to the
Kibre Negest, an iconic text which served as the basis for key aspects of Ethiopia’s
jurisprudence down the centuries, the law comes down from God. The King is his
supreme magistrate on Earth, given the sacred mandate of administering God’s law
faithfully and impartially. In the universe of the Kibre Negest, priests kept an eye on
the King and interceded whenever he deviated from the law. Accountability, another
attribute of a modern nation-state, was also a feature of the Kibre Negest. The King
was accountable not only to God but also to those he governed. Despite this enabling
heritage, the Ethiopian State was for the most part hamstrung by the double whammy
of tributary tax collection and autocracy.
Gondar ultimately gave way to an incident that had the potential of being
Ethiopia’s Magna Carta, but sadly ended up triggering an era of competing princi-
palities (zemene mesafint) during which the emperors were rendered impotent. The
incident was provoked by the last effective emperor, Tekle Giorgis (1770–1777),
who came upon the idea of imposing a new kind of tax. A mass gathering was called
by the inhabitants of the immediate vicinity at which the new tax was rejected, and
a laconic message sent to the emperor: govern us in the manner of your fathers and
we, like our fathers, shall support the Crown. We render our bare feet to thorns and
our chests to the lances of adversaries. But we render no taxes. To which the emperor
replied ruinously: if I go by what you say, wherein lies my royal authority? He was
immediately suspended from power and was restricted to the palace. The rebellious
gathering appointed a prince to act in its name. No one thought of designating some
authority to oversee the prince: a critical act that might have altered Ethiopia’s
Foreword ix
h istory. In time, the prince evolved into an autocrat, setting an example for other
princes and plunging Ethiopia into fractious principalities.
In 1847, a visionary military leader named Kassa, consumed by the idea of
restoring the country’s historic unity, power, and renown, embarked upon a military
campaign to unseat every prince, one at a time, beginning with the Prince of Gondar,
the primus inter pares. He succeeded and was crowned emperor. With remarkable
determination, he set out to create a modern nation-state where a strong central
government had the power to tax, establish a standing army, curb the power of the
Church and the local princes, and introduce land reform to relieve the peasantry of
its many miseries.1 He encountered fierce resistance and was finally brought down
by a British military expedition for his refusal to release British citizens he had put
behind bars. The Emperor committed suicide rather than bow in submission to the
enemy.
The seat of empire later moved southwards to Shewa where Menelik II was
crowned Emperor in 1882. Abegaz picks up the story from there and introduces the
reader to a new vista of Ethiopia’s political evolution: the modern Shewan State
covering the nine decades to the end of 1974. The global environment had changed
dramatically: it was the age of industry and the colonial scramble for Africa.
Menelik’s response was to launch a military campaign to reclaim the lost provinces
of bygone times. This turned out to be a major challenge, for massive demographic
shifts had occurred following an extended civil war in the sixteenth century. But
Menelik persisted and succeeded in reclaiming regions lost during the civil war,
adding fresh territory to pre-empt Italian, French, and British colonial incursions. A
military encounter was bound to occur with one of these at one point or another. In
1896, the Italian Army crossed Ethiopia’s northern border and occupied consider-
able territory. Emperor Menelik’s army went to war. To the astonishment of the
colonial powers and the wider world, he emerged victor.
A vigorous modernization program ensued. By the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury, the Shewan state (first under Menelik and later under Haile Selassie) suc-
ceeded in transforming the historic tributary state into a territorial state double its
previous size. And, in Abegaz’s words, “it [had] laid down a reasonably secure fiscal
base which was strung together from different sources, and developed links with the
global economy.” This was no mean accomplishment, but the project of building a
modern political order with a strong, accountable, and growth-promoting state
remained incomplete.
Abegaz asks why and provides a two-part answer. Internally, Shewa (like Gondar)
was beleaguered by the self-limiting nature of tribute-seeking which discouraged
agricultural modernization and economic integration, especially in the historic
northern and central provinces. External factors also came into play. The fall of
Axum came fast on the heels of the rise of hostile Arab communities on the littoral
of the Red Sea during the seventh century, followed by the emergence and domi-
nance of the Ottomans in the ensuing centuries. Ethiopian emperors had to devote a
good bulk of their resources to fending off these adversaries. And the forced isolation
The Meiji Restoration of Japan, with leaders harboring a similar vision, was launched in 1868.
1
x Foreword
of more than a thousand years further blocked the country from the centers of com-
merce and learning to which it had access previously and had greatly benefited
from.
As with Gondar, Abegaz proceeds to provide an extensive analysis of the com-
plex system of land tenure and tribute collection in Shewa, demonstrating at each
stage how the system effectively shut out any prospect of sustained growth and the
emergence of a productive farmer and merchant class. He supplements this with an
excellent account of the taxes, tributes, and revenue from the slave trade of the
short-lived Kingdom of Jimma Aba Jiffar.
The latest variant is the Revolutionary State represented by the two revolutionary
regimes from 1974 to the present. Shewa had managed to develop three of the build-
ing blocks of a modern state: a common language, a legitimizing ideology, and
monopoly over the instruments of violence. And Shewa’s genius of fusing the lega-
cies of Axum and Gondar with the new demography of the diverse cultures of the
southern provinces had been key to its success as a trailblazer of a modern state.
When all is said and done, however, Shewa fell short of evolving into a full-fledged
modern nation-state capable of providing popular participation in public affairs,
basic services to all, decentralization, adequate accountability, separation of Church
and State, and fundamental freedoms. And in 1974, a small politically conscious
segment of the population precipitated a revolution.
Over a relatively short period, Marxist students succeeded to undermine the old
regime. In the end, however, it was the military that usurped power. The soldiers had
no vision or coherent strategy for change. And before long, they embarked upon
mass arrests, summary executions, and a Stalinist type police state. As soldiers long
trained to uphold national unity and inviolable borders, they wore the mantle of
nationalism—not realizing that their version was purely of the cartographic variety.
Increasingly, they found it difficult to manage the nation’s affairs, long term or short
term. And they failed spectacularly when their extensive military superstructure
imploded in the face of sustained secessionist resistance. The young radical victors
were initially perceived as liberators from the military. Rather than building on this
enabling sentiment and fashioning less repressive and more inclusive policies, they
opted for an even more radical version of Marxism (that of Enver Hoxha of Albania)
made worse by a pernicious breed of ethnocentric nationalism.
Abegaz applies to these two regimes the same analytical tools he had earlier used
with such good effect and concludes that the classical extractive tributary system of
raising revenue persists. Under these regimes (especially under the latter) land has
been turned into state property. And the new governing elites extract what amounts
to rent from exploiting that asset (supplemented by huge resource transfers from
donor countries to support development) and deploy them for advancing the inter-
ests of their political class. Much more is said in the chapter in this regard that gives
depth and meaning to these observations. In the concluding chapter, the author
spells out the implications of his analysis for reforming the Revolutionary State.
A key question that has dominated the debate on Ethiopian nation-state forma-
tion is which of the two factors, the external or internal, was the more determinant?
This book contains a fairly exhaustive exploration of the balance between the two,
Foreword xi
with the author favoring the internal as the more decisive factor. I lean towards the
view that external factors have been the more formidable inhibitors of the nation-
building process. Imagine the countless missed opportunities for the cross-
fertilization of ideas in science, technology, the arts, governance, and the like that
might have paved the way for the emergence of a modern nation. Ironically, when
the isolation ended during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie I, the flood of new
ideas (which started with Italy’s occupation in the mid-1930s and culminated in the
mindless adoption of an exclusivist foreign ideology in 1974) disrupted the process
of nation-building that the Emperor had finally set in motion.
Reading Abegaz’s book reminds one of Why Nations Fail, a similar but more
ambitious book published in 2012, by Acemoglu and Robinson. Those who have
read it will recall how tangentially, and perhaps inevitably, Ethiopia’s case was
treated. We all owe a debt of gratitude to Abegaz for rectifying the situation and for
enhancing our understanding of a subject of such consuming and abiding interest to
Ethiopians. It goes without saying that there is also much that will be of interest to
scholars and specialists of Ethiopia.
Ato Tekalign Gedamu is a retired economist who held a number of cabinet positions under two
Ethiopian governments, was Vice President for Finance at the African Development Bank where
he served for some 16 years, and was Chairman & CEO of the Bank of Abyssinia
Preface
xiii
xiv Preface
the leadership that is in control of state institutions. As they say, if the state is a
computer, the regime is the software, and the government is the programmer or the
operator.
By state formation, I mean the drawn out, nonlinear, and endogenous evolution
of the institutionalization of the power of a supra-society political entity which
eventually enjoys a monopoly of large-scale violence. State-building is a deliberate
action by elites to develop the machinery of the state to enhance technocratic and
coercive capacity, and to gain the legitimacy to rule.
Nation-building, on the other hand, is the deliberate fostering of a strong
sense of a common political identification with the state by a culturally, and eth-
nically, or racially diverse populace to undergird the resiliency of state institu-
tions. State resilience is understood here as the capability of the state to absorb
internal as well as external shocks while preserving stability, adapting to unavoid-
able radical changes, and even transforming itself into a nation-state by consoli-
dating the requisite resource base to underwrite political centralization (OECD,
2008; Fukuyama, 2014).
The processes of class formation, nation formation, and state formation have
historically been profoundly shaped by war (interstate and intrastate), migration,
and long-distance trade. This means, state formation is a product of the terms under
which the producer and the appropriator classes control the means of production as
well as the distribution of the economic surplus already produced.
How only a handful of societies (roughly 1.5 billion people out the 7.5 billion
worldwide) managed to transition from closed-order societies (doubly exclusionary
economic and political institutions) to open-order societies (doubly inclusionary eco-
nomic and political institutions) continues to be a hotly debated issue (NWW 2012;
Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). These contingent outcomes (or radical turns) obvi-
ously involve luck, farsighted leadership, and critical moments of opportunity. One
possible avenue of extrication begins with economic growth which is presumed to
pave the way for inclusive institutions. A second path reverses the sequence. A third
path imagines the co-evolution of inclusive political and economic institutions.
The literature on the microhistory of economic and political institutions (the
trees) in Africa is sparse but rapidly growing. Drawing credible meanings from it for
the macrohistory (the forest) has, however, lagged far behind. The latter has, in fact,
given way to ideological (Marxist, liberal, or communitarian) or self-servingly
political (ethnolinguistic or parochially religious) interpretations of the past and the
future alike. The need for theoretical clarity about cause and effect, empirical sub-
stantiation of competing claims, and careful identification of the options for crafting
resilient institutions remains as great as ever.
The search for the ultimate causes of underdevelopment of Ethiopia, despite its
impressive historical pedigree, often ends with the recognition of the centrality of its
inability to forge an effective modern state to mount a robust industrialization drive.
I, therefore, take up here this vexed question of why the Christian civilizational state
found it so elusive to complete the project of transforming itself into a unified
nation-state through robust processes of modernization and assimilation of kindred
polities within its cultural reach. I offer a line of thinking that, while Ethiopian
Preface xv
exceptionalism may be justified by some features of its statecraft, the basic p rocesses
of state formation and nation formation are widely shared by many precolonial
African and Asian societies.
In other words, the most important aspect of the question of prolonged underde-
velopment ultimately turns on the effectiveness of the Ethiopian state in managing
three things: land, people, and trade. Furthermore, since state-building and nation-
building often come bundled, a vital issue that must be addressed pertains to the
conditions of existence for managing progressive cultural homogenization.
Many parts of Africa—Islamic, Christian, or Indigenous—had developed states
and empires at least as far back as the Middle Ages. In the cases of Egypt and
Ethiopia, the antiquity of the state and even the nation is remarkably long (Levine
2009). To show that Africa did not lack in the antiquity of state formation, one need
only mention the various Caliphates in North Africa and Sahelian Africa, the vari-
ous Ethiopian states, and other African states such as Ghana, Mali, Songhay, Asante,
Kongo, Oyo, and Dahomey. Nearly all precolonial African states, however, tragi-
cally succumbed to varying combinations of crises which were at least as internal as
they were products of global pressure.
Ken Post (1972) provides one interesting line of thinking to explain the demise
or the enfeeblement of the precolonial African state. He rightly notes (Post 1972:
237):
Who is extracting labor power in the form of agricultural products from whom, and how?
This analysis will involve such matters as the influence of land tenure, the extent and nature
of absorption into the world market system, relations with the State apparatus and those
who control it, and class differentiations and relations with the rural populations.
cosmopolitan diaspora also emerged from the social dislocation, and in the age of
the information-communication revolution, which predictably garnered a substan-
tial impact on domestic politics in the realms of both ideas and money.
Since then, the ruling coalition of ethnic fronts has been facing internal dissen-
sion and nation-wide uprisings against its misrule. Fomenting inter-communal con-
flict, over-reliance on large-scale state violence, institutionalized grand corruption,
ethnic discrimination, and a systematic de-building of national institutions seem to
usher in yet another strident popular struggle to establish inclusionary state institu-
tions (The Economist 2017).
Several ideas have certainly been advanced to shed some light on the question of
why Ethiopia has not yet completed its longstanding state-building project (see,
e.g., Tibebu 1995; Tegenu 2007). Compelling explanations have so far eluded us.
Crummey (1990), for example, provides a useful review of the recent historiogra-
phy of Ethiopia—the literature which is rich in description but poor in theoretical
construct, and one that has yet to bring the state in from the cold. More recently, the
political discourse on the contested Ethiopian state has fallen victim to distortion-
ary revisionism in the service of those who have captured it or are vying to take
their turns.
Tantalizing hints can also be gleaned from the uneven and surprisingly sparse
political economy literature with various takes on the interplay between internal
forces and external forces. Factors invoked include centuries-old isolation born of
encirclement by a hostile Ottoman Empire and later European colonialists (mainly
Italy and Great Britain), political fragmentation produced by non-navigable rivers
and erosion-prone watersheds bordered by unforgiving hot and dry steppes, and a
predominantly landed peasantry defensively resisting unbridled rent-seeking by
state elites who self-interestedly and ineptly squandered scarce resources on inter-
necine warfare and extravagant communal feasts to the detriment of wealth
accumulation.
One particular line of argument, which provoked me enough to offer what I hope
is a more credible alternative explanation, is the passing remarks made in Acemoglu
and Robinson (2012) to Ethiopia’s social formation. In their big-picture and pro-
vocative book, they forcibly fit Ethiopia into an unhelpful straightjacket of absolut-
ist feudalism. Though not for lack of trying, very few Ethiopian emperors managed
to impose an absolutist rule on a predominantly landed peasanty. Zero-sum tribu-
tarism holds a better explanatory power.
Melding relevant insights from economic history, institutional economics, devel-
opment economics, and development politics, I offer here one novel and counterin-
tuitive line of thinking about the internal forces which profoundly shaped Ethiopian
state formation. I make a case for the pivotal role, in state-building, of control over
tribute in the land-trade-power nexus of the non-feudal world of the Afro-Asian
region.
To put it rather provocatively, the lackluster record in nation-state formation in
Ethiopia is a product of the fact that the Ethiopian landed peasantry was not, and
could not have been, exploited as much as its European counterparts and for the
meager surplus to be productively invested. Even after the Ethiopian state managed
Preface xvii
1
I chose to focus on the period 1600–2015 partly to facilitate international comparison and partly
to take a manageable bite of a rich political and economic history. The post-Axumite Ethiopian
state is at least a millennium old, counting from Zagwe to Shewa. In its current territorial reach, it
is a little over a century old. For politicians and polemical historians who wish to draft history in
the service of partisan politics, the choice of longevity apparently matters greatly. It should not.
2
There is no standard for transliterating Amharic into English. So, spellings may vary for names of
people, concepts, or places between my rendering and those of the cited references.
3
Ethiopia is somewhat of a political enigma. Census figures show that its 100 million people are
two-thirds Christian and one-third Sunni Muslim. Though there are 80 linguistic groups, Ethiopia
is one of the least ethnically diverse countries in Africa. Some 68% of the population is accounted
for by equally sized ethnic Amara and ethnic Oromo. The next two largest groups (the Tigreans and
xviii Preface
the Somali) add another 6% each. This means that 80% of the population is accounted for by four
ethnolinguistic groups. The historical political faultline, as we will see, was instead between a
multiethnic Christian-Highlander state and a multiethnic Muslim-Lowlander state.
Preface xix
I call the Afroasiatic tributary model of state formation which is contrasted with the
European, Eurasian, African, and Chinese models.
Part II presents case studies of the three variants of the Ethiopian state as it
evolved since 1600 leveraging three mobilizational ideologies in Christianity, Islam,
and Marxism-Leninism. Chapter 3 explores, in some detail, the Gondarine state
which built on Axumite political traditions and provided a template for the Shewan
state that supplanted it. The latter, presented in Chapter 4, turned out to be one of the
most successful in modern Ethiopian history. Chapter 5 explores the nature of the
Revolutionary State which succeeded Shewa this time with a socialistic pretention
of an abiding commitment to universalistic class conflict and an abiding commit-
ment to internationalism. In the end, it fell back on the short-termist unleashing of
passion by an atavistic tribalism.
Part III, which comprises Chap. 6, summarizes the main arguments. It offers
some ideas for escaping the political and economic trap to which the postcolonial
African state seems to have been most prone (World Bank 2017). It also offers some
guiding principles for a post-EPRDF political order.
A lot of confusion is generated by the loose language in large parts of the litera-
ture on the subject. Our attempt to provide a corrective has rendered parts of our
analytical narrative unavoidably didactic. The excurses in the boxes, the glossary,
and the chronology of Ethiopian emperors are intended to provide a common frame
of reference that will help to sharpen the focus squarely on the debate on the internal
and external drivers of power in Ethiopia. Terms included in Glossary are bolded
the first time they are used in the text.
References
Ethiopia is a country of great beginnings and great unfinishings. Too few have so far
been foolhardy enough to try to answer the complex question of why pioneers in
state formation such as Ethiopia often suffered a reversal of fortune. The genesis of
this monograph is a paper I published in 2005 in the Journal of Agrarian Change.
There, I made a novel linkage among Ethiopia’s land institutions, the country’s
mode of patrimonialism, and the concomitant economic underdevelopment.
With a tinge of hubris, I subsequently came to the realization that the notion of a
“tributary mode of production” may very well offer a deep-veined understanding of
the evolution of Ethiopia’s political economy and those of many of its African and
Asian precolonial peers. Given the pivotal role of the state in overcoming anarchy
and mounting an industrialization drive, a comparatively historical approach to its
formation has much to offer.
I am indebted to a number of people, some subscribing to the feudal thesis or the
colonial thesis of African state formation, for challenging me to make a case for
tributarism. They include Alemante G. Selassie, Shumet Sishagne, Daniel Kendie,
and Mulugeta Petros. The late Donald Crummey encouraged me to stretch the tribu-
tary thesis to the limit of its fruitful application for understanding the enigma that is
Ethiopia’s agrarian political economy.
I am especially indebted to Ato Tekalign Gedamu who urged me to turn the
working papers I shared with him into this book. He also kindly provided the
Foreword which outlines his take on this timely subject.
I also wish to thank Kiel Kinkaid, my graduate assistant, for a lot of grunt work.
Kira Holmes of the Center for Geospatial Analysis at William & Mary kindly pre-
pared the maps for me. Lorraine Klimowitz ably coordinated the work with the
Series Editors and the Copy Editors.
My greatest debt, as always, is to Fernus who understandingly endured my pro-
longed shirking from family duties.
Williamsburg, VA (USA) Berhanu Abegaz
December 30, 2017
xxi
Contents
xxiii
xxiv Contents
Glossary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 179
Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 185
List of Appendices
xxv
List of Boxes
xxvii
List of Figures
xxix
List of Tables
xxxi
xxxii List of Tables
A modern political order stands on three interlocked legs that are hard to put in
place simultaneously: a centralized state authority to contain widespread private
violence, the rule of law to restrain abuse by powerholders, and an acceptable mech-
anism for the accountability of the rulers to the ruled. Precolonial political orders
emerged in an environment where external threats loomed large, internal political
fragmentation and contestation were high, and a weak incentive to build a solid fis-
cal base to support a viable state. The forms state formation assumed varied widely
across time and among world regions. We need to identify, without falling into the
trap of historicism or Eurocentrism, the conditions under which a given pathway
can lead to the emergence of a viable modern political order.1
1
Haldon (1993: 13) rightly notes: “Description alone explains neither how social formations work,
nor how change occurs—although the effects of these processes can be observed. In short, it can-
not reveal by itself the structural and causal relationships referred to already. And history is, if
anything, about explaining change, not merely describing the fact that it happens.”
Social order is a set of coherently interlocked cultural, economic, and political insti-
tutions and practices which give society the identity, stability, and the legitimacy of
proclaimed rulers to exercise authority. Political order and economic order in this
sense are subsets of the social order.
We need a unified theory of how social orders are born and how they are trans-
formed. We can then delineate the economic and political factors that promote or
retard prosperity and freedom. In other words, the doorstep conditions need to be
identified for an irreversible switch from the natural state of limited-access social
orders to the modern open-access social orders that broadly characterize industrial
capitalism (North et al. 2012).
Economic transformation entails sustained and shared growth as well as the
buildup of new capabilities that would undergird continual diversification of eco-
nomic activity. It also expands economic freedom and interacts with complemen-
tary political and social freedoms. Why the institutional infrastructure (rules, norms,
and enforcement organizations) that facilitated this transformation occurred in some
parts of the world and only in the past three centuries in some one-fifths of the
world, and why so few laggards managed to catchup, are vexed questions which
have yet to receive satisfactory answers.
More specifically, we need a theory of the genesis of exclusionary economic and
political institutions which generate self-reinforcing vicious circles, and how societ-
ies manage the transition to equally self-reinforcing virtuous circles which culmi-
nates in the emergence, usually through cumulative incrementalism, of inclusionary
institutions (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). The latter embrace social, political,
and economic freedoms by extending citizenship to almost all non-elites, and
bestowing legal personhood to perpetual and independent organizations.
Absolutism is essentially the vesting of centralized and unlimited authority in a
monarch or a dictator. Where absolutism co-exists with weak state centralization, the
fear of the incumbent ruling elite about creative destruction inevitably triggers a reac-
tionary opposition (as in the cases of historic Portugal, Spain, China, Ethiopia, and
the Ottomans). In such an exclusionary environment, any movement toward inclu-
siveness can be ephemeral and reversible. Economic growth is also fragile since this
political settlement tends to discourage institutional and technological innovation.
There is little disagreement over whence and wither. The starting point is a
doubly-exclusionary social order which defined the longue duree pre-industrial age.
The endpoint is a doubly-inclusionary, bourgeois social order which is barely 200
years old. The debate instead is how some societies managed this monumental
achievement. Two pathways readily come to mind.
The politics-led road begins with inclusionary political institutions which sup-
port rapid and shared economic growth. If broad-based and shared, economic
growth gives rise to middling classes that will be able to fight for and defend inclu-
sionary political institutions. In other words, political reform ultimately empowers
a large section of the population and thereby limits damaging extractive contests.
The economics-led road to inclusionary institutions, on the other hand, begins with
exclusionary but pro-growth economic institutions, which, by promoting regime-
1.1 Social Order 5
enhancing rapid but unequal growth, boosts the size of the economic pie along with
some self-restraint by the elite on unproductive rent-seeking. Prosperity under a
benevolent dicatatorship, by discouraging innovation, is likely to run out of steam.
Unequal growth can nonetheless set the stage for a crisis-induced switch to inclusion-
ary economic and political institutions since it is now easier for the less pauperized
masses to overcome persistence and inertia than would be the case without a modicum
of improvement in living standards.
The interplay between these two sequences has been the subject of two compet-
ing theses in development history. We briefly outline the arguments.
Institutional economics (NWW 2009; 2013) offers a historically-contextualized
analytical framework for making sense of the genesis and impact of political and
economic changes as institutions evolve. This approach begins with the premise that
success in political as well as economic development depends primarily on improv-
ing institutions understood as the prevailing rules of the game.
A central idea of the historical-institutional perspective is that the key to improv-
ing institutions is to control large-scale violence. Institutionalized peacebuilding is,
at least historically, done by incentive-compatible arrangements among elites
regarding the modes of creation and distribution of economic rent. Smart state elites
strive to deploy or leverage the full range of instruments at their disposal.
The notion of economic rent has various interpretations. Broadly construed, eco-
nomic rent consists of two components: classical producer and consumer surplus
(price divergence from opportunity cost or benign neoclassical rent) and any addi-
tional income generated by market power involving scale economies (monopoly
rent), political investment (political rent) or by innovation (innovation rent).
A key idea linking rent with violence is that the capacity for violence is the prin-
cipal determinant of the outcome of inevitable contests for the distribution of eco-
nomic rent. Limited-access societies such as Ethiopia impose restrictions on the
organized entry of non-elites (including access to government) for fear of destabi-
lizing the exclusionary equilibria struck by a dominant coalition of elites. These
restrictions limit competition and hence productivity growth.
In other words, the counterfactual is not a competitive market economy, as pos-
tulated by the Neoclassical perspective, but disorder and violence. The emergence
of viable private organizations and an increasingly differentiated government orga-
nization in a mature and non-static limited-access society creates the possibility of
mutual restraint, enduring impersonalization of exchange, and eventual transition to
an open-access society embracing the rule of law for elites, support for perpetually-
lived organizations, and political control over violence-capable organizations.
Understanding the role of violence in the stasis of natural societies is the key to
understanding institutional change toward open-access societies with strong states.
Violence potential is conceptualized by NWW (2012) as being endogenous to state
formation and social order.
6 1 The Making of the Modern Political Order
Source: Author
NWW (2012) are, however, noncommittal about the forces and the circum-
stances under which any of the paths will be traversed. They hedge that, because
culture is an important filter of what is legitimate and possible, it is hard to formu-
late a general theory of transition between the two social orders.
Acemoglu and Robinson (2010, 2012) rely on the distinction between extractive
economic institutions and exclusionary political institutions, on the one hand, and
inclusionary institutions of both types, on the other. They also pose a natural affinity
between extractive economic and political institutions (vicious circle) and inclusive
economic and political institutions (virtuous circle). Transition is the result of inter-
actions between existing institutions and auspicious critical junctures. Reviewing
how history shaped the institutional trajectories of nations, they explain prosperity
as a product of the entrenchment of inclusive institutions.
AR characterize the virtuous circles (or perhaps virtuous spirals) by noting that
the logic of pluralist political institutions makes usurpation of popular power more
difficult. This is because inclusive political institutions support, and in turn are sup-
ported by, inclusive economic institutions. Furthermore, inclusive political
institutions allow for the free flow information via a free media (see Table 1.2 for a
typology), when it eventually emerges.
Four possibilities are implied by the perspective advanced by AR (Acemoglu and
Robinson 2012) for breaking the vicious circle. One possibility entails small changes
that can cumulatively generate radical institutional change. Examples include the
Age of Discovery, the Commercial Revolution, the Enlightenment, or the Industrial
Revolution. Small changes cascading into a torrent facilitate the emergence of
inclusive political institutions in Europe, as a new class of merchants and businessmen
got engaged politically. A broad coalition for change emerged which also included the
gentry trudging a pathway that nurtured a liberal-minded tradition of parliamentary
rule and local forms of power-sharing going back to the Magna Carta.
8 1 The Making of the Modern Political Order
A second possibility is historical accidents such as the Black Death and a colonial
empire benefiting a labor aristocracy at the Center while pauperizing labor in the
Periphery. Spillovers from the French Revolution in large parts of Western Europe, via
interstate conflicts the French won, led to the copying of inclusive French institutions.
The first two Estates (the nobility and the clergy) eventually lost out to the Third
Estate (merchants, businessmen, professionals, artisans, and later common people).
Yet another set of triggers comprises the infrequent radical breaks such as revo-
lutions, the end of slavery, and the end of serfdom all of which created a power
vacuum that was filled by autonomous towns. Revolution—the Glorious Revolution
in England or the French Revolution—mattered greatly wherever absolutism had a
long been the norm. As Acemoglu and Robinson (2012: 211) put it:
The Glorious Revolution was a momentous event precisely because it was led by an
emboldened broad coalition and further empowered this coalition, which managed to forge
a constitutional regime with constraints on the power of both the executive and equally
crucially, any one of its members.
Finally, contingences and cumulative causation tend to honor the law of unin-
tended consequences. This includes the inauguration of the struggle for political
liberties in some of the most unpredictable places. Illustrative historical examples
include the birth of democratic experiments by convict labor in Jamestown (the
franchise for White labor) or Australia (the secret ballot) by European workers who
were conscious of their power of leverage created by labor scarcity.
At the risk of oversimplification, it may be noted that the literature offers two
competing conceptualizations of the preconditions for institutional transformation.
Institutional economics emphasizes cumulatively incremental causation involving
individuals maximizing expected net gains from an activity in a world of uncer-
tainty and randomness outcomes. Political economy approaches take power seri-
ously and focus on contingency-prone critical junctures, driven by elite bargains,
which may result in the status quo or radical change—hence, the importance of
comparative analyses of actual and counterfactual outcomes.
A Critical Juncture is a window of opportunity involving contingent decision-
making by elites in a world of great uncertainty and unpredictability. It is loosely
described as a discrete critical period or moment (short relative to the period that
follows it). Though often assumed to lead to a change in the absence of plausible and
theoretically consistent counterfactuals, it does not inevitably result in an irrevers-
ible and markedly different system than the status quo ante (Cappoccia and Kelemen
2007). Critical junctures are distinguished from normal periods by the fact that they
present powerful stakeholders with a much broader menu of contingent choices, one
of which will path-dependently become the new normal. So, if big mistakes are to be
made by reformers, they are often made during the transition period that is a critical
juncture. A Critical Period, on the other hand, is a longer transition period involving
ebbs and flows involving the atrophy of the old order and the progressive build-up of
the new order which gives way to a substantially new order.
If contingencies happen to favor radical change, how does transition occur? An
impeccable causal logic is the politico-economic model of institutional transforma-
tion (Cappoccia and Kelemen 2007). The antecedent is the path-dependent (or self-
1.2 Political Order 9
Political scientists tell us that a modern political order (Sir’ate Mengist) has three
mutually constitutive pillars (Hobsbawm 2012; Migdal 1988; Huntington 2006;
Fukuyama 2012, 2014). The first pillar, a capable and effective state, has attributes
which include control over an adequate fiscal base to underwrite basic public services.
Highly valued public goods include secure borders, internal law and order, respect
for personal safety and property rights, and key public infrastructure that crowds-in
private investment. The second pillar, the rule of law, is grounded in widely-accepted
societal norms and is binding on both the ruler and the ruled. The third pillar, account-
ability of the ruling elite to the citizenry, operates through a steady extension of popu-
lar sovereignty to subjects-turned-free-citizens. The first of the three pillars speaks to
the state’s administrative and military capability while the latter two address the
legitimacy of both the rulers and the public institutions they build.
The state embeds the norms of the dominant political culture, especially as they
pertain to long-held notions of authority or legitimacy. Its supreme institutional
machinery distinguishes it from civil society, political society, and business society.
Furthermore, the state leg of the tripod existed in pre-modern times in some parts of
the civilized world far ahead of the other two touchstones.
By political culture, we mean the widely-shared norms (attitudes, beliefs, and
sentiments) that define legitimacy in the exercise of authority or power in a com-
munity such as a polity or a nation. These include beliefs about the autonomy of the
individual (civil liberties), the universality of equality all human beings (human
rights), the right to participate in collective decision-making (political rights), the
equality of collectivities (ethnos, gender, religions, or classes), notions about the
10 1 The Making of the Modern Political Order
2
State building, being highly contestable, has until World War II involved incredible external vio-
lence among warring national states, city-states, and other principalities. This would explain why
war abroad and civil strife at home have long been the preoccupation of state builders. Historically,
wars were financed by a combination of tax revenue and public debt (against future revenue and
plunder) whose mix and coerciveness depended on the nature of the economic base, be it based on
capital, land, or labor (Tilly 1975, 1990; Parrott 2012; Giustozzi 2011). The project of centralizing
power and ensuring monopoly over the instruments of violence was, therefore, costly and pro-
tracted. However, it permitted a degree of separation of the private sphere from the public sphere
thereby paving the way for sustained civilian control of the specialists of violence.
1.2 Political Order 11
3
It would be useful to note here that by “institutions” we mean norms and codified rules which
serve societal needs for order, efficiency, and accountability. To be effective, they need to be
backed by the requisite organizations with the mandate and the capability to enforce them as
impartially as possible (NWW 2012). Economic, political, and social institutions also interact in
complex ways to produce changing mixes of predation and shared growth in the economic realm,
and coercion and freedom in the political realm. While disentangling random changes from sys-
temic changes is difficult, we do know that the impediments to collective action tend to perpetuate
inefficient and inequitable institutions.
1.3 Theories of State Formation 13
A coherent theory of state formation must then address several questions. What are
the key variables that determine a viable statehood and the transformation of highly
fractionalized ethnos and other sectarians into coherent nation-states under a
historically-determined dominant national political culture? Who is best-suited to
serve as the flagbearer of the state?
The requirements for successful projects of state building, nation formation, or
nation-state formation are certainly not entirely clear (Moore 1993; Huntington
2006; Hobsbawm 2012; Fukuyama 2014; Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2014). The
candidates for explanatory variable include the availability of adequate economic
resources, the presence of ambitious elites, imperial rule, a threshold of population
density, a cohesive political culture to legitimize authority, and persistent existential
threats to the state or the society.
What we can say for sure is that the success depends on the size and reliability of
extractable resources, the forms and levels of centralized coercion, the types of
political entrepreneurs representing the state (propertied or predatory), and the
nature of the pact among the state elites and between them and the economic elites
(Spruyt 2011; Weber 1978). Success in effecting nation formation, in turn, depends
on additional variables such as the degree of cultural homogeneity of the population
and the degree of accommodation by the dominant culture of its competitors
(Fukuyama 2014; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012).
Before the entrenchment of a modern market economy, the targets of fiscal
extraction (typically an independent peasantry, serfs, or traders) were direct; so
were the agents of surplus extraction, including the titled hereditary nobility or
landlords with labor rights. The permissible modes of surplus extraction (taxes,
fees, tributes, mass levies, slaves, and the like) were also ill-defined and highly vari-
able. Political centralizers had to contend with other political entrepreneurs which
included oligarchs, warlords, clerics, or soldiers of fortune.
Viable states emerged only in those societies which managed to produce suffi-
cient mobilizable economic surplus to support a non-productive class of warriors
and administrators. This is so because states require a secure fiscal base to under-
write their myriad functions which explains why they spend a lot their energy ensur-
ing the generation, appropriation, redistribution, and use of economic surplus.
Success in war and cohesiveness of political culture shape the relations between
the political Center (the Sovereign) and the political Periphery (regional lords or
landed elite). One can glean from the literature the insight that a universalistic ideol-
ogy is essential for a credible claim by state elites of ultimate and transcendent (with
respect to ethnic, regional, or religious identities) authority to cement legitimacy. As
such, the state itself must develop a distinct identity whether this assumes the form
of autonomy, embeddedness or even embodidness in the larger society (Evans 1995).
The evolution of the state is then profoundly shaped by geopolitical forces, his-
torical legacies, and the socio-economic environment within which the state is situ-
ated (Fig. 1.1). More specifically, state capability to exact and utilize public
14 1 The Making of the Modern Political Order
Fig. 1.1 Drivers of state formation and state robustness. C capability, L legitimacy. (Source and
notes: Author)
resources as well as to penetrate and regulate society is shaped by the nature of the
fiscal base, the alignment of political actors, and the opportunities that come with
engagement with the larger geopolitical forces.
A viable state must, in the final analysis, meet certain conditions to obtain the
loyalty of most of the citizenry and to defend itself against external aggression.
These pre-conditions comprise four elements. First and foremost is a solid fiscal
base built either through decentralized revenue mobilization by d elegating author-
ity to private actors (tax farmers, fief holders, or lenders) but without losing con-
trol. Still better, adequate public resources are mobilized through a centralized
bureaucracy.
The second element is the progressive attainment of a monopoly over large-scale
violence either by contracting out to private militaries or preferably by establishing
a state-funded professional army. Historically, this process is protracted and often
involves bargains between ruling regimes and ambitious competitors with own mili-
tia (Chifra) which could make the state ungovernable.
Monopoly over large-scale violence ensures law and order at home as well as
effective defence of international borders. This task can be accomplished with lev-
ies of decentralized citizen-militia (Zematch) or a centralized, professional military
and security services. Rulers are often tempted to put a high premium on protecting
long-distance trade which has historically paved the way for industrialization.
The last two elements pertain to legitimacy which is perhaps the most potent
instrument for taming disruptive private and state violence. Internal legitimacy
is attained through a mix of patronage, cultural solidarity, the provision of public
goods and services, delivering on economic growth, and power-sharing. External
legitimacy is earned by a sensible invoking of sovereign rights through effective
deterrence which is aided by an international state system that guarantees ter-
ritorial sovereignty.
1.3 Theories of State Formation 15
The legitimacy of the ruling elite crucially depends on the strength of non-state
economic and social organizations. Where a weak state exists in strong societies,
power tends to be diffused or overly decentralized. In other words, the “triangle of
accommodation” among state actors--the autocrat, the regional corporate lineages
and military strongmen, and appointed governors as well as the bureaucrats—can
be chronically tenuous (Migdal 1988).
Successful state consolidation is aided immensely by the presence of a flag-
bearer group of nationalists with martial skills, a unifying ideology (religious or
secular), an adequate resource base to be mobilized at a low cost, and a bedrock of
shared political culture to tame mutually destructive violence over succession and
surplus appropriation. The European experience underscores further that success in
modern-state building is ultimately predicated on a vigorous industrialization drive
(Clark 2007; NWW 2012; Skocpol 2015).
Wherever the central state preempts other power centers, kleptocratic or oligar-
chic regimes tend to prevail for a long while. Such regimes institutionalize central
control of the instruments of coercion, rely on some form of meritocratic recruit-
ment, and enfeeble competing centers of authority. Their preferred mode of gover-
nance may include reliance on military slaves, distant outsiders, or eunuchs as in the
Islamic empires, and recruitment based on merit as in China, Japan, and Europe
(Boix 2015; Skocpol 2015; Fukuyama 2014).
A stylized depiction of the interactions between the nature of the threats facing
state elites and the buoyancy of the fiscal base underwrites not just personal patron-
age but also the efficient provision of key public goods and services. This suggests
four distinctive types of states (Table 1.3).
At one end of the spectrum is a capable state which has managed to attain a
secure fiscal base and domestic legitimacy. At the other end is the failed state which
lacks both fiscal buoyancy and internal legitimacy.
16 1 The Making of the Modern Political Order
The two intermediate cases apply to most existing states today. Where the root
cause of fragility is primarily internal, a hegemonic ruling elite may emerge to
either coopt competitors with a reasonable political settlement or to cow them into
submission. Where the weakness is primarily external, viability may be obtained
only through tenacious nationalist mobilization. William McNeill (1982) goes so
far as to suggest that the arms race among warring states, in fact, contributed signifi-
cantly to the emergence of the industrialized market economy in Europe.
A well-resourced state authority might then gain legitimacy for its nationalist
mobilization and security achievements. The citizenry appreciates regular and
broad-based taxation, the provision of basic public goods, and progressively inclu-
sive political representation (Tilly 1990; McNeill 1982; NWW 2012; Bates 2009;
Acemoglu and Robinson 2012).
War, of course, can unmake the state as easily as it can make it. It turns out that,
given the endogeneity of institutions, militaristic and neo-patrimonial regimes have
in many countries, including contemporary Ethiopia, succeeded in obliterating civil
society and business society alike.
The nature of state-business relations varies by the level of economic develop-
ment, the type of state, and the strength of the state. This is starkly evident in the
differing ways the military is financed and managed today. The postcolonial state in
Latin America, Asia, and Africa typically started out as an extractive military-state
or as a military neo-patrimonial state. Understandably, though, it is dependent on
global powers for military goods to enable it to privilege order over justice.
As noted above, one place to look for useful clues about the drivers of political
stability is the changing balance in the relative strengths of the state and that of
society at this age of hyper-globalization. In this respect, Migdal (1988) helpfully
defines state-society relations in terms of social capability. A strong state is one that
has the capability to penetrate society, regulate social life, extract scarce resources,
and deploy those resources productively in a determinate way. A strong society,
with good organizations and economic base, can resist the determined attempts to
fully control economic and political life by a rapacious state elite. The requisite
conditions for building strong states, he argues rather counterintuitively, are pro-
found social dislocation, external military threats, and an independent bureaucracy.
However, Migdal says precious little about sufficiency.
Where there is an internal imbalance in the social capabilities of the fundamen-
tal interest groups in society to mutually constrain each other (aka social capital),
a narrowly-based dictatorship may provide time-bound stability. This may be nec-
essary but not always sufficient for prosperity. However, the dictator constantly
faces existential threats from below in the form of a mass rebellion, and from
above in the form of a coup d’état. Relying on an enduring coordination failure
among the masses or the professional neutrality of a mercenary military-security
apparatus is a high-risk strategy for such regimes (Olson 1993; Tullock 1974;
Wintrobe 2012).
Institutionalized devices of mutual restraint among competing interests (such as
checks and balances, Bills of Rights, an independent judiciary, decentralization, and
sunset clauses and term limits) are essential for balancing the human passions of
1.4 Transition to Modern Political Order 17
We have underscored the point that the state, the most important leg of a modern
political order, is a bundle of post-tribal political institutions that define the distribu-
tion of power in a class-based society. States share the unusual attributes of possess-
ing a centralized source of sovereign authority which is ideally backed by a
legitimate monopoly of large-scale violence exercised by the rulers over the ruled.
Finally, it is buffeted by a priestly class of sorts providing ideological support or
legitimation. This helps to minimize over-reliance on naked violence that would
expose the exploitative nature of hierarchical power relations.
The tortuous process of state formation shows certain commonalities across world
regions. Tribal warfare, especially between settled farming populations (or urban
trading classes) and mobile agro-pastoralists presaged modern inter-state warfare.
The need to capture the existing economic surplus as well as to boost its size through
gains in productivity favor the search for a defined territory with dense and circum-
scribed population. Where this is not possible, a precariously loose network of far-
flung tributors had to be forged (Table 1.4).
Then there is the need for a pan-ethnic ideology to build trust and foster coopera-
tion among a diversity of autonomous socio-economic groups in society. These
stakeholders typically include a hereditary and territorially-based aristocracy, an
organized and literate peasantry, autonomous towns hosting merchant and artisan
classes, and the church or the mosque.
The formation of states as well as the corresponding regimes that controlled them is
profoundly shaped by timing. Early-comers such as Western Europe and China dif-
fered in important respects from latecomers such as Eastern Europe, Japan, Latin
4
Micklethwait and Wooldridge (2014: 63) make the interesting point that Marx’s ideas about the
state proved enormously influential while being insubstantial in an especially dangerous way: “It
was not just that Marx had precious little to say about how you construct government. He was
wrong to argue that political forms do not matter. There was a huge difference between a liberal
London, where Marx could while away his time in libraries, and authoritarian Berlin, where he was
a wanted man. Marx also ignored the fact that the state could be an interest group in its own right,
as it was to become, in extreme form, in the countries that claimed his blessing. But his bigger
failure lay in his refusal to come to terms with Hobbes’s great insight that a state is necessary for
the peaceable conduct of all human affairs.”
18 1 The Making of the Modern Political Order
America and the later colonies. The differing experiences were shaped by such fac-
tors as access to the sea, the presence or absence of medieval towns or burghs, and the
degree of reliance on long-distance trade. The dynamics created by internal forces
and external forces jointly determined the robustness of states and the choice between
constitutionalism and authoritarianism (Spruyt 2011, distills the historical lessons).
One line of argument underscores the fact that the desire to build effective states
often comes from elite bargains rather than from effective bottom-up negotiated
settlements between elites and subjects or citizens who somehow manage to over-
come coordination failure (Boix 2015; World Bank 2017). The incentive for power-
sharing arises rationally from a recognition of the interdependence of peace
providers and wealth providers.
Modern states which emerged in the age of commerce (1600–1800) and the age
of industry (1800–2000) had to contend with certain politico-economic imperatives.
One way is to transform mutually self-destructive domestic extractive contests into
a contestable but stable equilibrium that optimally reconciles wealth redistribution
with wealth creation. A second strategy is to incentivize the specialists of violence
to protect producers, not just state elites (Bates 2009). A third avenue is for regimes
to exercise self-restraint, honor accepted norms of justice to cement loyalty and
legitimacy, and reduce insularity to new ideas from outside.
A viable state elite had to develop a minimum of state capacity to at least ensure
peace and security, and the rule of law. This paves the way for a transition from
1.4 Transition to Modern Political Order 19
‘tributarity to territoriality’ with a secure state, if not one enjoying popular sover-
eignty. In other words, a successful state is one that manages to transform itself from
a multinational state into a nation-state with loyalty eventually undergirded by free
citizenship rather than by atavistic kinship or exclusionary religiosity.
I characterize here two major roads to a viable pan-ethnic and pan-religious state:
European and Afroasian. I will then proceed to apply the conceptual framework
outlined in this chapter to elucidate the Afroasian model of state formation and
reproducibility.
The European Road The widely accepted historical marker for the modern
European state, emerging as it did from the process of sweeping politico-eco-
nomic changes of the middle ages followed by slow absorption, is the Peace of
Westphalia of 1648. The characteristic features of the canonical Westphalian
conception of the state included the notion of sovereign authority (based on a
combination of centralized control, coercion, and consent), a defined and unified
territory (with mutual recognition and effective defense), and a weak notion of
popular sovereignty (with a flag-bearer elite invoking a combination of minimal
accountability to the governed and a universalist ideology to legitimize its rule).
In the absence of a global authority to enforce the Treaty’s linkage of state (rather
than citizen) sovereignty to territoriality, effective armed deterrence was the key
to state survival.
In the stylized European road, the transition took place from a citizen-militia to
a standing army, and from feudal levies to tax collection. The resistance to central-
ized coercion and the extension of the franchise elicited a stronger state in some and
state fragility in others.
One challenge came in the form of a crisis of internal legitimacy which was
exacerbated by the conflictual interests of the various factions of state elites, divi-
sions between state elites and economic elites, and power contests between central
elites and regional elites. These processes turned out to be protracted until a domi-
nant winner prevailed or a stable coalition of winners was forged.
The second challenge was external legitimacy or how to obtain recognition from
well-established states internationally. The post-Westphalian European state sought
external legitimacy by skilfully combining preparation for external wars while earn-
ing internal legitimacy by prevailing over competitors through a combination of
coercion and nationalist ideology.
External, as well as internal legitimacy, are also intertwined since fending off
external challenges buttressed nationalist credentials while opening opportunities
for minimizing investment in defense. The reasoning for this complexity is as fol-
lows: external insecurity arising from a Darwinian military competition favored
the survival of those regimes with military dominance, willing to protect wealth
creators from predation and taxed them reasonably, and willing to use public
revenue wisely.
Delving deeper, Peter Flora (1999), expounding the theory of Stein Rokan, notes
that the state-cum-nation building project in Europe revolved around three inter-
linked interventions into non-political society. They are penetration, integration,
and participation.
20 1 The Making of the Modern Political Order
political settlement that combines high economic inequality and low growth. The
inequality-stagnation equilibrium then renders power overly contestable. When
coordination failure is somehow overcome, however, enlightened rulers tend to opt
for a moderate inequality-high growth equilibrium. This is so because the relation-
ship between economic inequality and effective governance is generally a negative
one. Excessive economic inequality enfeebles the requisite restraint on power-hold-
ers thereby undermining enduring accountability of rulers to the ruled.
In a nutshell, the European experience underscores that the nature of political
institutions (state capacity, the rule of law, and accountability) and economic institu-
tions (property rights, regulation, and corporate governance) is one of endogenous
co-determination, if not mutual constitutiveness. High state capacity tended to have
a close affinity with enforceable property rights and the delivery of basic public
services. The prevailing of the rule of law was closely associated with effective
enforcement of mutually binding commitments. Finally, and strong political con-
testability defined the mode of corporate governance as well as state governance.
The Afroasian Road The Afroasian road differs from the Eurasian road in
part for its non-reliance on densely settled urban and semi-urban populations
(Osafo-Kwaako and Robinson 2013). Osafo-Kwaako and Robinson (2013: 7)
put it this way:
The lack of effective centralized states is clearly a potential factor not just in explaining
poor economic performance in Africa since 1960, but also over a much longer duree.
Whatever the impact of the colonial period might have been on state formation in Africa, at
a factual level the evidence seems to suggest that Africa developed centralized states later
than the rest of the world. Though Africa certainly did have states and quite a few emerged
and consolidated in the 18th and 19th century (sic), this process seems to have definitely
lagged behind Eurasia and at least parts of the Americas (Central America and Andean
South America).
These intertwined political and economic processes are distilled in Table 1.5.
One reasonable generalization is that there is a ‘natural affinity” between the pillars
of a modern political order and those of a modern economic order. High state capac-
ity, for example, tends to be positively correlated with a strong enforcement of
clearly-defined property rights and the provision of basic public services. Where the
rule of law is well-established, fair regulations are likely to be fully enforced.
Finally, where power is contestable, there is likely to be a high degree of account-
ability by state and business elites to a broad set of stakeholders.
Many scholars, such as Herbst (2000), Bates (2001) and Reid (2012), take a
Eurocentric view to argue that the absence of state-forming factors (most notably,
warfare, high population density, and trade) stunted state formation in a sparsely-
populated Africa. This was a product of an adverse disease environment or the lack
of domesticable plant and animal species. Others, such as McIntosh (1999), Levine
(2011), and Vansina (1999) dispute this suggesting instead that there are myriad
roads to effective states.
The logic of African non-feudal tributarism is certainly rooted in ecology as well
as in land abundance. State formation was possible in the savannah and some desert
22 1 The Making of the Modern Political Order
zones while the forest zone remained largely stateless until the advent of European
colonialism (Vansina 1999; McIntosh 1999).
In the forest zone of Africa, productivity tended to be low on account of thin soils
and flourishing pests; initial occupants sought to exact tribute from latecomers; and
society was necessarily communitarian. Polities remained stateless and loosely
politically organized.
In the savanna region, higher-productivity cereal and legume production
by smallholders facilitated the production, storage, and transportation of eco-
nomic surplus. Communal or customary land tenure progressively gave way to
share-cropping and small-scale slavery to support the formation of classes and
then states.
In the dry Sahelian zone and the lowlands, low-productivity pastoralism sup-
ported state formation only where long-distance trade between ports and the min-
eral- and agriculture-rich hinterland generated enough surplus to support class
societies and facilitated coordination among the clan-based polities. Richer states
absorbed poorer ones, and changes in trade routes or the exhaustion of precious
metals induced fragility.
The security-taxation nexus under colonial and postcolonial periods, how-
ever, changed the indigenous trajectories of political development rather dra-
1.4 Transition to Modern Political Order 23
The mastery of the political art of building a capable and an accountable state
continues to elude much of Africa. Precolonial institutions either remained
fragile or fell victim to colonial occupation. Where indigenous communities
fell prey to colonial forces rather than to an expansionist-neighbor’s forces,
the rate of economic exploitation and the level of political disempowerment
tended to be the highest. This equilibrium offered few prospects for grand
bargains short of outright rebellion. Even then, post-independence state elites
inherited exclusionary political and economic institutions to behave much like
colonizer overlords.
Civilizational states such as Egypt and China, while failing to meet the challenge
of democratization, have nonetheless managed to combine a high degree of state capa-
bility (stateness) and a high degree of cultural cohesion (nationness)—see Box 1.1 for
details. At the other end of the spectrum, many African countries such as the Sudan
and Kenya continue to exhibit both low stateness and low nationness. This leaves us
with two intriguing intermediate cases. Fragile or failed states such as Somalia face
low stateness despite high nationness while older polities such as Ethiopia grapple
with the opposite mix of stateness that is far ahead of a nationness.
Comparative historical studies suggest that structural factors, human agency,
and conjunctural factors have jointly shaped the protracted transition from a closed
politico-economic orders to an open one. There is little disagreement that nation-
alist elites established a state long before crafting a nation (or a nation-state) by
assimilating disparate populations via the army, the public educational system, and
religious institutions (Hobsbawm 2012; Spruyt 2011). Where this political mech-
anism succeeded, state elites self-interestedly invested in security and promoted
prosperity to enhance the future tax base and thereby ensured state monopoly of
access to the instruments of large-scale violence (NWW 2012; Tilly 1990). Both
the rule of law and broad-based accountability, being in large part dependent on
the malleable norms of the dominant political culture and long-lived organizations,
were slow to take root.
One mechanism for synchronizing state and nation is organic territorial expansion
to incorporate culturally-related groups to be followed by aggressive assimilation. The
steamrolling of other cultures by an expansionist Islam and the hegemony enjoyed by
the Han culture would, for example, explain the formation of the modern nation-states
of Egypt and China, respectively. Another viable mechanism is a slow process of
assimilation, undergirded by episodes of mass migration and intensive economic
exchange, which helps to forge a viable nation-state out of a multiethnic one.
The cases of Persia, Japan, Russia, and Korea may fit this trajectory. Then we
have incomplete state projects, as in the cases of India and Ethiopia, where a com-
bination of empire building, mass migration, and multiple competing religious ide-
ologies (Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism) have produced a measurable but
incomplete synchronization of stateness with nationness. The political Center
remains distinct from its Periphery which means that alienated elites may strive for
their ‘nation’ to acquire its own ‘state.’
1.4 Transition to Modern Political Order 25
Migdal (1988), Fukuyama (2012, 2014), Huntington (2006), and Acemoglu and
Robinson (2006, 2012) offer ideas about the transition dynamics from an exclusion-
ary political equilibrium to an inclusionary one. A necessary but not sufficient con-
dition for a successful transition is some sort of contingent, dislocating shocks such
as war or revolution. Sufficiency entails several additional factors, including a con-
ducive global climate, an existential military threat, or the existence of a multiplicity
of power centers such as an autonomous and capable bureaucracy and skillful lead-
ership (NWW 2012; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012).
26 1 The Making of the Modern Political Order
A large literature in social science places an effective state at the heart of successful
economic transformation. This is dramatically illustrated by the fact that Ethiopia
could not escape the deadweight of Malthusian stagnation until 1960 when its real
per capita income began a modest but sustained growth. By the time centralized
states began to form, two distinct systems emerged in large-scale societies. They
were driven by the desire to control over people, land, or both.
In the first case, state elites managed to monopolize access to land and large-
scale violence. Where land is abundant, or production is labor-intensive, translating
political power into economic power required control over people in a well-defined
territory. This fact incentivized direct involvement in the process of wealth cre-
ation—feudalism of all varieties, hydraulic empires, and slave plantations come to
mind (Domar 1970).
In the second case, state elites managed to acquire monopoly only over the
instruments of violence. This means those who sought to translate limited political
power into economic power had to content themselves with indirect control rights
over income from propertied producers in the form of tribute or service.
This poses a chicken-and-egg problem for ascertaining the sequence or the direc-
tion of causality in the emergence of effective political institutions and secure pros-
perity rights. It is important here to appreciate the pivotal role of context for
understanding the variations in the trajectories of political and economic institu-
tions. Let us briefly consider three views on the interface between political order
and economic order.
One perspective is the universalist thesis articulated by Acemoglu and Robinson
(2010, 2012). It argues that the universal desire of state builders to have a secure
economic base impels them to (a) subvert kin-based patrimonial political institu-
tions into absolutist ones, (b) seek to extend their control over non-kin by using a
combination of transcendent ideologies (such as Christianity or Islam) and milita-
ristic predation, and, therefore, (c) rely on exclusionary economic institutions and
unproductive predation both of which make the incipient state vulnerable to inces-
sant warfare and external capture.
Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) as noted earlier, rely on the distinction between
the exclusiveness and inclusiveness to show how history shaped the institutional
trajectories of nations. One pathway conceptualizes the transition toward inclusive-
ness as a product of the interactions between existing institutions and critical his-
torical junctures. This is so because, while extractive institutions permit
accumulation-driven growth, only inclusive institutions permit productivity-driven
growth.
Another line of thinking is that a combination of absolutism and weak centraliza-
tion foster fear of creative destruction, as in the cases of Ethiopia and the Ottomans.
Where absolutism coexists with strong centralization, it fosters either fully extrac-
tive institutions with some room for prosperity (China), or become extractive and
stagnationist (Spain). Furthermore, inclusionary political norms tend to promote
prosperity and pluralism (England after 1700).
1.5 Political Order and Prosperity 27
The universalist perspective offers various escapes from the vicious circle of
doubly-extractive institutions: a revolution (such as the Glorious Revolution or the
French Revolution) empowers both the capitalist and the working classes. Political
transformation may also be a product of judicious concessions by the ruling class
when the position of the working class becomes strong— as in the case of the
European settler colonies.
Institutional drift or random shocks can also create windows of opportunity
for significant change in favor of inclusion. Though less certain, change may
be a product of spillovers from other societies. This possibility is emblemized
by the positive externalities of the French Revolution on political openness in
Western Europe.
The most notable implication of this reading of political history is the strik-
ing affinity between exclusionary economic institutions and exclusionary politi-
cal institutions. Secure political control by new ruling classes inescapably favors
self-restraint by powerholders to give rise to productive and inclusionary economic
institutions. The latter, in turn, pave the way for the emergence of inclusionary polit-
ical institutions.
The second perspective is the rational-myopia thesis of state (de)formation
whose reasoning goes something like this. Given the chronic fragility of a nascent
state, privatization of security leads to descent to warlordism. Building extensive
instruments of coercion for the internal security of a narrowly-based regime, funded
by irregular plunder and regular economic rent, limits investment that would have
fueled sustained economic growth. It also repurposes the inherited technocratic
capabilities of the postcolonial state in ways that promote narrow interests (Besley
and Persson 2009; Bates 2009; Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2011). This reason-
ing, however, begs the question of what factors shape the prospects for transition,
when contingent opportunities arise, from fragility to robustness.
The third perspective is what may be dubbed the incompatibility thesis. The argu-
ment is that the rational state-builder faces a trilemma of sorts. Repression, economic
freedom, and political freedom are inherently incompatible. Only the following duo
can produce prosperity: repression with economic freedom, or political freedom with
economic freedom (Olson 1993). This means, there are few possible poltico-economic
settlements open to exclusionary political elites seeking to deploy a mix of positive
incentives (growth) and negative incentives (punitive repression for disloyalty).
The debate on the pathways out of the exclusionary trap boils down to an empiri-
cal question. With the specificities of the Afroasian state mind, we offer a fresh take
on the behavior of state elites which at best enjoyed a monopoly over violence but
certainly not a monopoly over economic assets. In this case, the desire of state
builders to have a secure economic base impelled them to rely on officeholding and
punitive campaigns to extract tribute from autonomous producers, rely on a network
of autonomous intermediary officeholders and tax farmers to collect tribute indi-
rectly and administer justice, and face an endemic see-saw in the power balance
between the great classes of wealth-redistributors and wealth-creators. This non-
absolutist (and less exploitative), territorially expansionist system nonetheless frus-
trated the emergence of cohesive states, inclusionary political institutions, and
28 1 The Making of the Modern Political Order
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Chapter 2
The Tributary-Civilizational State
There are many roads to political and economic development. In the ages of European
Discovery and Commerce, Afroasia was a pioneer in establishing centralized states,
albeit within loosely-defined territories which were occupied by culturally kindred
but diverse peoples. Post-feudal Europe was, however, the leader in forging a coher-
ent political order—comprising territorialized states, the rule of law, and functional
mechanisms of accountability. The West European state was one that successfully
monopolized large-scale violence (via a salaried professional army), established
robust central bureaucracies, honored the rule of law, and protected wealth creators
from myriad myopic redistributors under the cloak of officeholding.
The shared cultural heritage of a geographically compact Europe was deep-
veined enough to pave the way for industrialization and a global colonial project.
There are, however, many roads to heaven. A Eurocentric perspective on the history
of state formation, therefore, misses much of the rich political accomplishments of
such civilizational states as Ethiopia, the Islamic empire-states, China, and India.
I argue in this chapter that there is an impeccable logic for the non-territoriality,
decentralized delegation, and episodic economic growth of tributary civilizational
states. The expansive tributary politico-economic relation of Afroasia, founded on
extractive relations between overlords and tributors, turned out to be a more permis-
sive but also a structurally self-limiting mode of state formation than the European
mode of an intensive productive-cum-extractive relations among landlords, serfs,
and burghers.
2.1 The Feudal European Model of State Formation 33
Table 2.1 Sequences of the elements of modern political order and economic order
Region Political Sequences Economic Sequences
Western RL SC PG (stable) RI PR EG (stable)
Europe/China
East Asia, Russia, SC RL PG (stable) PR RI EG (stable)
Prussia
South. & East. SC PG1 RL PG2 PR EG1 RI EG2
Europe, India
European RL PG1 SC PG2 RI EG1 PR EG2
Offshoots
Rest of World PG1 SC RL PG2 EG1 PR RI EG2
Sources and Notes: Author
Political order: SC state capacity, RL rule of law, PG political governance (accountability)
Economic order: PR property rights, RI regulation and social insurance, EG economic governance
Institutional affinity: SC with PR; RL with RI; and PG with EG
Economic history teaches us in this respect that there are four vehicles for the fusion
of political and economic power in pre-industrial class-based societies (Table 2.1).
They are: control over land, control over labor, control over long-distance trade, and
control over the meager economic surplus of the smallholder, the craftspeople, the
pastoralist, or all three.
The feudal version of the European model of political order was one that relied on
control over land and water (and the scarce labor to work it) and control over trade
via towns and seaports. The hydraulic version of the Asiatic model of political order
was one that relied on control over land in river valleys and on mobilizing the readily-
available labor surplus to man the irrigation works. The generalized Afroasian model,
with a widely diffused access to land, had to content itself with an arm’s-length cap-
ture of the social surpluses of autonomous and far-flung wealth producers.
State builders need to be mindful of the conditions for a sustainable generation
of appropriable (redistributable) surplus over subsistence needs. They also had to
respect normatively acceptable forms and levels of appropriation. Impunity in extra-
economic coercion by rulers enraged farmers, herders, and traders enough to sup-
port rebels as a rebuke to imprudent rulers.
34 2 The Tributary-Civilizational State
Even then, appropriators had to find the right way to distribute the captured
e conomic surplus among political allies to ensure loyalty as well as to minimize
damage to wealth creation. Much like unionized factory workers, deeply disgrun-
tled peasants and merchants are known to ‘go on a strike’ by producing little above
subsistence requirements. After all, what is not produced cannot be siphoned off by
politicians-turned-administrators. Alternatively, producers invested in weapons to
resist recalcitrant overlords—domestic as well as foreign.
These considerations provide us with important clues about the high predisposi-
tion of tributary societies for internal strife and their high vulnerability to geopoliti-
cal conflict. A myopic but defeatist response to political insecurity is to coalesce
into smaller, cohesive groups organized around clan, ethnicity, race, or religious
sect. An expansive, but probably viable, example is to establish something resem-
bling a papal state or a caliphate. The Western and the Eastern Roman empires and
the Islamic Caliphates are cases in point. In the case of the latter, the sovereign was
responsible only for defense and the execution of Islamic laws. Whenever rulers
break this delimitation of authority between state and society, they raise the specter
of illegitimacy and rebellion.
The canonical European model is associated with feudalism (Box 2.2), a politico-
economic system with imperial authority over decentralized lordships which
monopolize land ownership and the administration of justice over mainly enserfed
but also free populations. This system eventually allowed for significant increases in
land productivity over smallholder peasant agriculture, the establishment of towns
and cottage industries, and enough centralization of political authority under the
crown. This arrangement facilitated the emergence of a modern political order.
The Western experience is associated with a transition from overreliance on
private militias to a standing professional army, from indeterminate tribute col-
lection and private debt to a predictable tax collection, from mindless predation
to judicious exploitation of wealth creators, and from reliance on crude coercion
to selective but wide-enough political representation. Tilly (1990: 76) summed
up the profound role of external wars in the non-linear process of European
state transformation with his justly famous quip: “War made the state, and the
state made war.”
Western Europe, of course, offers only one of many possible pathways toward a
territorial national state. The context was obviously quite different in that the early
incarnation of the state emerged in tandem with commercial capitalism and the
modern state emerged with industrial capitalism. The peculiarities include the fact
that social development took the form of household-based individualism rather than
from kin-based collectivism; inheritance was bilateral; exogamy was the norm; and
women had non-trivial rights to property.
State formation was also shaped by the emergence of countervailing institutional
actors—an autonomous Church, parliament, feudal estates, and corporate cities.
The dispersion of power centers eventually gave rise to progressively accountable
governments where economic freedom and rule-bound politics steadily became
deeply rooted.
2.1 The Feudal European Model of State Formation 35
The Eurasian, Asian, and Afroasian variants gave rise instead to a different kind
of state—a state that is tributary rather than territorial (Box 2.3). Such a state
needed to effect dual transitions to a modern national state: from a far-flung empire-
state ruling over myriad nationalities to an integrated multi-national state, and from
a tributary-military state relying on indirectly collected tributes to one relying on a
36 2 The Tributary-Civilizational State
directly mobilized revenue. That is, the “tributary-military state”1 was compelled to
employ strategies for capturing peasant and merchant surpluses given that it was
unable (or unwilling) to build up taxable productive capacity within a well-defined
core territory. Tribute-seeking, by favoring the redistributive extensive margin over
the productivity-enhancing intensive margin, proved to be a formidable impediment
in terms of both the size of the appropriable surplus and the resistance from the
producing classes against predation (Jacques 2012; Fukuyama 2012).
1
A fiscal-military state is used to refer to a state with a centralized bureaucracy which can impose
heavy taxation and mobilize long-term debt financing of prolonged wars. An efficient fiscal-military
state collects revenues by relying less on coercion than on cooperation to ensure that the productive
base of the economy is not harmed. Britain and Sweden are often cited as pioneers of this model in
the 17th and 18th centuries. An absolutist-military state, on the other hand, combines unchecked
monarchical power with militarism and a centralized bureaucracy. The Iberian monarchs of Spain
and Portugal are good examples. A “tributary-military state” is a state with a weak central bureau-
cracy, a small royal army, and overly dependent on tribute and militia-service obligations of its
subjects. The Afroasiatic states we study here are great examples of tributary militarism.
2.2 The Tributary Afroasiatic Model of State Formation 37
I push here, to the its limits, the analytical framework built around the nexus
between political contestation and the revenue base of the state to distinguish the
civilizational tributary-military state from the territorial-tax state. My primary
objective is to explain why only certain circumscribed trajectories of state formation
were open to Afroasian civilizational states. The selection of diverse case studies is
informed by the conceptual entry points of tributarism, surplus seeking, and politi-
cal entrepreneurship.
Table 2.2 Land and water institutions in the medieval afroasiatic world
Region Land tenure Taxation
Byzantium (527–1453): • Freehold peasants regulated • Freeholders and tenants
• Claim: all land belongs to by Farmer’s Law paid state taxes of all types
the crown. • Soldier-farmers on measured land
• Village or communal lands • Share tenancy on estate • Aristocracy paid land taxes
(pooled capital; dominant) lands—split-share with only
• Land was well-measured, landlord providing capital • Ecclesiastics were exempt
reasonably taxed, and • Imperial lands cultivated from most or all taxes
productively cultivated. variously by tenants,
slaves, and serfs
Mughal India (1526–1868); • Z: Freeholders turned into • Z1: Land tax fixed
British Raj (1858–1949): tenants permanently
• Zamindari landlord system • Z: Tenants also subject to • Z2: Land tax lasting
• Mahalwari village system labor and gift obligations 20–40 years
• Ryotwari individual • Freehold: village or • M: Village headman
freehold system individual forwards land revenue to
the treasury
Ottoman Empire, 1543–1923: • State lands (mawat and • State collects taxes and
• Islamic customary law, Urf miri), privately cultivated fees
• Ottoman Code of 1858 as share tenancy. • State collects non-tax
• Private freehold (mulk) revenues from its own
• Public land (waqf) lands
• Communal or clan lands • Waqf lands are free of state
(musha), pastures, and taxes
water resources
Gondar, 1550–1770: • Urban freehold • Taxation of long-distance
• Rule of ecclesiastical law: • Rist and communal for trade
• Fetha Negest peasanty • Tithe, fees, and gifts to
• Rist and Gult System • Gult for crown and emperor, kings and Ras.
religious institutions • Gult income rights to
appointees and grantees
Sources: Author (see text)
Z = Zamandari; M = Mahalwari
2.3 T
he Islamic Empire State: Ottomans, Safavids,
and Mughals
The Islamic gun-powder empires built by the Ottomans (c. 1400–1900), the Safavids
(c. 1500–1700), and the Mughals (c. 1550–1850) all shared many of the elements of
state building. These include the mastery of firearms to supplement or supplant
horse cavalry, and the masterful manipulation of a universalist Islamic ideology to
minimize the use of violence by obtaining a begrudging submission of far-flung
subject populations (Bertkay 1991). Ideological solidarity, in turn, tamed predatory
invaders into self-restrained administrators of rich lands.
More pertinent to our thesis, income rights were conditional on service to the
state. This was necessitated by the desire to work around feeble central bureaucra-
cies and to prevent the entrenchment of a hereditary elite. The lack of primogeniture
in determining succession, the fusion of mosque and state, and the chronic fiscal
crises all feed the propensity for territorial expansion in search of new tributors (see
Table 2.2 for a comparative profile).
40 2 The Tributary-Civilizational State
The Byzantine aristocracy, which was defined by its military character despite
a minority serving as judges and administrators, provided a template for the
post-medieval Ottoman state (Dale 2010). A notable institution was the pronoia
which temporarily transferred imperial fiscal rights from land or other sources
of revenue to state officials in exchange for public service—an arrangement
which gave the grantee conditional possession rather than outright ownership.
Unlike their Western counterparts, Byzantine military nobles were fully landed
and expected to pay taxes as proof of land rights. This non-feudal class, second
in importance to the biggest landowning class led by the Emperor himself,
included the aristocracy and the Church—comprising dioceses or parishes, and
later monasteries.
The great landed estates of the Byzantine heartland of Anatolia, withstand-
ing for long the incessant attacks across its borders (by Persians, Arabs, Slavs,
and Turks), eventually gave way to a system of free peasant farms whose rev-
enue base supported a functional local army to operate throughout the empire.
The Farmer’s Law governed land tenure as well as communal and contractual
obligations (Ashburner 1912; Gorecki 1981). This Law defined in impressively
modern terms the sanctioned relations between (free or bonded) peasants and
landlords and overlords. It also outlined the rights and obligations of wage labor-
ers, herdsmen, guardians of fruit plantations, merchants, tenant farmers, and
soldier-farmers.
Taxation was rationalized with a remarkably accurate system of land measure-
ment, and it was finely differentiated. Tax obligations fell entirely on landowners
rather than on tenants. Exemptions were granted to professional solders, members
of the militia, and the nobility.
In the end, the imperatives of war financing, predatory taxation, and the Black
Death jointly led to the demise of the empire in 1453. Between 1453 and 1526
(roughly coinciding with the incubation of an emirate out of the loose confed-
eration of the Ifat-Adal-Harrari sultanates in Eastern Ethiopia), three major
“Muslims empires” emerged on the ashes of the Greco-Roman and Persian civili-
zations (Dale 2010).
In the Mediterranean, an Ottoman empire was established under the Seljuk
Turks. In Iran, the Shi’a Safavid empire emerged with its state elites evincing a
Mongol background. In South Asia, Mongols and Turks (the Mughals) established
the Delhi Sultanate by imposing overlordship over fiercely independent and frac-
tious local Hindu tributaries until the British Raj took over in 1858.
The three empire-building elites were motivated primarily by redistributive wealth
accumulation. This was done through the three channels of the jizya tax imposed on
non-Muslims, taxes on agricultural production, and taxes on commerce. By estab-
lishing an extensive zone of Muslim sovereignty, they sought to acquire enough
wealth to ensure a life of comfort for the ruling elite, to expand the empire, and to
undertake grandiose projects for the glorification or the legitimation of the dynasty.
Following Byzantine precedents, the dominant economic strategy was to rely on
reasonable taxation and to preserve the family farm from fragmentation. Trade was
2.3 The Islamic Empire State: Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals 41
a prestigious activity, and all three empires strove to provide safe and efficient pas-
sage for long-distance commercial travelers. Exportable commodities such as silk,
spices, and silverware were highly coveted.
The shared mode of governance of these Turkic-Mongol rulers from Central Asia
is often characterized as “patrimonial-bureaucratic.” The Ottomans developed a
highly bureaucratic Eurasian2 slave empire; the Safavid were the least bureaucratic;
and the Mughals occupied a middle position in the Weberian spectrum. Under the
Ottomans, the distinction between the military class and the producer class was the
sharpest in newly conquered territories much of which became state lands (mir). As
in the case of the Mughals, Muslim rulers could not establish a permanently-rooted
local bureaucracy the farther one goes from the Center. However, imperial domina-
tion was accepted wherever it was seen by the distant tributors as a provider of a
public good, i.e., a force for peace and order.
Emperor Akbar, the founder of the Mughal Empire, reserved the most fertile
areas as Crown lands while parceling out much of the remainder to the officer class
which was regularly rotated. The officer class, in turn, had to devote a good portion
of its allotment as temporary holdings (mansab) for the support of the military con-
tingents. The defeated Rajput chiefs were also allowed to retain a portion of their
lands as well as their autonomy only if they consented to loyally serve the regime.
These practices are uncannily like those of the Christian Ethiopian empire of the
same period with respect to newly incorporated regions.3
The Ottomans taxed agriculturalists, pastoralists, some timar-holders, and long-
distance traders—later with the help of tax farmers. Modeled on the pronoia, the
Ottoman timar (and iqa) was a conditional grant that temporarily transferred impe-
rial tax or tribute rights (from land, customs, fishing, hunting) to an individual or an
institution. These grants may be long-term, but ownership remained imperial.
Military districts were run by officers who served as tax collectors and admin-
istrators with the right to keep a portion of the tax is in lieu of a salary. Soldiers
also received livelihood entitlements to incomes from small towns as well as funds
from the central treasury to support the cavalry. Where the centralizing Sultans
were energetic, fiefs were replaced by salaries in cash or kind. Where the Sultans
were weak, grant-holders evolved into autonomous tributaries or even regional
family dynasties.
Unlike the case of the isolated Gondarine state, the global reach of the Ottoman
empire-state compelled it to be responsive to economic transformation in Europe
during the Commercial and the Industrial revolutions. The merchant class served as
2
By ‘Eurasian,’ we refer to the world of the Eastern Church which encompassed European and
Neareastern regions where Orthodox Christianity and later Islam coexisted. The term ‘Afroasian’
will be used here to include northeastern Africa (mainly Egypt and Ethiopia) and the worlds of
Constantinople and the Islamic empires of the Ottomans, Persia and the Mughals.
3
The striking similarities among Ethiopia, Eurasia, and Afroasia in nomad-settler relations, the
military administration and punitive land dispossession in newly conquered lands, and the largely
indirect mode of surplus and militia mobilization will be presented in the next two chapters.
42 2 The Tributary-Civilizational State
The contemporary contender of the civilizational Islamic states was the Christian
Gondarine State of Ethiopia which was distinctively tributary. While it seems excep-
tional from its African and Western Asian peers, it shared most of their fundamental
features. However, it notably lacked gun-power capability.
The two successor dynasties of the maritime empire of Axum, the Zagwe and the
Solomonid in the first half of the second millennium, left important institutional
legacies on which subsequent Ethiopian states could build. The post-medieval
Ethiopian state went through four distinct stages of evolution over the subsequent
700 years: Wollo-Shewa (c. 1270–1520), interregnum 1, Gondar (c. 1550–1770),
interregnum 2, and Shewa (1889–1974).
This pedigreed inheritance included a core people in the central highlands with a
supra-tribal consciousness to legitimize a pan-Ethiopian state, a uniting ideology
provided by Eastern Orthodox Christianity (peddling a spiritual manifest destiny,
the sanctity of royal authority, and a written code as a source of ecclesiastical as
well as secular laws as interpreted by the Emperor). This was capped by an exagger-
ated claim of Semitic heritage which provided an aura of cosmopolitanism, a largely
landed peasantry subject to overlordship by Church and State. More importantly for
4
By mid-1800, the archaic timar system was abolished, and the military organization was central-
ized and salaried. The administration of the waqf was also centralized and excess holdings trans-
ferred to the Crown. The Tanzimat (ordering) proclamation of 1839 initiated a period of reforms
which climaxed with the announcement of a written constitution in 1876 as well as a parliament.
Mohammad Ali, who ruled Egypt under Ottoman tutelage during the first half of the 1800s, mod-
ernized Egypt by building a hyper-militarized state, raised farm productivity, nurtured a secular
civil service and the army, introducing advanced education and health services, and launching an
import-substituting industrialization. His successors, especially Khedive Ismail built railway lines,
harbors, bridges and the Suez Canal before the British made Egypt and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan
colonies until the mid-1900s (Maddison 2007).
2.4 The Precolonial African State I: Gondar 43
the economic base, a plow-based mixed farming economy dominated cereal and
livestock production in the central highlands. A world-class culture (cuisine, music,
and art) is adorned by an equally sophisticated indigenous Geez script and literature
that is unique in Africa (Tamrat 1972; Levine 2000, 2001; Isaac 2012).
As I explain in the next chapter, the most important institutional legacy for state
formation came in the form of overrights to tributary income. The overrights were
granted to the Crown’s regional administrators and soldiers in lieu of a salary from
the poorly-resourced central treasury. The well-established Ethiopian Orthodox
Church, and the provincial kings and lords enjoyed a high degree of autonomy from
the emperor. This means religion and region were the two primary anchors of politi-
cal identification. Non-primogenitor smallholder farms in the highlands and com-
munal agro-pastoral systems in the predominantly Muslim lowlands produced a
combination of producer autonomy, land fragmentation, and a lackluster class
consciousness.
One legacy that successor states failed to hold on to was secure access to the Red
Sea which had made Axum a cosmopolitan seafaring empire which was fully inte-
grated with the worlds of the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. The spread
of Islam into the interior regions of the Horn of Africa from the tenth century on
predictably gave birth to several Muslim principalities in the lowlands which frus-
trated reliable access to the ports along the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
Much like Orthodox Christianity, the unifying power of a pan-tribal Islam
enabled the various principalities to coalesce politically to mount incessant raids on
nearby non-Muslim communities in search of pasture and new converts. This drive
culminated in an Ottoman-supported, decade-and-half-long occupation of much of
the non-Muslim highlands in the first half of the 1500s.
Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi’s jihad managed to destroy in less than two decades
much of the Ethiopia’s literary, architectural and cultural heritage. It also resulted in
forced resettlements of Christian farmers in isolated and defensible uplands or the
malaria-ridded and otherwise less hospitable lowlands (Trimingham 1965; Henze
2000). The destruction of churches, the forced mass conversions and re-conversions,
the widespread looting of smallholder property by the soldiers of fortune, and the
resultant paranoia rendered the Church even more isolationist, prone to internecine
doctrinal conflict, overly conservative, and immobile.
The classic but temporary triumph of Muslims over Christians and pastoralists
over farmers turned out to be a pyrrhic victory of mutual destruction. The loose
confederation of Islamic principalities under the Adal state virtually disappeared by
1600. It subsequently took the Christian state the better part of the sixteenth century
to recover from the mayhem.
The final straw was the massive invasion and migration to the heartland of the
agro-pastoral Oromo from the southern borderlands, especially during 1550–1700
(Bahriy 2002; Pankhurst 1997, ch. 24). The relentless penetration of the settled
historic provinces by the stateless Oromo clans, much like the movements into set-
tled society by the Mongols and the Manchu of Central Asia, shaped Ethiopia’s
demographics and state formation in important respects. It bifurcated the Abyssinian
heartland along a north-south axis.
44 2 The Tributary-Civilizational State
5
Although Gondar the town was exceptional in becoming a permanent capital with impressive
castles, the meager surplus of the smallholder could not be supplemented by income from a good
access to the global trading network (unlike the case of the Islamic empires). With a population of
60,000 in 1700, the accounts of travelers consistently suggest that Gondar was far from an urban
commercial-industrial center. It was hardly comparable even to provincial towns in contemporary
North Africa or the Middle East. As Gamst (1970) suggests, Ethiopia did not manage to develop
the material basis for developing urban centers which could last to the present era.
6
This is not to suggest that the country became a complete intellectual wasteland. For example,
Zara Yaecob’s philosophical Treatise or Hattata (written in Geez in 1667) is now favorably com-
pared with later works of Descartes and Locke in its commitments to rationality and the power of
reason that is normally associate with the European Enlightenment. Zara Yaecob’s precociously
modern liberal views on such fundamental questions as the indefensibility of slavery, the defensi-
bility of the equality of religions, and the equality of the sexes are quite remarkable (Sumner 1976).
2.5 The Precolonial African State II: Asante, Kongo, and Dahomey 45
Central authority inevitably waxed and waned as the emperors tried to gain lever-
age over the nobility as well as over the soldiers of fortune by employing several
stratagems. The most reliable instrument involved nurturing a meritocratic system
for recruiting tenaciously loyal servants, especially those “raised from dust.”7 Another
method was to decouple control over land routes and trade routes from control over
office-holding. This way, powerful members of the aristocracy and the nobility are
turned into appointed state officials who can be shifted at will from office to office
(promotion-demotion) or from region to region to prevent them from acquiring pow-
erful political bases. The third, strategic political marriages and c oncubinage, served
as a deterrent against the buildup of strong lineages. This innovation seems to be all-
too-often lost on many contemporary political commentators.
Enhancing the productivity of the estates of the nobility and the smallholder at
the Center could not, however, be sustained since the power centers (the Crown, the
nobility, or the heterogeneous landed peasantry) were not always decisively hege-
monic. Gondar tragically fell into an insidious power struggle and low-intensity civil
wars during a momentous century in world economic history. Between the death of
Iyasu II (1755) and the crowning of Tewodros II (1855), state collapse led to uncon-
trolled predation of the borderlands and pillage of the highland smallholder became
the norm. The incessant redistributive contests among state elites in the heartlands
of the empire, therefore, hold the key for a fuller appreciation of the self-limiting
nature of tributarism with respect to prosperity and state consolidation alike.
2.5 T
he Precolonial African State II: Asante, Kongo,
and Dahomey
7
Two illustrious such leaders in the Court of Menelik II are Fitawrari Habte Giorgis Dinegde
(1851–1926) and Dejazmatch Balcha Safo (1863–1936).
46 2 The Tributary-Civilizational State
Some empires and kingdoms, such as Mali, were justly infamous for their large
towns or small- to medium-size cities (Coquery-Vidrovitch 2005). Regardless of
economic organization, political or social identity had more to do with membership
in family, kinship groups, or language group than in being a resident of a given
jurisdiction. African domestic slaves augmented the labor power of their masters’
extra-subsistence production. Here are three illustrative examples.
The Kongo state (1390–1914) encompassed modern-day Angola and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo. An independent state from about 1390 to 1891, and a vassal
state of Portugal subsequently, the Kongo monarchy was abolished upon the
Portuguese victory against the Kongo revolt of 1914.
By the end of the sixteenth century, Kongo’s population was probably close to
half a million people in the core provinces. Its capital city of Mbanza Kongo showed
evidence of a high degree of centralization with 100,000 residents around
1500 A.D. This allowed resources, soldiers, and surplus foodstuffs to be readily
available at the request of the king.
2.5 The Precolonial African State II: Asante, Kongo, and Dahomey 49
The Kingdom of Kongo is arguably one of the most sophisticated states in Africa
south of the Sahara. It was a mix of a centralized state united by a syncretic
Catholicism faced fierce competition over succession to the throne at the Center
(members of the royal council as well as the top echelon of the Church hierarchy)
and periodic challenges to central authority from distant governors and tributary
principalities in the Periphery.
The economic base of the Kongo state was multifaceted. It boasted an exten-
sive trading network. The state exploited mineral resources and ivory. Residents
also engaged in manufacturing of copperware, ferrous metal goods, raffia cloth,
and pottery. These skills also show up in remarkably sophisticated artifacts
(Fromont 2017).
Like its contemporary precolonial counterparts, Kongo also relied on tribute-
based revenue from communal-land assignments (renda) and forest products to
finance its bureaucracy and military. The latter was supplemented by mass levy and
European mercenaries. Tributarism also encouraged expansionist wars on neigh-
bors in search of land and loot. Enslaved captives were valuable assets as loyal
soldiers and as exportables which attracted steady Portuguese penetration, and
eventual colonization, of the Kingdom (Lamphear 2016).
gain access to the Atlantic coast. This feat enabled it to engage in trade (in gold bars,
cocoa, and kola nuts) with Europeans to buttress its staples base of maize and root
crops. The Asante Union was eventually folded into the Gold Coast colony.
Much like its contemporaries in West Africa and Central Africa, the Ashanti (aka
Ashanti) Kingdom was remarkably centralized in its administration but with de
facto checks and balances provided by organized interests in the society. They also
relied on enslaved captives to staff the domestic economy as well as to engage in the
Atlantic slave trade. Just as importantly, the royal house supplemented its trade-
based revenue by tributes and taxes on the smallholder population. This strategy
enabled the Union to appease political competitors, expand into less-defended
neighbors, and challenge external invaders until it was finally overcome by the vora-
cious British Empire (McCaskie 2003).
alliances with foreign forces in exchange for weapons and diplomatic recognition.
The imperatives of loot-seeking also intensify predatory expeditions to peripheral
regions in search of precious metals, forest products and slaves thereby distorting
the process of state building and pauperizing neighboring peoples. The endemic
wars at home and incessant conflict with foreign invaders end up perpetuating a
weak state and a subsistence economy.
The economic base of a subsistence economy, especially if buffeted by revenue
from long-distance trade, may sometimes be adequate to support the institutional-
ization of a modern administrative and military bureaucracy. This presupposes con-
trol over a well-defined territory and substantial inroads toward the creation of a
citizenry with a shared political culture through assimilationist institutions. This
vital political task was undertaken by some of the rump states of the Islamic empires
and the Ethiopian Shewan State, but only after 1941 (see Chap. 4 for details). By
then, the external threat virtually disappeared for most under collective security
guarantees while the internal threat faced by exclusionary regimes continues to
loom large to this day.
What about the mechanism that links tributarism to the prospects of economic
development? A compellingly causal mechanism I explore below goes form ecol-
ogy and geography to endemic wars and underdevelopment. The proximity
between sedentary agriculturalists and transhumant agro-pastoralists creates
incentives especially for the latter to engage in hit-and-run battles in search of
loot and pasture. Repeated attacks by highly mobile barbarians on cities and large
villages have historically disrupted the political equilibrium between tributors
and tributaries.
Upstarts also rationally engage in unrestrained rent-seeking to build up a war
chest against rivals which inevitably triggers an arms race. The wealth-producing
class is impelled to allocate a good portion of its resources to investment in defense
while the extractors do likewise with judicious investment in the instruments of
war and coercion. Talented individuals from modest backgrounds historically pre-
ferred to join the priesthood, the soldiery, or the Court as clerks or even servants.
This vicious cycle weakens the state further and, unless a hegemon emerges
quickly, it makes the fragile state vulnerable to incorporation into another empire
or total dissolution.
In the end, insecure producers resort to subsistence production. They also ratio-
nally invest in various forms of defense against gratuitous predation. As Bates
(2009) shows, physically insecure communities (as in pastoralist-cultivators in
Northern Kenya and South Sudan as well as Gamo-Gofa and Illubabor) rationally
choose limit wealth accumulation or remain poorer than they can as a a cruel deter-
rence against predictable predators.
This hit-and-run extractive mechanism ensures a Malthusian trap that is
ensconced in a political trap of tributaries. Played over and over throughout central
Asia and much of Africa, this dynamic explains the bias toward underdevelopment
in these societies. Without rootedness in their hinterland populations, sound fiscal
systems, and effective military organization, tributary states could at best reproduce
themselves. They needed to be jolted by auspicious external shocks to transmute
themselves into superior politico-economic equilibria.
52 2 The Tributary-Civilizational State
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Part II
Three Ethiopian Tributary States
Chapter 3
The Gondarine Tributary-Military State
This chapter provides a critical analysis of the suggestive but largely descriptive
literature on Ethiopian agrarian history in search of an explanation for why war
makes and then unmakes the tributary state. Using the theoretical framework devel-
oped in Chap. 1 for thinking about the dynamics of transition from a civilizational-
state to a territorial state, I explore the self-limiting but functional rist and gult land
institution of Ethiopia. This politico-economic institution and the hostile external
climate together conspired against the metamorphosis of the Gondarine state (GS)
into a territorially-defined tax state (Table 3.1 for a comparative summary). However,
Gondar provided a template for a modern Ethiopian state that compares quite favor-
ably with its Afroasian peers.
The 250-year-old Gondarine state was the inheritor of three illustrious legacies: (i)
the institutional heritage of Axum (as refined by the Zagwe and Solomonid emper-
ors), (ii) the emergence of Islam as a political force spearheaded by the Ottoman
empire encircling a predominantly (two-thirds) Christian Ethiopia (hence, the apt
metaphor of a ‘Christian island in a sea of Islam’), and (iii) the massive insertion of
Oromo pastoralists into the central highlands on the wake a devastating jihad against
the Christian state. By the time the state regained its footing around 1550, GS found
itself stuck between a rock (incessant contest with neighboring Muslim kingdoms)
and a hard place (endemic contests among state elites and between them and a pre-
dominantly landed peasantry).
The maritime empire of Axum, which was no more by the end of the first millen-
nium, provided the template for the successor Ethiopian states (Tamrat 1972; Levine
2000; 2001; Isaac 2012). They included a core people with a supra-tribal political
consciousness to be loyal to a sovereign state; a uniting ideology provided by
Eastern Orthodox Christianity; the notion of the sanctity of royal authority; a writ-
ten code as a source of ecclesiastical as well as secular laws; a national mythology
of Semitic heritage which provided an aura of cosmopolitanism and legitimacy for
the imperial throne1; a landed peasantry subject to overlordship by a Church-State;
a plow-based mixed farming economy; and a world civilization.
Axum’s legacies also included overrights to tributary income, due the imperial
Crown being granted to its administrators and soldiers in lieu of salary. The well-
established state-church as well as the mostly hereditary provincial kings and lords
enjoyed a high degree of autonomy from the emperor. This reality effectively made
religion and region the two primary sources of political identification. The predomi-
nantly smallholder land tenure and agricultural systems of the highlands produced
an adequate economic surplus to support a ruling class.
Ser’ate mengist (state), inspired by the rough template provided by the well-
spring of the remarkably cosmopolitan institutions of Axum, revolved around the
royal court (alga).It was nonetheless constrained by competing intermediaries
(local nobles, dynastic families, Church/Mosque notables, and other retainers) with
a capacity to credibly mete out disruptive violence. The crucial institution of orderly
succession was, therefore, absent. The balance of forces rather than the incumbent’s
designation held sway.The Court, a far cry from an autonomous bureaucracy, intro-
duced a state language (Amharic) with the rise of Amde-Tsion I at the beginning of
the fourteenth century (Crummey 1988).
This rich political culture subsequently underwent five distinct phases of politi-
cal evolution in the second millennium: the Zagwe state (960–1270), the Wollo-
Shewan state (1270–1570), the Gondarine state (1650–1770), and the Shewan state
(1889–1974). In each case, agro-ecology favored unfettered smallholder access to
land. It also cemented a path-dependent fusion of extractive economic institutions
(tribute-seeking in the center and predation in the periphery) and exclusionary polit-
ical institutions (monopoly over overlordship titles and appointments).
1
For an interesting comparative look at the civilizational forms of a Sinicized Japan and a
semitized Ethiopia, see Levine (2001). He examines the common features, along with nuanced dif-
ferences, of the two countries thusly: receptive insularity, idealization of an alien culture, sacral-
ization of an imperial homeland, parochialization, religious pluralism, political decentralization,
hegemonic warrior ethos, and hierarchical particularism. Parenthetically, mid-nineteenth century
Japan had a literacy rate comparable to Europe, well-developed transport and tax systems, com-
mercialized agriculture, and agro-processing workshops that supplied manufactures to a growing
urban economy.
60 3 The Gondarine Tributary-Military State
GS was both a contemporary and a variant of the Afroasiatic mode of state for-
mation in the Red Sea and its western littoral. We take up here the intriguing ques-
tion in Ethiopian political and economic history: Why did the post-Jihad Christian
Abyssinian state, anchored in Gondar, fail to transform from a respectable tributary-
military state into a tax-based, territorial national state by integrating the myriad
kindred polities within its tributary reach?
Various explanations can be gleaned from the thin literature on Ethiopian nation-
state formation. Factors invoked include centuries-old isolation born of encircle-
ment by a hostile Ottoman Empire and later by European colonialists (mainly Italy
and Great Britain), political fragmentation resulting mainly from non-navigable
rivers and erosion-prone watersheds bordered by unforgiving hot and dry steppes,
and unbridled rent-seeking by state elites who were impelled to squander the scarce
resources on internecine warfare and public feasting to the detriment of productive
wealth accumulation.
Our working hypothesis is as follows:
Building a nation-state entails developing a centralized bureaucracy and a professional
army, and for power-holders to accede to reciprocal restraints (through autonomous Crown
Councils, Constitutions, and a multiplicity of manageable power centers) to pave the way
for accountability to the ruled. Tributarism, as a form of rent-seeking, is an efficient form of
financing a self-reproducing state wherever state elites are unable to monopolize access to
land and trade. However, tributarism is also self-limiting since it relies on indirect rule and
puts a high premium on perennial extractive contests over smallholder surplus. By under-
mining the emergence of an autonomous farmer class or a business class, endemic predation
stunts the fiscal basis of the state and undermines its legitimacy. This would explain the
failure of the historic Ethiopian state of Gondar to pave the way for the emergence of a full-
fledged nation-state.
not substantially deviate from the subsistence level (as in the case of densely-popu-
lated Egypt or South Asia). However, where land is abundant and labor scarce, labor
cost is likely to be high since the opportunity cost (the foregone income from being
an owner-cultivator) sets a high wage floor. Landlords, state or private, then have a
strong incentive to enserf peasants by tying them to the land and enforcing this abso-
lutist control by monopolizing both landownership and the instruments of violence.
The abundance of land and a moderately dense population in the core highland
provinces of GS trailblazed a third route of an independent smallholder peasanty
becoming the norm of the agrarian system. Unable to monopolize access to land and
even weapons, GS and its predecessors had little no choice but to make unprece-
dented concessions on land ownership to the peasantry but also to redress this by
making bewilderingly purpose-specific claims of tribute (with such ridiculous
excuses as peasant obligations to host itinerant visits, to pay bird taxes, and even
contribute the costs of weddings and funerals). What makes this system of overlord-
producer contest economically damaging is not, however, the rate of exploitation
per se (since it is much lighter than feudalism or hydraulism) but the capriciousness
of the obligations (Pankhurst 1966; Abegaz 2005).
It bears repeating that a viable state must meet four conditions to impose its will on
domestic society and to defend itself against external aggression. The first condition
is a solid fiscal base either through decentralized revenue mobilization by delegating
authority to private actors (tax farmers, fief holders, or lenders) albeit at the risk of
loosening control, or through a centralized bureaucracy. The second requirement is
attaining a monopoly over large-scale violence either by contracting out to private mil-
itaries or by establishing a state-funded professional army. The third is internal legiti-
macy or popular consent which can be obtained through a mix of patronage, cultural
solidarity, the provision of public goods and services, support for economic growth,
and power-sharing with regional communities. And, the fourth condition is external
legitimacy that is earned by devising an effective deterrence against aggressors.
Gondarine state re-builders faced two sets of structural challenges concerning
these requirements. They needed a robust defence against recurrent invasions by the
Ottomans or their surrogates. So, the emperors had to organize a core of imperial troops.
Monarchs also had to manage effectively the internal competition for power and
wealth among innumerable family dynasties. They had to fend off constant chal-
lenges to the Crown from competing political houses, and ensure that office-holders
transfer to the imperial treasury a sufficient portion of the revenue collected from
independent farmers, traders, and tributary principalities in the near abroad.
They needed to protect international trade which was essential for acquiring
arms (swords, helmets, spearheads, muskets) and prestige goods (silk products,
2
A reasonable rendering into Amharic of the tributary-military settlement is “gult sireet-sir’at”
since the gult income over-right defines the core of landholder obligations to the state, and Sira’t
means state administration which includes both civilian and military components.
62 3 The Gondarine Tributary-Military State
church vests and umbrellas, and carpets). The emperors participated in the trade
through royal agents and collected revenue from it through taxation. Caravan routes
radiated mainly from southwestern Ethiopia—a main source of slaves, ivory, gold,
wax, civet, khat, and coffee (Abir 1980; Pankhurst 1998; Wolde Aregay 1984).
GS, like its contemporary Afroasian peers, was quintessentially tributary rather
than territorial. It was also militaristic and top-down authoritarian by necessity. GS
was a tributary-military state. Such a state was neither bureaucratic nor absolutist. It
was rather a decentralized entity relying on church-based legitimacy inter-elite
intrigue, marriage alliances, and occasional punitive expeditions to keep itself viable.
Ethiopia took a good century after the demise of GS to forge the broad outlines of a
modern state, including a recognizably contiguous territory, and a relatively central-
ized administration on the heels of a ruthless competition among regional lords
reduced the number of autonomous regional kingdoms from 25 in 1800 to 4 in 1900.
A tributary state must undergo dual transitions to a modern national state: from
a far-flung loose empire state ruling over myriad nationalities to an integrated
national state, and from a tributary-military state that relies on indirectly collected
tributes to finance its wars to a bureaucratically mobilized revenue base. That is, the
tributary-military state is compelled to employ decentralized and inefficient strate-
gies for capturing peasant and merchant surpluses (through title-holders, revenue
farmers, punitive expeditions, and the like) rather than to build up taxable produc-
tive capacity within a well-defined core territory, and fiscalizing it moderately in
exchange for providing security and basic public services.
The spread of Islam into the interior regions of the Horn of Africa in the second
millennium gave rise to several Muslim principalities thereby endangering reliable
access to the ports along the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Just as importantly, the
incessant raids on nearby non-Muslim communities (mostly Agew, Oromo, and
Sudanic) culminated in an Ottoman-sponsored occupation of the Christian state in
the early 1500s (Fig. 3.1). The classic but temporary triumph of lowlander-Muslim
over highlander-Christian, of nomads over farmers, turned out to be short-lived but
with long-lasting adverse consequences for both communities.
The Oromo penetration of the historic provinces subsequently shaped the
Gondarine state in at least three important respects. It suspended Pax Ethiopica until
1900 by bifurcating the Abyssinian provinces into the Gondarine and later the
Shewan ruling houses. In due course, the culturally assimilated Oromo ruling
houses emerged in the districts, most notably the Mammadoch of central districts of
Wollo and the Yeju of northeast the province of Wollo, which paved the way for a
protracted civil war that lasted nearly a century (1770–1855). Other Oromo clans
mastered the art of statecraft and co-founded a number of kingdoms with the con-
quered Omotic, Nilotic, and Sidama peoples in the south-western highlands (Abir
1968; Hassen 1990; 2017). We will explore the political significance of these coun-
terfactual developments in the next chapter.
The traditionally roving Christian emperors moved to the northwest periphery
and established a permanent capital in the Gondar region toward the end of the six-
teenth century. The favored technique of territorial expansion was the establishment
of military colonies which served as core populations from which Aksumite high
culture, a Semitic language, and Christianity spread. The military colonies as well
3.2 Gondar as a Tributary-Military State 63
Table 3.3 Fiscal, military, and administrative systems of Gondar and its successors
Attribute of the Gondarine, c. Revolutionary.
modern state 1570–1770 Shewan, 1889–1974 1975–2015
Centralization of • No bureaucracy • Progressively • Hyper-centralization
revenue collection • Crown lands, trade centralizing • Hyper-nationalization
taxes and tributes • Crown lands, and of property
• Fiscal state nontax revenues
Centralized, • Palace troops • Palace guards • Professional,
professional Army • Militia of regional • State military ethnicized military
lords • Militia of • Regional and local
• Peasant militia regional lords police forces
Domestic legitimacy • Common culture • Cultural diversity • Cultural diversity
• Public goods • Public goods • Public goods
• Patronage (esp. • Patronage provision
state offices, or (especialy, • Patronage to party
shumet) shumet) loyalists
External legitimacy • Deterrence • Deterrence • Deterrence
• Adeptness in • Colonial, League • U.N. system of
forming alliances & U.N. system sovereignty
State-society balance • Weak state • Moderate state • Strong state
• Strong society • Weakening • Weakened society
society
Source: Author
kings and lords, being a de facto military aristocracy, enjoyed an uneasy autonomy
from the king of kings (the Neguse-Negest) which made religion and region impor-
tant sources of political identification. Control over military assets was thus pivotal
for challenging higher authority, enforcing tributary payments on the peasantry, and
raiding the periphery for booty and expanded tributary clients. This system per-
sisted until World War II and, as Perham puts it rather vividly (Perham 1969: 163),
“It might almost be said that every large-scale campaign in Ethiopia had some of the
features of a civil war.”
The arms race could be broadly construed to include control over well-trained
central troops, the militia under the control of the nobility, and conscripted small-
holder. The citizen militia participated with its own weapons and provisions—
mobilizable in times of conflict which often lasted 1 or 2 months. Unlike many of
its European counterparts of the same period, Gondarine high offices were not
secure enough to be sold for cash to the highest bidder. Nor was there a class of
urban-based, rich financiers to debt-finance wars.
Central authority waxed and waned as the emperors tried to gain leverage over
the nobility, often reduced to the status of ordinary soldiers of fortune, by employ-
ing several stratagems. The most reliable institution involved, as noted earlier, nur-
turing a meritocratic system for raising loyal servants hailing from distant districts
or modest backgrounds. There is nothing novel in this practice which dates from at
least the Zagwe dynasty. Going into service was also an important channel for the
upward mobility of ambitious individuals of humble origin in Europe and Eurasia.
Another strategy was to decouple control (through ownership or overrights to
tribute) from appointive office-holding by making the latter non-hereditary. This
way, powerful members of the aristocracy (mekwanint) and the nobility (mesafint)
are turned into appointed state officials (shumamint) who can be shifted at will from
office to office (promotion-demotion or shum-shir) or region to region to prevent
them from cementing powerful political bases. The third was strategic political mar-
riages and concubinage to cultivate wide-ranging alliances which effectively served
as a deterrent to the buildup of strong lineages.3
It is, therefore, essential to have a good understanding of Ethiopia’s land institu-
tions since they have underpinned political power in the country from time imme-
morial. Ethiopia, in fact, provides a fascinating model of a tributary-military state
which ceded authority over uncentralizable and hence indeterminate state revenue
base to titled office-holders in exchange for state service (Abegaz 2005).
3
The longstanding practice transcended not just ethnicity but also religion. When Ahmad Gragn
entered Hadya in the 1520s, the number one complaint made to him was the humiliation involved
in having to deliver an annual tribute of Muslim brides and concubines to the Christian Court. In
later periods, the wives of some of the most fanatical Christian emperors (notably Tewodros II and
Yohannes IV) came from Muslim or nominally Christian families. More tellingly, many Christian
mothers of the imams of the Mammadoch clan of Wollo groomed their sons for leadership by send-
ing them to church schools (see Box 4.1). Mohamed Ali was a devout imam as the last head of the
Mammadoch and a devout builder of churches as Ras Mikael. The powerful Yeju families of the
nineteenth-century Wollo are so ethnically and religiously mixed (Ras Ali the Great and Ras Ali II,
both of whom reigned in Gondar and built Debre Tabor, come to mind) that it becomes absurd to
try to dichotomize their malleable identity in mutually exclusive Christian or Muslim, and Amara
or Oromo terms (Ahmed 2000; Ahmad 2003).
3.2 Gondar as a Tributary-Military State 67
The confusion about the land institutions of Ethiopia is understandable in the light
of the enormous variations emanating from the ever-changing balance of power
between producer and appropriator at the local level, the myriad mechanisms for
4
The gebbar institution in its narrow form emerged in Shewa and Wollo, the Amhara provinces
where the Oromo made significant inroads, in the latter part of the Gondarine period in these. The
agrarian system was later extended in a modified and harsher form to the southern provinces. The
concept of gebbar system is often misunderstood. In its generic meaning, gebbar meant a landed
payer of obligatory state fees, taxes, and services. So, technically, all rist-holders are gebbar (who
pay gult, tithe, and perform service--gibir) to the Emperor (the fictive owner of all land) or his
agents. In its narrow meaning, it refers to cultivators of land in militarily administered districts who
must meet both customary tribute obligations as well as extra-ordinary labor obligations until the
administrative system was normalized. In both senses, being a tenant or abandoning rist land frees
one of all the obligations (such as being obligated to significant corvee or even being bonded)
which is tied to the land. Only in labor-scarce regions and in the initial stages of conquest (since
soldiers and administrators cannot cultivate government-granted, in lieu of salary or maderya,
lands), do we observe people being compelled to cultivate the land and hand the bulk of the pro-
duce to the soldiers (neftegna). In this sense, the gebbar is neither a chisegna (renter) or a serf
(which, in addition to being tied to the land, has no personal freedom).
5
After reading my paper (Abegaz 2005), which argues against the feudal thesis and in favor of the
tributary thesis, Donald Crummey wrote me a long email noting that he is now convinced that the
tributary interpretation of Ethiopian agrarianism captures the Ethiopian system rather well.
68 3 The Gondarine Tributary-Military State
matching of income rights, and the plethora of state functions to which they are
dedicated. For our purposes here, it will suffice to focus on the big picture and on
the most recurrent forms of land tenure appropriate for a society where control over
the bundling of land and labor is the foundation of wealth and political power.
Land tenure (yemeret sireet) defines the producer-appropriator relationship
between the landowner and the socially-sanctioned residual claimant (usually the
producer or the entire community). The property right in land often comes in cir-
cumscribed forms, including the right to income (from own cultivation or lease-
hold), the right of use (usufruct), the right of transfer (by temporary gift or an
encumbered mortgage), and the right of alienation by gift or sale.
Tribute or gibir6 is an economic as well as a political relationship among a hierar-
chy of classes or estates—the state elite (bete-mengist), the Church elite (bete kahnat),
and the tribute-paying clans or polities (bete-seb or bihere-seb). Internal tributarism is
an institution that defines the relations between the endogamous soldier-patrician-
priestly overlords and the producer-plebian peasant, artisanal, or mercantile classes of
the core provinces. This mode of administration of the income and service rights of
the state is the defining feature of the much-maligned gebbar system.
The mode and intensity of extraction of surplus, in the form of tribute rather than
in the form of fixed taxes and fees, differed among the three historically distinct
geographies of power. In the old core provinces of the Gondarine state (Eritrea,
Tigray, Begemdir, Simien, Wolqait, Amhara, Wag-Shum, and Gojam), the polity
was defined by a securely landed peasantry (ristegna), a titled aristocracy, and a
well-endowed state-church. In the core regions of what later became the greater
Shewan state (Amhara, Wollo, Yeju, and modern Shewa), a mixture of rist, church
and monastery fief endowments, crown lands, and fiefs of imperial soldier-
administrators coexisted.
The endemic nature of large-scale violence is encapsulated in Table 3.4. As they
say, uneasy lies the head that wears the Crown.
The tributary provinces in the rest of the south, the east and the west existed
under a system of indirect rule conditional on annual tribute payments and militia
service to the imperial court. This was also the norm in relations with tributary poli-
ties in the periphery of the borderless empire. It effectively defined the arm’s-length
but a hierarchical relationship between the Court in Gondar and several autono-
mous, but not foreign, kingdoms and chiefdoms under the orbit of its authority and
culture area. Rebellious provinces in Greater Ethiopia were routinely subjected to
punitive dispossession of land and military administration as a harsh instrument of
deterrence (Levine 2000; Pankhurst 2012).
6
For our purposes here, “tribute” is construed as a regular and variable form of payment obligation
of a subject (or a tributary) to an agent (or a tributor) of the state. It has the following attributes: the
actual amount is not fixed (except for the tithe) although customary levels may exist; obligations
may take several forms (payments in cash or kind, customary gifts, and military and non-military
service, and the tributary (gebbar) may be an individual of any political rank, an organization, or a
self-governing dependency. A predictably known or fixed tax obligation (with a preset tax base and
tax rate) is not a tribute payment. So, the tithe (regardless of on whom the incidence falls) and vari-
ous transaction fees for public service are not tribute either. It is the contestable and negotiable
nature of the non-fixed ex-post tribute payment which makes it both inevitable in the early stages
of state formation and inherently indeterminate and, hence, uncertain.
3.2 Gondar as a Tributary-Military State 69
Table 3.4 Ethiopia: major external and civil wars fought, circa 1600–2000
Emperor/head Period External Wars Internal Wars Comments
GS 1. 1563– • Ottoman • Recovery from • Imperial guard
Sarsa-Dengel 1597 occupy port super- jihad established
of Massawa • Oromos overran • Garrisons in the
(D) Shewa, Enarya, Shewa-Enarya
Bale, Dawaro, moved to North
Damot and Shewa
GS 2. Susenyos 1607– • Attacks from • Incorporation of • Conversion to
1632 the Fung of Oromo warlords Catholicism
Sennar (V) into the nobility • Assimilation of
Oromo
GS 3. Fasiladas 1632– • No major • Doctrinal wars in • Gondar as imperial
1667 external response to capital
threat Catholicism • Restoration of
• Isolation of key Church
tributaries • Permanent capital,
1635
GS 4. Iyasu I 1682– • No major • Emergence of Gibe • Powerful praetorian
1706 external Oromo kingdoms guards
threat over the Enarya and • Rasses, Gibe-Keffa
Keffa tributaries kings, Wollo-Yeju
sheiks, Shewa
GS 5. Bekaffa 1721– • No major • Solomonic nobility • Stabilized then
1730 external loses crown largely disintegrated
threat to assimilated • Oromo elite
northern Oromo assimilation: Qwara,
elites Wollo, and Yeju
TR 1. Zemene 1769– • Egypt, as • Era of warring • Christology: Hulet
Mesafint 1855 successor of warlords for control Lidet (Tigray-Gojam)
(Warlordism) Ottomans, of the Crown Islam vs. Sost Lidet
occupies spreads in (Gondar-Shewa)
port of highlands • Northern trade-route
Massawa (D) decline
TR 2. Shewan 1813– • Egypt grabs • Consolidation of • Amhara-Oromo
Kingdom 1889 Harrar (V) Greater Shewa with melding
(Sahle Sellasie) a series of • Southward
skirmishes and expansion
alliances • New trade routes
TR 3. Kingdoms: 1830– • Egypt • Menelik’s • Autonomous
Oromo, Keffa, 1897 occupies expansion to fulfill kingdoms and
Harrar, Janjaro, & Harrar Ethiopia irrendenta sheikdoms either
Wolayta Emirate (D) • Conflicts among retained autonomy
• Italy at warlords and with with tribute or
Adwa (V) Menelik became provinces
• Scramble for
Africa (V)
TR 4. Tewodros 1855– • British • Expeditions to • Reunification of
II 1868 expeditiary Tigray, Wollo, Abyssinia by
mission to Shewa and Gojam defeating the lords of
Meqdella (D) seeking ruler the Gondarine
submission provinces
(continued)
70 3 The Gondarine Tributary-Military State
Table 3.4 (continued)
Emperor/head Period External Wars Internal Wars Comments
TR 5. Yohannes 1875– • Mahdist • Punitive expedi- • Muslims as fifth
IV 1889 invasion (V) tions to Shewa and column
• Italians at Gojam • Defending intl.
Dogali (V) borders
SS 1. Menelik II 1889– • Italy at • Greater Ethiopia • Modernizer in Shewa
1913 Adwa (V) via (re) incorpora- • Autonomy for
• Ethio-Somali tion: Wollega, tributaries
1 (V) Keffa, Sidamo, • Federation with
Bale, Arsi, Harrar, Eritrea
Ogaden. and Awssa • Ethiopia’s borders
recognized
SS 2. Haile 1930– • Italy • Woyane rebellion • Modernizer
Selassie I 1974 occupies (D) • Regional • Skillful foreign
• Italy insurgencies alliances
expelled (V) • Revolution • Reintegration of
• Ethio-Somali Eritrea
2 (V)
RS 1. Derg 1974– • Ethio-Somali • Eritrea & Tigrean • Nationalizations
1991 3 (V) rebellion • Military dictatorship
RS 2. EPRDF 1991– • Ethio- • Ogaden insurgency • Ethnic-based
Eritrean war • Ethnic clashes governance
(V) • Anti- “Shewan-
• Ethio-Somali Amara State”
4 (V)
Sources and Notes: Compiled by author from various sources. See Appendix 3.1 for details
Outcome: V =victory for Ethiopia, D=defeat for Ethiopia
State type: G=Gondarine (GS), S=Shewan (SS), R=Revolutionary (RS), TR=Transitional period
For our purposes here, we need only focus on six dominant bundles of land
rights, each with a well-defined political role. Rist (kinship-based), Private freehold
(individual), Corporate (tribal or religious institutions), Mengist (Crown or State),
and Gult (income overright). The first two are non-state rights while the latter two
fall in the sphere of state administration.
Rist (patrimony) is a circumscribed freehold which is shared more or less equally
by all kin who can trace their bloodline to the estate-founding ancestor (abbat). Rist
land is owned by families rather than individuals, and hence heritable only within
the extended family. In this sense, rist is both private and weakly communal. The
land is privately but corporately owned (but individually farmed) by all eligible
members of the extended family. While residence-based rist prevailed in highland
Eritrea, this form of ownership should not be confused with customary, communal
tenure (where the locus decision-making is outside the family) that defines lowland
Ethiopia and much of Sub-Saharan Africa until very recently.
The ancestor may have acquired initial ownership by a state-sanctioned coloni-
zation of state-claimed land (aqgni abbat) or by a state grant of dispossessed land
(tiklegna abbat) in exchange for military-related service. Founder-legitimized rist-
land is customarily inalienable for any reason other than state crimes or refusal to
fulfill tax, tribute, or militia obligations tied to the land itself. These obligations are
3.2 Gondar as a Tributary-Military State 71
generally met jointly by the corporate descent group through a chosen leader of the
kinship group known as the Aleqa.7 Interestingly, rist inheritance did not exclude
daughters (at least in the Amhara heartland); and the right to sell one’s share was
conditional only on the right of first refusal by members of the descent group
(Bekele 1995; Hoben 1973; Pankhurst 2014).
Wherever primogeniture existed, as in much of Europe, the inheritance system’s
favoring of a controlling-owner prevented fragmentation thereby expanding the
scope (scale economies, access to credit, and the like) for enhancing its productivity
and market connectivity (Kuran 2001). This was so because inheritance is limited to
close family members and the widespread adoption of primogeniture broke down
loyalties to clan, tribe, or caste. Primogeniture is widely credited for promoting
accumulation, and for reinforcing the sense of belonging to a nation-state (Maddison
2007: 314; Goody 1971).
Ethiopian egalitarianism, while promoting individualism, preempted the emer-
gence of a manorial economy by empowering the peasantry in terms of access to
land and control over production while denying the producers full control over their
output (Abegaz 2005). To see this, we need to dig a little deeper.
One central feature of the canonical Ethiopian system is that the tithe and the
tribute obligations were tied to the land rather than to the people owning or working
the land. These obligations typically also included payments in cash or kind (usu-
ally a quarter of the harvest, or payment in the form of goods such as gold, salt bars,
honey, or household articles), and variable additional obligations (gifts, or labor) to
the local governor. Some or all of these obligations may be waived in exchange for
sending a family member on extended military campaigns, supplying provisions for
billeted troops, or providing corvée for major public projects. Because of a long
agency chain and informational asymmetry, the principal (the Emperor) typically
faced a low pass-through of revenue from the agents. Officials who expected to be
frequently rotated or see the end of military-rule also had a strong incentive to
engage in predatory behavior with guile.
Ye-Mengist land was under the control of the Crown to cover the administrative,
military, and retainer expenses of the Court and its regional officers. This was the
norm until the Emperor’s personal property began to be separated from that of the
State, circa 1900. Cultivated by unpaid labor (corvée) or by sharecroppers, proceeds
from state lands were designated for the upkeep of palace troops and retainers, not
to mention the lavish banquets (also aptly called gibir). In addition to meeting the
needs of the central palace, royal farmlands located in the periphery were granted to
7
The parallel with the land institutions of the Byzantine Empire is rather striking. Byzantium’s
agricultural manpower was predominantly smallholder cultivators and herders who were collec-
tively liable for tax or tribute payments. The basic unit of fiscal administration, the village, required
a pooled payment to the state conveyed by an appointed head of the family clan. Despite the supe-
rior bureaucratic capacity of Byzantium, this system also facilitated conscription of peasant militia
(Ashburner 1912; Gorecki 1981). The civil code and the church cannon of Fetha Negest (Law of
Kings), Ethiopia’s equivalent of the Magna Carta of the sixteenth century, was inspired by the
Byzantine system (Tzadua and Strauss 2009).
72 3 The Gondarine Tributary-Military State
members of the royalty and the military aristocracy as rist. Instead of being man-
aged as feudal estates, these big landholdings were farmed out to smallholder ten-
ants who employed inefficient traditional farming techniques.
There, in fact, were two kinds of tenants managing the family estates of big men
in historic Ethiopia. One was the chisegna, a sharecropping or rental tenant who
resided on a landlord’s else’s land and typically paid one-fourth to one-third of the
produce, net of the tithe. The chisegna was different from the temaj, a resident plow-
man, who had gone into service to tend a rich man’s estate. Non-resident tenants
were also contracted for specific tasks such as tilling (temaj or zega) or cattle-
rearing (Bekele 1995; Tegene 2009).
These arrangements are often, but must not be, confused with feudal estates
since some two-thirds of the Ethiopian peasantry was landed. Unlike most of its
counterparts in Egypt, the Sudan or the Euro-Asian empires, Ethiopian peasants
also enjoyed a remarkable degree of freedom which included formal equality before
the law, few sumptuary or inter-class marriage codes, and an opportunity for social
mobility by signing up for the soldiery, the priesthood, or commerce (Crummey
2000; 2005; Spaulding and Kapteijns 2002). And yet, peasants under this seemingly
permissive agrarian regime nonetheless remained pauperized economically a puzzle
we are striving to elucidate, if not solve.
Whenever the Emperor is strong, the Crown enjoyed enormous authority over
land as well as over its subject producers and intermediary appropriators. Since the
customary rule of law was at times tenuous, landholders can lose their property
rights at the whim of an upstart or when a territory changes hands because of the
seemingly never-ending jurisdictional and territorial contests.8
Corporate land was the property of arguably the only perpetual corporations
besides the State—Church and Mosque. Tribal lands under customary tenure may
also be included in this category. Royal churches and large parishes (Debr) were
especially well endowed with inalienable land charters which accounted for as
8
Some examples will suffice to make the point. Ras Gugsa Mersha of Yeju, after usurping the
Crown in Gondar from 1799 to 1825, claimed all land in the country would be managed as crown
property. With unprecedented hubris, he did manage to temporarily dispossess the gentry and the
well-endowed churches upon which the losers proceeded to ravage the countryside as soldiers of
fortune. A generation later, Emperor Tewodros also introduced an unsuccessful land reform pro-
gram and proceeded to redistribute church lands and transfer the landholdings of the nobility to the
Crown. In 1857, an aggrieved priest in Shewa boldly castigated Tewodros II to restore church lands
and resume of the age-old practice of roving imperial tent cities in order to spread the burden of the
large court on localities (Pankhurst 2012: 142): “Remain 4 months in Gondar, and eat up
Armachaho, Segade, Wolqayt, and Tigre, then establish yourself for another 4 months at Aringo
and eat up Begamder, Lasta, Yeju, Warra Himano, Wallo and Shoa, and then make your residence
at Yebaba to eat up Macha, Agaw, Damot and Gojam as was done in the past.” Emperor Menelik II
also threatened rist-holders in Tigray and Wollo with expropriation should treasonous activities
continue (implemented in the Islamic belt of central Wollo). A good deal of land in Shewa was
expropriated by the Crown under various pretexts which explains why post-Gondarine Wollo and
Shewa constituted intermediate cases between the old north and the new south. Finally, the Italians
abolished the kin-based rist system in favor of residence-based village tenure in the highland dis-
tricts of Eritrea after 1880 to obtain land for Italian settlers and to undermine resistance to colonial-
ism by the ristegna gentry.
3.2 Gondar as a Tributary-Military State 73
much as one-quarter of the cultivable land (Crummey 2000; Pankhurst 2014). Often,
the church-owned land was distributed to priests and deacons on an inheritable basis
on the condition that the holder carries out the specified church service.
Again, the service obligations were tied to the land which meant that lay people
often cultivate church lands for generations, and even transfer them by sale (Tegene
2009). The same principle applied to waqf lands except that their use was limited to
permanent settlements—most notably, in Adal and Awssa, Hadiya, Fatagar, Dawro,
Harrar, Beni Shangul, and Jimma.
9
Fief is generically an income right (usually from the heritable revenue-producing property)
granted by a landlord or his/her agents in return for symbolic allegiance or actual service whose
cessation leads to the land (or offices and tax farms) to revert to the patron. Under common law,
“fee simple” is the ownership of real property that subject to property tax and credit obligations
while “fee tail” is hereditary, non-transferable ownership of real property. The Ethiopian rist fits
the fee tail form of ownership while gult is widely understood as a fief. When a gult-linked office
is inheritable, it was called riste-gult.
10
It is interesting to note that in successful civilizational states, the civilian bureaucracy needed to
effectively manage an empire was substantial. Medieval France, for example, had a royal adminis-
trative corps numbered 80,000 in 1665 (Fukuyama 2012: 329).
74 3 The Gondarine Tributary-Military State
they are in a good position to siphon off a good portion of the income leaving just
enough to underwrite basic religious services. Furthermore, aleqnet allowed the
nobility to hire agents to perform the designated religious services while keeping
the extra income and bequeathing the office to their children (Crummey 2000). Itege
Taitu and Negist Zewditu were two savvy manipulators of aleqnet.
Ethiopian tributarism was too shallow to support cities, big castles, or perpetual
estates. The Crown and the nobility supplemented gult income from their own fam-
ily’s rist estates and predation on weaker principalities. And yet, most gult-holders
were little more than rich peasants. The emperor derived income from several
sources, including his own estates to supply the Court (such as (mad-bet and hudad
lands), and collections from provincial governors and autonomous tributaries (trib-
utes in kind, taxes, customs duties, and fees). Over time, tribute in kind was only
incompletely converted into taxes, payable in cash or gold.
Trade was controlled by Muslim or foreign resident merchants who enjoyed the
protection of the political elite. Long-distance trade connected scattered market
centers and garrison towns going north-south from the Shewa to Eritrea, and east-
west to the sea outlets controlled by the Ottomans. Post-Axum Ethiopia never
became a great trading country. It was instead reduced to exalting the warrior and
the priest instead. Poor communications, constant predation on the producer class
and high transport costs all made exports uncompetitive.
The Fetha Negest (the cannon Law of Kings) provided some pre-Enlightenment
guidelines about the rights of subjects, contractors (Box 3.1), and property owners
(Jembere 2000). The power of the Emperor was only theoretically absolute. Lacking
the requisite fiscal base to underwrite a central bureaucracy and a salaried army,
emperors had to make concessions to the regional warlords and the peasantry to
ensure responsiveness to requests for levies.
This necessarily meant that the mode of surplus extraction was too indirect for
higher-ups to involve themselves in promoting innovation. Success in war was key
for GS domestically as well as externally. As one can see in Table 3.4, incessant
wars made and then unmade the beleaguered Ethiopian state.
Bargaining power and control rights over land involve a two-way process which
frustrates a clear identification of the direction of causality. One instructive way of
identifying the set of feasible politico-economic equilibria in the Gondarine society
would be to couch the governance problem in terms of strategic behavior. In game
theory, rules that facilitate commitments and cooperation are considered efficient
(World Bank 2017). Where rulers depend on assets controlled by dispersed land-
holder such the ristegna, overlords rationally offer generous concessions about
extraction rates and might even extend the franchise as in the case of the U.S.A. and
Canada (Acemoglu and Johnson 2006).
3.2 Gondar as a Tributary-Military State 75
The relevant consideration here is to contain potential violence that induces exis-
tential angst by making the right concessions to aspiring challengers. A simple
game-theoretic model makes the point. The model has rules that define the incen-
tives and the constraints which are chosen carefully to capture the probable align-
ment of major political actors.
Consider, for example, a non-cooperative game of chicken between two contend-
ing parties for power, the Emperor as the principal and the titled provincial rulers
as agents (Olson 2000; Zhou 2011). Let us also assume, not too unrealistically,
76 3 The Gondarine Tributary-Military State
Table 3.5 A mixed game with nobility constantly testing the limits of imperial provocation
KING
EMPEROR: Aggressive Submissive
Defensive A B
x, 2 2, 1
Punitive C D
−1, −2 1, −1
Source and Notes: Author
Max-Min: King—Submissive; Emperor—Defensive if x > −1, Punitive if x < −1. King has a
“dominant” strategy (submission) but Emperor does not: B (normally) or D (bad times)
that self-enforcing contracts of mutual consent are near impossible under tributary
relations precisely because the central state lacks impartial and effective mecha-
nisms for enforcing the rules of the game.
Agents understandably seek to accumulate wealth to cover the cost of provisioning
and equipping an army or militia to defend existing authority or to mount a bid for
more power. The Emperor, as the king of kings, seeks deference from appointed or
hereditary officials by employing the right mix of positive and negative incentives.
Let us also make the following simplifying assumptions without sacrificing rel-
evance. All players are individually rational; the payoffs are expected values; play-
ers pursue a tit-for-tat strategy in a repeated game since a track record of cooperation
is rewarded and a pattern of noncooperation is likewise punished, and commitments
which make threats credible serve as an effective deterrence against renegades.
Two definitions are in order. A dominant strategy is a stable outcome of a political
game in which each participant is doing the best that can regardless of what competi-
tors are doing. A Nash equilibrium is a set of stable actions given what other players
are doing, i.e., each player is doing the best it can for a presumed set of actions of its
opponents. This means dominant strategies are special cases of Nash equilibria.
A game with specific net payoffs is as shown in Table 3.5. The illustrative pay-
offs capture each of the four common situations in which Gondarine patrons and
their clients often found themselves. Several observations can be made. First, B is
not a Nash equilibrium because the strategy of challenge has a higher payoff if the
emperor happens to be conciliatory. If challengers limit their probing for any weak-
ness of the emperor below the threshold that would trigger a punitive expedition, the
payoff for the emperor of pursuing tolerance becomes a probabilistic outcome (x)
rather than a constant. Second, if x > −1, then the optimal strategy for the emperor
to deal with small provocation is to be conciliatory. If, on the other hand, x < −1,
then the Emperor is impelled to take a punitive measure. An arms race with shifting
coalitions is likely to prevail with uncertain outcomes. Third, strategic cycles in
decision sets may also result as contingent behavior produces alternating and
sequentially repeated outcomes.
A payoff matrix that accords with the norms that prevailed in medieval Ethiopia
are one where constant threats of external invasion and autonomous governors
forming alliances with foreign aggressors (in exchange for weapons) and other
domestic contenders to capture the throne induces the incumbent Emperor to be
rather cautious or even paranoid. This is depicted in Table 3.6 where the Nash equi-
librium entails over-taxation of peasants.
3.2 Gondar as a Tributary-Military State 77
Table 3.6 Cautious nobility with emperor facing incessant external invasion
KING:
EMPEROR: Aggressive Submissive
Defensive A B
−5, 3 5, 2
Punitive C D
−1, −3 1, −2
Source and Notes: Author
Emperor—punitive; King—submissive: D (Nash but non-dominant for both)
The central point here is that the rist and gult system and the uncertainty of the
level of extraction did not generate a category of landless people but produced a
Malthusian lock-in by failing to provide an incentive-compatible mechanism
whereby the tributors and the tributaries would find it in their best self-interest to
promote farm productivity. Another interesting payoff matrix (Table 3.7) shows
why the emperor would over-react in punishing insubordination because accom-
modation has a low payoff, or the emperor is reckless or hot-headed.
One manifestation of the contestability of both high offices and the Crown itself is
the high intergenerational mobility and instability in Ethiopian political culture. The
royalty and the nobility openly practiced dynastic marriages of convenience and ram-
pant concubinage despite church prohibitions of polygyny and politically-motivated
dissolution of sanctified marriages. Even among the lay population, divorce rates
(with almost equal rights of inheritance by all children) were traditionally high which
explains the difficulty of asset accumulation as well as the high remarriage rates.
The least protected, short of outright rebellion or abandoning of farming, were
the peasants who were subject to extra-customary demands for tribute by local offi-
cials and billeted soldiers, looting expeditions by neighboring warlords or maraud-
ing nomads, not to mention militia obligations tied to the land (Caulk 1978a, b). The
ideal principle to guide the tributary mode was enunciated by a populist but short-
lived Gondarine Emperor, Ze-Dengel, who boldly declared in 1606: “Man is free;
land is tributary.11” Ze-Dengel and Tewodros II are remembered as tragic reformers
who did not fully appreciate the power of a coalition of vested interests in the tribu-
tary system (Box 3.2).
11
In the original Geez, it reads “seb hara wo’gebbar midir” (see Box 3.2). Ze-Dengel’s reign
lasted less than two years (Crummey 2000).
Box 3.2 Tragic Reformers: Ze-Dengel and Tewodros II
A good emperor or empress is one who is open to new ideas and adaptable.
His or Her Court is diversely represented; dispenses justice fairly and wisely;
skillfully uses political marriages and delegation of power to regional nota-
bles to cement loyalty; and balances the relative power of the Crown, the
nobility, the Church, and the militia.
Failure to appreciate the stiff resistance to major reforms that empower the
Court at the expense of the soldiery and the priesthood is dramatically illus-
trated by the tragic ending of two rash reformer emperors—one trying to pave
the way for and the other to build an alternative to the collapsed imperial
throne of the Gondarine State. In both cases, reforms born of enlightened self-
interest, lacking an effective coalition and good planning, were defeated.
Emperor Ze-Dengel (1603–04), a nephew of the powerful Emperor Serse-
Dengel (1563–96), wanted to consolidate his power by reforming the two key
institutions of the tributary system: the chewa regimental system of specialists
of war being granted income over-rights (gult) imposed as a tax obligation on
hereditary land (rist). The new emperor soon passed two edicts: (1) a mass
levy of able-bodied people to staff an army directly under the Emperor’s own
command; and (2) reasserting the rights of farmers over the land on payment
of fixed tribute (not including service) as a condition of ownership. This gem
of reform is encapsulated by the slogan, “Man is free; land is tributary.” The
chewa troops, initially established in Denbya by Emperor Serse-Dengel in
1575, managed to kill Ze-Dengel in battle. On pain of abolishing the monar-
chy altogether, they were persuaded to support the crowning of Susenyos as
emperor who proceeded to restore their gult rights along with service obliga-
tions from the farmers.
Emperor Tewodros II (1855–1868), an ambitious upstart without a patri-
monial network to tie him down, tried a Ze-Dengel-type reform of the age-old
tributary system. He proposed to have the regional governors and judges as
salaried appointees of the Court. He also wanted the militia, then under the
control of the garrison governors of the military colonies in the frontiers of the
empire as well as the hereditary regional overlords, to be fully integrated into
a national army under the Emperor’s command. Fixed salaries would replace
gult rights and indiscriminate pillaging. To implement this ambitious program
of centralization, he had to go against the grain by forcibly overcoming the
resistance of the richly-endowed churches and monasteries as well as the
chewa. A good shibboleth for him is: ‘Soldiers eat; peasants provide.’
One manifestation of the bitter struggle over the revocation of all ecclesi-
astical income rights from land to the minimum necessary was that he broke
tradition by failing to generously endow churches. Another was his predispo-
sition for punitive destruction and self-sacrifice. A spiteful Tewodros even
plundered and burned the illustrious capital city of Gondar twice during
1864–66 to punish church resistance to his reforms. One of the most admired
Emperors in Ethiopian history, Tewodros II ended the tragic saga by commit-
ting suicide in 1867 upon losing a battle with a British expeditionary force in
his fortress capital of Maqdalla, abandoned by the deeply alienated clergy and
betrayed by the disgruntled regional lords.
3.3 Unstable Equilibrium: The Era of the Warring Princes 79
The political implications of the failure to monopolize access to both the land
and the instruments of violence continue to be momentous long after the demise of
GS. Shiftnet (political banditry) indeed was a highly romanticized and age-old form
of rebellion by disgruntled peasants or political upstarts targeting mainly superiors
(Crummey 1986; Caulk 1978a, b).
This analytical prism also uncovers why the political logic of redistributive over-
lordship favored the extensive margin, i.e., the strategy of expanding the universe of
tribute payers. People in newly annexed territories, therefore, suffered the lowest
protection of land and income rights, especially if they resisted fiercely. Ironically,
because of the higher fertility of the land in the reintegrated and newly annexed
provinces alike, less-landed peasants enjoyed a higher standard of living than those
in the core provinces where nearly all were subsistence owner-operators. Ownership
alone does not necessarily mean higher economic welfare where natural-resource
endowments are denuded, or the dysfunctional institutions discourage shared eco-
nomic growth.
Gondarine Ethiopia was a land-rich and ecologically diverse country with heavy
dependence on rainfed settled farming in the highlands and semi-nomadic pastoral-
ism in the dry lowlands. As we keep insisting, the peasantry was not generally sub-
ject to European-type feudalism or Asian-type hydraulic despotism (Wittfogel
1963). Because some two-thirds of the peasantry was landed (family-based or clan-
based), the ruling class had to rely on a different mechanism of exploitation: the
benefices of the “official title” assigned to it by the Crown. In other words, much
like the Islamic empires, this is a case of the conversion of political power into eco-
nomic power rather than vice versa.
A bedrock of shared political culture and a unifying ideology served two pur-
poses. It made the Crown the target of competition by the ambitious regardless of
ethnicity or geographic origin. It also stemmed, with limited success, mutually
destructive violence over tribute and imperial succession.
Robustness became elusive as the emperors progressively lost the capacity to
enforce their income rights from a distant capital after the mid-1700s. The favored
governance technique of GS involved the establishment of military colonies which
served as core populations from which Northern political culture and Christianity
spread. Military colonies and monasteries were established farther afield in the fron-
tier provinces among the Sidama people of the central highlands as far south as
Keffa and Ennarya.
The demise of GS coincided with the beginning of the modern period in world
history which was inaugurated with two momentous political revolutions (the
American and the French) and the industrial revolution which soon engulfed the
Continent and the European offshoots. The nineteenth century gave the world the
idea of the “sovereign citizen,” the demographic transition, and a boom in global
demand for primary goods and cheap labor (Findlay and O’Rourke 2009).
80 3 The Gondarine Tributary-Military State
For Gondar, the limits of tributarism became evident in the most incongruous
of time. By 1770, the territorial control of the Gondarine Emperor had shrunk to
the environs of the city of Gondar. Heads (ras) of powerful political dynasties
from Tigray, Gojam, Yeju, Wag, Simien, and Wollo took turns in reducing the
emperors to mere puppets during what is called the era of the warlord prince-
lings—euphemistically but misleadingly dubbed Zemene Mesafint since few, if
any, dared claim royal blood to declare themselves emperor (see Appendix 3.1 at
the end of this Chapter).
The steady erosion of the Crown’s authority to myriad regional warlords lasted
some 85 years (1770–1855) or perhaps 100 years (1755–1855) before a drive to
restore central authority finally succeeded. A regional upstart rose to the level of the
emperorship in 1855. Crowned as Tewodros II (r. 1855–1868), he restored the
authority of the monarchy by subduing regional pretenders, reducing church lands,
and centralizing the collection of revenue in the hope of creating a modern military
and administration.12
He was soon followed by another warlord, crowned as Yohannes IV (1872–
1889), who was less of a reformer than a restorer of the state-church against
Islamized political contenders from Wollo as well as from the Mahdists of the
Sudan. It was not until after the geographic center of political power moved south
to Shewa that a modern territorially-defined state would emerge for the first time in
modern Ethiopian history.
In sum, the Era of the Princes ironically revealed the remarkably successful
political assimilation of the northern Oromo elites of Gondar, Gojam, and espe-
cially Yeju and Wollo which took place over two centuries. It was also the culmi-
nation of the intra-Christian conflict related to the unsuccessful Jesuit attempt to
introduce Catholicism from the top. Things were also exacerbated by the self-
destructive and vainglorious fissions within the Orthodox Church reflecting a
combination of regional monastic rivalries and a doctrinaire approach to
Christological debates.
The tragedy was that, while Europe was entering the industrial revolution and the
consolidating the modern nation-state, and parts of Asia were beginning to do the
same as a defense against encroaching colonialism, the Gondarine monarchy was
unable to hold even the core provinces together. This led to the pauperization of all,
including church elites, princes, military-administrators, and the gentry. Unbridled
tributarism perpetuated isolationist underdevelopment in medieval Ethiopia and its
legacies persisted well into the twentieth century.
12
Tewodros II tried to form centrally-controlled and integrated regiments rather than relying pro-
vincial militia led by regional chiefs. He also had plans to have a salaried officer corps, proposed
reductions in the size of the clergy, and apparently intended to redistribute land from huge church
endowments to peasants who were to pay fixed taxes to the treasury rather than indeterminate
tributes to local chiefs.
3.3 Unstable Equilibrium: The Era of the Warring Princes 81
Three reasons can be adduced for the failure of the age-old monarchy to trans-
form itself from resiliency to robustness. For one, there was little threat to the
emperor from an economically and politically autonomous church since church and
state were mutually dependent. The head of the church was the Emperor, the
Patriarch himself was and imported foreigner from the persecuted minority church
of Egypt which, while supporting one pretender or another in succession contests to
the throne, had no power to challenge the institution of the imperial court.
A second reason is the economic backwardness of the country which militated
against the emergence of a strong and united gentry to constrain the emperor’s pow-
ers. A united peasantry to transmute tribute into tax was certainly out of the question
given the daunting task of effective coordination of parish-minded farmers and ever-
mobile pastoralists. Thirdly, the geography of the country facilitated fragmentation
from within and encirclement by Islamic forces from without to prolong Ethiopia’s
isolation from the rest of the world. Its incomplete modern political order, despite
the early start, was then the joint product of all these inauspicious factors.
The primacy of the internal constraint on robust state formation, therefore, was
rooted in the comparatively egalitarian land institutions. By allowing only certain
modes of surplus extraction to be feasible, they constricted the state’s the fiscal
base. A vicious circle of sorts seems to have set in for good.
13
Marcus (1975: xvii) also notes: “[F]rom time to time, the nation had disintegrated into parts, but
it had never disappeared as an idea and always reappeared in fact. The Axumite Empire may have
faded after the seventh century, but the Zagwe followed in the eleventh century; and, of course, the
succeeding Solomonic dynasty created a state that incorporated at least two-thirds of the country’s
present area. In the sixteenth century, that empire lost its will to rule after being ravaged by Muslim
armies waging holy war, and it sharply contracted in the seventeenth century as the Oromo success-
fully invaded the devastated and depopulated highlands… From the Axumite period, public history
in Ethiopia has moved from north to south, and the twentieth-century state developed along this
well-trodden path. Menelik and his governors ruled Ethiopia’s heterogeneous population indirectly,
largely through accommodation and co-option. Haile Selassie centralized the state and expanded
Ethiopia’s civil society as a counterweight to ethnic forces. He fostered unity through the develop-
ment of a national army, a Pan-Ethiopian economy, modern communications, and an official cul-
ture whose main feature was the use of the Amharic language in government and education.”
ppendix 3.1: Chronology of Ethiopian Emperors, 1563–1974
A
(from the 28th Emperor to the 56th Emperor)
Source and Notes: Based on the compilation by Ato Tekalign Gedamu from various authoritative
sources (until 1974). The notes and the transliteration from the Amharic are mine
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Chapter 4
The Shewan Fiscal-Territorial State
As the two restorationist emperors, Tewodros II and Yohannes IV, reached the limits
of what can be done to reclaim the supreme authority of the post-Gondarine Crown,
the regional kings of Shewa and Gojam, with ambitions to claim the emperorship,
launched aggressive territorial expansions in the closing decades of the nineteenth
century. By 1900, the central province of Shewa won the competition to become the
seat of a much larger Ethiopian state under a remarkably restorationist Emperor
Menelik II.
The modern Shewan state of 1889–1974 was uniquely positioned to regain the
epicenter of the Ethiopian state it had hosted earlier for 250 years (c. 1270–1520).
As noted by Merid W. Aregay, the rise of Shewa on the ashes of Gondar is primarily
attributable to revenues from the coffee trade which started in the Harrar and the
Gibe regions and accelerated during 1750–1850 (Wolde Aregay 1988). It also ben-
efited from the disruption of the Solomonic order and the emergence of an alliance
between Amara and Oromo elites in the central provinces.
The restoration of the Christian monarchy took place under a radically different
global environment. It took place in the age of industry and the colonial scramble.
It also took place in a domestic environment of massive territorial expansion south-
wards which boosted ethnoreligious diversity, integration into the global economy
through cash-crop exports, and the centralization of state authority in the geographic
center of the country.
Hesitant attempts at modernization were, however, insufficient to fend off Italian
encroachment which at the second try dislocated the old ruling class. The ceding of
Eritrea as a colony in the 1880s and Italian Occupation in the 1930s also provided
an impetus for the introduction of modern interconnected administrative centers
which later grew into important centers of commerce. The post-liberation decades
to 1974 witnessed a drive to centralize and modernize the state by a determined
Emperor Haile Selassie I.
The exclusionary economic and political institutions of this fiscal-territorial state
reflected the longstanding redistributive preoccupation of state elites. The Shewan
state was savvy enough to earn domestic legitimacy and resilient enough to gain
international recognition of its sovereign borders by rebuffing the European colo-
nial onslaught. The century-old experiment at centralization and proper fiscalization
of tribute nonetheless failed once again to produce a robust state and an accountable
political order.
After 1900, the trajectories of Ethiopian state formation and nation formation
became sharpened. For the conservative states of Gondar and Shewa, viability
entailed effective management of the concentric circles of authority. The emperors
had first and foremost to consolidate control over the core provinces by forging
close alliances with a network of provincial lords and appointed governors. To
expand the tributary base and to ensure a secure access to the sea, submission by
tributary chiefdoms and sheikdoms had to be established and enforced with implied
threats made credible by occasional punitive expeditions.
The sense of urgency for initiating a catchup modernization drive came in the
form of a response to two major wars with imperial Italy (in 1896 and again in
1935). The weaknesses thereby exposed by the confrontations induced the establish-
ment of civil and military services, and the trappings of a modern market economy.
The modern Shewan state (SS), which arose in the age of industry and the
Scramble for Africa, upheld the icons of a recognizably Axumite-Gondarine politi-
cal culture. These impressive legacies included a national vernacular in Geez-
Amharic, a state church, the idea of semi-sacred emperorship, the legal code of the
Kibre Negest, and the Gult Sireet-Sir’at system of extracting tribute to finance the
Court and its decentralized administration (Fig. 4.1).
By mid-twentieth century, SS had succeeded in introducing the rudiments of a
modern bureaucracy and a professional army to be considered neo-patrimonial. It
transformed the historic tributary state into a territorial state by obtaining a grudg-
ing international recognition of its borders doubling the territorial reach of Gondarine
Ethiopia. Furthermore, it laid down a reasonably secure fiscal base strung together
from disparate sources, including new economic links with the world economy.
4.1 Colonialism’s Rude Encounter with an Indigenous State 87
Gebbar 1:
Kahinat & Menekosat
(Ristegna)
(Ecclesiastic and monastic
Gebbar 2:
(Chisegna & Zega)
Fig. 4.1 Class hierarchy of the Sireet-Sir’at system of the Shewan State. Ristegna = land-owning
peasantry with customary rights and obligations, Gultegna = state agents with over-rights of vary-
ing duration to taxes and fees, Gebbar 1 = all owners of tax-obligated land, titled or ordinary,
Gebbar 2 = a class of tenants, voluntary or pressed, with little legal protection, Chisegna, Temaj or
Zega = live-in tenant (zega, temaj) or contractual tenant (chisegna), Mekwanint = titled nobility,
Shumamint = titled high officials. (Source: Author)
This chapter seeks to answer the question that continues to animate our overall
inquiry: Why did an early-starter Ethiopia so belatedly and only partially transi-
tioned from a tributary-based military state to a tax-based territorial state? To answer
this question satisfactorily, we must first identify the stylized historical facts about
the country’s ever-changing political economy in the century spanning 1875–1974,
and identify the actual and the counterfactual pathways it could have taken.
The dawn of the nineteenth century saw several region-based contenders for the
Gondarine throne. The ensuing protracted civil war ended with the crowing of two
ruthless upstarts who managed to restore the authority of the Crown but failed to
institute radical reforms in land institution and state administration-- Emperor
Tewodros II (1855–1868) and Emperor Yohannes IV (1872–1889). In the end, King
Sahle Selassie’s grandson bested them all to become not just a king of Shewa in
1875 but also Ethiopia’s most accomplished modern statesman culminating in his
crowning as Emperor Menelik II (r. 1889–1913).
The Scramble for Africa was fended off with the spectacular defeat of a European
power (Italy) in Adwa in 1896—an improbable feat predating the other two European
defeats in the hands non-European powers—the Japanese over Russia in 1905 and
88 4 The Shewan Fiscal-Territorial State
the U.S. over Spain in 1898.1 This encounter also exposed the b ackwardness of the
country relative to its detractors—a fact dramatized by its inability to regain Eritrea.
Greater Shewa2 was indeed a region with certain distinctive historical, geo-
graphic, and demographic characteristics which uniquely qualified it to spearhead
the project of building of a modern Ethiopian nation-state. This geo-economic cen-
ter looked northward for cultural inspiration, southward for a secure fiscal base, and
outward for technological diffusion. The re-incorporation of even more ethno-
linguistically and religiously diverse peoples was managed by a state elite that was
much more diverse in its demographic reach than its predecessors.
In the process, SS went through three distinct phases of development. The
Menelikian phase (1875–1913) is distinguishable by the notable achievements of
territorial expansion and the establishment of quasi-modern government institutions
with some autonomy from the Imperial Court. The interlude (1913–1941) was one
of overly cautious modernization and uncertainty about imperial succession (an
Achilles Heel of the tributary state for centuries) and a five-year Italian occupation.
The Shewan state emerged in full form under Emperor Haile Selassie I (1941–74).3
One clue to their success is that the flagbearers of SS boasted mixed genealogies
through political marriages at the top and considerable intermixing especially
among the Amara, the Tigre, the Oromo, and the Gurage—two of the latter being
1
Jonas (2011: 333-4) has this to say about the unexpected potency of the tributary-military system
in mobilizing massive resources to resist existential threats from abroad: “Nations, if they are to
endure, are defined not by religion, ethnicity, or race but by the scale at which freedom can reliably
be defended. Only on the scale of Ethiopia itself could resistance have succeeded. Adwa reminds
us that the only freedom we truly possess is the freedom we are able to defend…The Adwa cam-
paign spanned 5 months and 580 miles. It was rivaled among nineteenth century military cam-
paigns only by Napoleon’s Russian campaign, which took 3 months and logged 490 miles from
Vilnius to Moscow. Unlike Napoleon’s Russian campaign, the Adwa campaign ended in victory.
This is greatness.” Regarding the entrepreneurial motivation of the unpaid citizen-soldiers who
were required to respond to the call for war mobilization, Jonas (2011:55) also observes: “Wealth
wasn’t just incidental to the campaign; it is what drove it. Ethiopian soldiers were compensated in
the form of what they could herd, prod, or haul away.”
2
An integral part of the Abyssinian political orbit, what I call “greater Shewa” refers to historic
Amhara districts of modern Wollo south of the Beshilo River and modern Shewa north of the
Awash River. This was the seat of the medieval Ethiopian state during 1270–1550. The disintegra-
tion of the post-1270 neo-Solomonic empire of Amde-Tsion in the early 1400s under the onslaught
of jihadist wars spearheaded by the Muslim Adal sheikdom and then the massive migration of the
segmentary clans of the Oromo triggered a shift of the administrative center of the empire from
Debre-Birhan in Shewa to Gondar. Gondar ruled over much of the highlands of today’s Eritrea,
Tigray, Begemdir and Simien, Wollo, Gojam, Shewa, and Wollega. What we will focus on here is
Menelik II’s Shewan State with its eventual capital in Addis Ababa and ruling over contemporary
Ethiopia until its demise in 1974.
3
One can reasonably argue that the empty state coffers when the Italians were expelled, and British
insistence (as co-liberators) on extending their military administration until the end of World War
II in 1945 both prevented the Emperor from assuming full control of the state. By 1955, however,
the Emperor had skillfully managed to free himself of this de facto trusteeship and financial depen-
dence to introduce significant legislative reforms of the land tenure system and government admin-
istration, restored Eritrea and the Haud to Ethiopia, and introduced a revised Constitution which
granted limited political rights to citizens.
4.1 Colonialism’s Rude Encounter with an Indigenous State 89
politically prominent peoples of the southern provinces. Unlike the Gondarine state,
however, contests over the Crown became exclusively an affair of cliques within the
Shewan dynasty instead of being between the Crown and the regional political
houses nationwide. This was not to be until after another multiethnic but thoroughly
assimilated political elite from Wollo put up a remarkable last stand to claim
Menelik’s throne for Abeto Iyasu (Box 4.1).
Box 4.1 The Self-Reinvented: Ali the Great of Yeju and Mohammed Ali
of Wollo
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, two hybrid families managed to
establish regional dynasties which played a central role in the Era of the
Princes by contending for imperial power as king makers. They symbolize the
remarkable genealogy of inter-ethnic mixing, two-way cultural assimilation,
and a history of conversion and reconversion between Orthodox Christianity
and Sunni Islam. This heritage of intercultural fluency gave ambitious politi-
cians to show a remarkable adeptness in navigating what on the surface looks
like a political culture of contradictions.
One political dynasty was the Worreshekhoch clan of Yeju. The Yeju who
are believed to have hailed from Ifat (Qawat) in Shewa. They were Christians
at the beginning of the Jihad but had mostly converted to Islam by the time
they settled in the northeastern Wollo region of Angot on the heels of the great
Oromo migration. The Yeju spoke Amharic and had successfully assimilated
with the Amhara and the Oromo of the region as well as into the social and
political structures of Christian Ethiopia.
Ras Ali (I) the Great, the son of Gelebu Faris of Lasta and Abba Gwangul
of Yeju, was the founder of the Werreshekhoch political family of Yeju. He
was an important player for the control of the Emperor in Gondar in the 1780s
and served as Ras of Begemdir and Regent of the Emperor until his death in
1788 (buried in Lalibela). Like most members of his extended family, and
despite his Muslim name, Ras Ali founded Debre Tabor as his dynastic capi-
tal, established a new gult system for troops which were accountable to him
rather than to the Gondarine Emperor, and endowed new churches there as
well as in Woldya. Debre Tabor assumed the role of Gondar city, having ben-
efitted from the rise to prominence of his son, Gugsa the Great and grandson
Ali II who was also a Regent until his deposition in 1855 by his son-in-law,
Emperor Tewodros II.
The other was the Mammadoch clan of Tenta. Located near Meqdella, the
dynasty was established by Mohammed Ali Abba Jibo in the middle of the
eighteenth century by imams of the Muslim central belt of modern Wollo
Province. Their core comprised the central districts between Tehuledere in the
East, Dessie Zuria in the Center, and Worre-Himeno in the West. This power-
ful family, known for its cavalry and Islamic religiosity, was an important
(continued)
90 4 The Shewan Fiscal-Territorial State
4
The pre-WW II SS had an agricultural fiscal system that was based on administrative-territorial
units in well-secured (non-military) provinces: 11 gizat administered by the top-ranked Ras, 17
negarit administered by the next-ranked Dejazmach, and 8 wuchi under Kegnazmach, 12 under
Fitawrari, 22 under Kegnazmach, 7 under Grazmach, and 8 under Balambaras. Emperor Tewodros
II had a different policy known as hager beje administered directly by the Emperor’s personal
representatives, the then powerful Mislene (Wolde Mesqel 1970). This age-old military-adminis-
trative system of Afroasia in newly annexed territories is sometimes misconstrued, deliberately or
out of ignorance of the economics of the tributary system, as internal colonialism.
4.2 The New Fiscal Base and Governance 93
What I call the fiscal-territorial state of Shewa differs from the older Abyssinian
mode of political and economic governance in many important respects. First, the
peasantry, while predominantly landed, included a significant proportion (about
one-third) of tenant households. Second, being led by an insurgent dynasty, SS was
more aggressively expansionist territorially.
Third, its reliance on tithe revenue and the granting of fiefs to officials was much
lower than that of its northern counterparts. There are two reasons for this new
development: the newly incorporated regions offered large tracts of fertile and more
sparsely-populated land as well as rich tributary kingdoms and chiefdoms. The new
territories became a major source foodstuff for the Court as well as hard currency
94 4 The Shewan Fiscal-Territorial State
from exportable cash crops (coffee, forest products, mining products, and slaves).
These additional resources provided an edge for the Shewan state elite in the peren-
nial arms race with domestic and foreign contenders.
The fourth, and perhaps the most notable, feature of SS was that the monar-
chy progressively reduced its over-reliance on the powerful nobility through an
expansion of reshufflable offices over inheritable offices. Toward the end of the
period, adeptness at mobilizing foreign military and economic aid facilitated
centralization.
Finally, large alienable (sellable) land grants were given to the royalty, loyal
governors, local notables, and soldier-settlers. Unlike the rigid rist system, this mix
of the old and the new land tenure systems facilitated the progressive emergence of
market relations in land, labor, and cash crops. The proliferation of garrison towns
also made it easier to enforce the peace, secure taxable trade and off-farm activities,
and implement the widely-resented measurement of land to better gauge the agri-
cultural tax base.
These important institutional innovations went a long way toward overcoming
the constraints of the Gondarine tributary-military institutions. The enduring south-
ward shift in the geography of power from Gondar to Addis Ababa became the
flipside of the lingering marginalization and the alienation of the gentry of the older
provinces both politically and economically.
This redefinition of the foundations of state power also meant that an increas-
ingly urbanized and market-connected ruling elite steadily severed its personal and
collective ties to its most reliable rural constituencies. To put is rather colorfully, the
state elites operating almost exclusively out of Addis Ababa willfully kept up
appearances while leaving the rural base hopelessly pauperized. This, it turned out,
came at a high political price for both the elite and the country. The 1974–1975
Revolution exposed the utter helplessness of the urban-based ruling class to defend
its interests or to save the state from full capture by narrowly-based military officers
and, later, by secessionist forces from the Periphery.
To see this, imagine rather simplistically but usefully that the modern SS com-
prised three distinct religious polities: North, South, and Center. In the Ethiopia of
the historic North and Center, the Abyssinian legacy refined by Gondar was ubiqui-
tous, and the Amara-Tigre-Agew synthesis of the political culture was well
entrenched (Kebede 1999; Levine 2000). SS boasted variants of the gebbar land
institutions with distinct geopolitical histories. The rist system was preponderant in
the older provinces of highland Eritrea, Tigray, Begemdir, Simien, Gojam, and
Wollo (north of the Beshillo River).
A mix of ristegna and chisegna (tenancy) prevailed in the central highlands of
Wollo (south of the Beshillo River) and Shewa (north of Awash River)—roughly
60%:40% in favor of rist. This system, which was largely a product of the long-
standing practice for the military administration of rebellious Muslim districts of
central Wollo and the predominantly Oromo districts of Shewa, was extended to
the southern highlands after 1900 (Table 4.1).
In the post-1875 Menelikian south, a diverse community of subjects (ranging
from pre-state polities to well-established kingdoms such as Jimma, Wellega,
4.2 The New Fiscal Base and Governance 95
Table 4.1 Rights in land in the old and new provinces, 1900–1974
Region and type of land tenure Arable land State and overlord claims to farm
(Sireet) under: income (Sir’at)
1. NORTHERN “Rist-Rim:” (Tint Hager-- Northern peasantry and local gentry
Eritrea, Tigray, Begemdir & North: 40% of were landed
Simien, Wag & Lasta, Wolqait, population)
Gojam
Rist (kinship, village) 70% Gult, tithe, tax, service, gifts
Maderya (secular); 20% Tithe, rest granted in lieu of salary
Rim (clerical)
Crown 10% The whole income, net of rent
2. CENTRAL “Rist-Rim- (Mehal Central peasantry and gentry was like
Chisegna:” Wollo, Amhara, Yeju, Hager—Center: northern when landed; otherwise tenant
Shewa, Wollega 10% of (gebbar)
population)
Rist (kinship) 50% Gult, tithe, tax, service, gifts
Maderya (secular); Rim 20% Tithe, rest granted in lieu of salary
(clerical)
Crown 10% The whole income, net of rent
Private 10% Tithe and taxes
3. SOUTHERN “Rist-Rim- (Dar Hager— Southern peasantry in high-resistance
Private-Chisegna:” southern South: 50% of regions lost two-thirds of land to militia
highlands; eastern, southern and population) (Neftegna), the church and the crown;
western lowlands--(re) lowland pastoralists kept communal
incorporated after 1870 land but not the irrigable
Rist (Balabat, aristocracy, 50% Gult, tithe, tax, service, gifts
church, solder-settlers,
communal)
Maderya (secular); rim (clerical) 20% Tithe, rest granted in lieu of salary
State 10% The whole income, net of rent
Private 10% Tithe and taxes
Communal/pastoral 10% Tithe and livestock taxes
Sources and Notes: Author. Based various sources cited in the text
1. In land-rich and labor-scarce regions in all three regions, various forms of labor arrangements
prevailed (ranging from rental/sharecropping to resident ploughmen and non-resident farmers with
service obligation to officials
2. Property rights to land also varied from right of use only (Maderya), right of inheritance and trans-
fer (Rist), right of alienation with dedicated service obligation on the land (Rim/Semon, Riste-Gult),
and right of sale (Private)
Wolayta, and Keffa) was incorporated into the resurgent Shewa-centered state
(Fig. 4.2). In these regions, two kinds of land tenures prevailed in addition to rist
held by the local gentry). Some autonomous kingdoms were permitted to keep their
private estates on payment of a fixed tribute to Addis Ababa.
The rest of the greater South (most notably Arsi, Keffa, Sidamo, and Harrarge)
joined the central provinces of Wollo and Shewa. It fell under an onerous version of
the gebbar system traditionally employed for administering rebellious or newly
conquered provinces. The state (as well as disgruntled warlords), unable to pay its
96 4 The Shewan Fiscal-Territorial State
Fig. 4.2 The making of Menelikean Ethiopia, circa 1900 (Sources and Notes: Affar/Adal, 1900–
1935; Haud (Ogaden), 1957; Eritrea, 1952. Ethiopia had a population of 5 million in 1855, 10
million in 1905, and 15 million in 1955)
by a tributary state which was unable to pay its administrator-soldiers from the
central Treasury. In the Eastern and Western pastoral lowlands, communal hold-
ings continued along with large estates owned by the nobility or the State along
rich river valleys.
It bears repeating here that the tithe and tribute obligations are tied to the land
rather than to the people owning or working the land. These obligations typically
also included payments in cash or in kind (usually a quarter of the harvest, or pay-
ment in the form of goods such as gold, salt bars, honey, or household articles), and
variable additional obligations (gifts, labor) to the local governor. Some or all of
these obligations may be waived in exchange for sending a family member on
extended military campaigns, supplying provisions for billeted troops, or providing
corvée on major public projects (Table 4.2).
Gult was also the lowest administrative unit with the Emperor at the apex, fol-
lowed by the provincial governor (which may be a king, or a Ras or a senor appoin-
tee known as Enderasse), and the district governor (Awraja Gezhi or Melkegna).
The Melkegna of Shewa enforced the collection of levies destined for the hierarchy
of higher administrators ending with the Emperor. The Melkegna also administered
local justice and the mobilization of the citizen militia with assistance from the
Mislene (sub-district governor), a Balabat (a member of the local gentry typically
appointed in newly conquered territories) and the Chika-Shum (a rotating position
for headman among rist-holding families).
The mix of outright land grants, labor requisitioning, conditional land-
use grants, and tax over-rights depended on the land/labor ratio of a district.
McCann (1995) suggests that the southward diffusion of the relatively advanced
technology and annual crop regime of the ox-plow complex may have contrib-
uted more than inter-regional migration to the national integration of the north
and the south. The correlations between land endowments and labor supply are
depicted in Table 4.3, and they seem to have shaped the architecture of institu-
tionalized arrangement.
98 4 The Shewan Fiscal-Territorial State
Table 4.3 Correlation between factor endowment and mode of surplus extraction
Land/labor
ratio Land: abundant Land: scarce
Labor: 1 2
Abundant • Land grants to settlers in exchange • Smallholder cultivation—The norm
for service to the state for much of the country
• Smallholder cultivation
Labor: 3 4
Scarce • Large grants to nobility and • Good land in unhealthy borderlands
royalty • Expeditiary looting of
• Labor servitude: Tied corvée agro-pastoralists
tenants
Source and Notes: Author
1 = the early stages of rist areas, 2 = the later stages of rist areas, 3 = newly conquered areas
(one-third of population), 4 = the tribal periphery
The treatment of the southern gebbar5 was certainly worse than in the north-
central provinces. This was a product of a number of factors including the unprec-
edented power of the Court over the appointive regional governors (constant
reshuffling thereby nurtured a spoils-of-war mentality), the great need of the state
for marketable surplus to import firearms, and the cultural distance between the
agents of a pedigreed state and a subject population accustomed to communal or
rather despotic governance systems.
In densely populated districts, lands granted to churches, local gentry, soldiers
and administrators, and those reserved for the Crown were cultivated by tenants
(Pankhurst 2012). Where labor was scarce and the grantee, being on public duty,
could not self-cultivate the temporary or long-term land grants received in lieu of
salary, onerous service obligations had to be imposed on locals. Peasants were req-
uisitioned to cultivate the maintenance grants of the soldier-administrators and the
garrisoned soldiers.
One of the consequences of the Shewa-led restoration of greater Ethiopia in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century is the enhancement of the capacity of the
emperor to derive a substantial part of her or his income from domain lands under
the control of the Court-State. This would have been the envy of the Gondarine
5
A noted earlier, the term “gebbar” has been rendered various shades of meaning in the literature
(see, for example, Pankhurst 2012, chapter 4). In the older provinces, it refers to all manners of
landowners (rist land or private land) with tax and tribute obligations (gibir) to the state as a condi-
tion of access to land. So, a gebbar is the occupant of a gibir-paying land. In the newer and mili-
tary-administered provinces, it is used variously to refer to (a) those with gult or gibir obligations
where payments are replaced by equivalent service (corvée) on lands granted by the Crown to
support its non-farming functionaries; or (b) those in labor-scarce regions who are compelled to
transfer the tithe, onerous tribute obligations and service to the soldier-administrators on pain of
losing their customary rights to the land. The Oromo agro-pastoralists who conquered much of
southern Ethiopia in 1550–1800 surprisingly converted the vanquished (still owners of their plot of
land) into servile tributaries through coercive and fictive adoption. As Mohammed Hassen (1994:
63) puts it, “The Oromo adopted the gebbaro en mass, giving them clan genealogy, marrying their
women, and taking their young into service for herding.” The term gebbar is often confused with
landlessness (or chisegna) which is not necessarily the case since tenants may be better-off farms
with capital and labor to rent in more land.
4.2 The New Fiscal Base and Governance 99
monarchs. Furthermore, the state expanded the independent domains of its agents
by freehold grants of large tracts of sparsely occupied land as well as well-settled
lands which bitterly resisted the imperial army.
Ye-Mengist Meret was land under the control of the Crown to cover the adminis-
trative, military, and retainer expenses of the Court and its regional offices. This was
the norm until the emperor’s personal property began to be separated from that of
the State by Emperor Menelik II. Cultivated by unpaid labor (corvée) or sharecrop-
pers, proceeds from Crown or state lands were designated for the upkeep of Court
troops (Mehal Sefari) and retainers, not to mention the lavish banquets. In addition
to meeting the needs of the central palace, crown lands located in the periphery,
were granted to members of the royalty and the military aristocracy whose landlord-
ship was comparable to the Jimma state.
Private freehold, with the right of alienation, was the exception to the rule. Prior
to the twentieth century, it was the norm in the garrison towns and the capital city.
With the southward expansion of the state at the turn of the twentieth century, free-
hold in farmland was permitted but still accounted for a small fraction of the arable
land during the period under review. However, as we will show below, some king-
doms, most notably Harrar and Jimma, dispensed entirely with communal tenures
to create full private ownership rights in land.
Precisely because these regions were under a military administration, at least
until new legislations were introduced in the 1940s, soldiers and officials had a free
hand to demand extra-customary payments and services.6 This onerous system,
born of expediency, was sometimes unhelpfully analogized with serfdom which, at
least in its European or Japanese forms, tied landless peasants to both the land and
the administrator-judge landlord who usurped even the social rights of the serfs.
In this respect, one often encounters the hasty conclusion that the thesis of the
northernization of southern tenure systems is inapt since landlessness was much
higher, and the ethnicity of the ruler often differed from the ruled (Donham 1986;
Tareke 1991). While this helps to explain the regional variations in the extent of
“decentralized balabatism,” there is little evidence in the historical record or the
core Ethiopian political culture to support the claim that the monarchy based in
Shewa introduced an alien system that had not existed in the older districts of the
Empire and Shewa itself.
The history of the ethnically diverse North instead shows that territorial annexa-
tion, punitive military expeditions, international migration, the establishment of
military colonies, and cultural assimilation were the most widely shared strategies
among tribute-seeking peoples (Tigre, Agew, Amara, and Oromo) for imposing
6
Perham (1969: 307) characterizes the system this way: “The military practice almost universal in
the south may be illustrated from Limmu. Menelik quartered some of his own soldiers in eastern
Limmu, and families of the Galla [Oromo] inhabitants were made into gabars, each one obliged to
support a soldier… They had to build his hut and to provide, according to his will, all that he
required from them of their agricultural produce, meat and honey… The gabar families were reg-
istered upon a list and it was the duty of the local headman to see that there were enough of them
to support the soldiers.”
100 4 The Shewan Fiscal-Territorial State
7
Share tenancy has two key economic attributes: it allows for risk sharing which is important in a
highly uncertain environment; and it discourages tenant investment if productivity-sharing is not
matched equitably with cost-sharing (Deininger 2003). The combination of incipient commercial-
ization and absentee landlordism triggered tenant evictions in a handful of districts that were being
integrated with the urban economy. A half-hearted tenancy reform legislation, introduced under
donor pressure, languished in Parliament only to be overtaken by the nationalization of all land in
1975 (Ellis 1976).
4.3 The Jimma State: Landlordism, Slavery, and Free Trade 101
Table 4.4 A profile of the land tenure systems of imperial Ethiopia, c. 1970
Land ownership by
Land use and tenancy holder Yield/size
% Cultivated: % % Tenant: Govt
rented Cultivated: total Freehold Chruch: and Rank:
(partly) <1 ha (partly) (%absentee) various other Y/H
A. North
Begemdir na 70 15 (6) rist na na 4/12
(Gondar)
Gojam na 54 20 (7) rist na na 9/11
Tigray na 78 25 (18) rist na na na
B. Central
Shewa 55 (17) 47 67 (16) 54 (67) 14 32 5/8
Wollo 14 (25) 80 55 (9) 82 (40) 14 4 3/5
C. South
Arsi 51 (11) 31 52 (7) 41 (27) 17 42 2/10
Bale na na na 48 (12) 2 50 1/7
Gemu 46 (6) 94 47 (4) 17 (50) 5 78 12/1
Gofa
Hararge 46 (15) 76 54 (5) 45 (48) 17 38 10/3
Illubabor 67 (17) 69 75 (2) 49 (42) 5 46 8/6
Keffa 67 (4) 58 62 (3) 44 (50) 3 53 6/4
Sidamo 35 (1) 91 39 (2) 43 (47) 3 54 7/2
Wellega 49 (5) 65 59 (5) 44 (28) 5 51 11/9
Sources: Ministry of Land Reform Administration, Reports of Land Tenure Survey, 1967–1970;
Central Statistical Office, National Sample Survey, 1963–1967; Central Statistics Office,
Agricultural Sample Survey, 1979–1980 (for the Y/H data).
1. The proportion of full owner-operators ranged from 85% in Begemdir to 28% in Shewa. na=not
available. (partly) part tenant
2. Ranking (Eritrea and Tigre are excluded): Y=crop yields (kg/ha—1 being the highest), and
H=size of holdings (1 being the smallest)
As the Shewan elite prepared to resume the flagbearer status of the Ethiopian state
in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the country’s frontiers comprised a
number of Cushitic and Nilotic groups most of which were organized around clan
and sub-clan polities (Fernyhough 1986). Others boasted highly-centralized but
small-scale kingdoms, Emirates, chiefdoms, and monarchies.
Pervasive patron-client relations and the institution of age-set classes defined the
political economy of most Southern polities in the Rift Valley and the southeastern
highlands as well as in the southwestern lowlands. While the peripheral acephalous
societies remained stateless and thereby vulnerable to plunder and enslavement, the
Omotic (Gonga) monarchies such as the Seka and the Keffa were centralized and
despotic. Many of these kingdoms were tributaries of the Christian Gondarine state.
102 4 The Shewan Fiscal-Territorial State
(continued)
4.3 The Jimma State: Landlordism, Slavery, and Free Trade 105
from the gigantic landholding of Abba Jiffar and the long-distance trade it
embraced, most notably from the slave trade. That is, the Shewan ideal was
one of a landed peasanty while the Jimma ideal was big landlordism that
had no precedent in Ethiopian history.
2. The Shewan state had to rely on indirect extraction and conscripted peas-
ant militia for its big battles. The Jimma state was essentially a slave state
which relied on a combination of large armies of slaves as well as requisi-
tioned the Oromo and local peasanty to cultivate the vast estates of the war
leaders.
3. The subversion of the clan-based gadaa system (following the conquest of
vast non-Oromo lands into a free-trading but an oppressive state of Abba
Jiffar I) stands in an ironically unfavorable contrast with a tributarist state
of Sahle Selassie.
Jimma provides one possible template for what a scaled-up Oromo state might
have looked like. For one, it managed to master four of the six building-blocks of a
viable state: a common ideology in Islam, a lingua franca in Oromiffa, sufficient
coercive power (to ensure law and order, and secure borders), and a broad-based
fiscal base. Like the bigger Shewan state which eventually swallowed these south-
western kingdoms, Jimma Abba Jiffar lacked two other essential capabilities: provi-
sion of adequate basic public services (beyond enforcing land rights and protecting
traders), and sufficient restraints on the state elite to observe the rule of law. In sum,
Jimma was basically an efficiently despotic and monolingual Islamic state with lit-
tle resemblance to the pre-state gossa-based Oromo polities.
In Jimma, an unprecedented landlordism was instituted—an innovation that was
certainly un-Oromo also and un-Ethiopian by the standards of both GS and SS. The
apex was occupied by the king (and his royal descent group) and a class of warlords
(nobility: abba lafa or abba biya). The kingdom was rigidly centralized and con-
trolled thousands of landless tenants and bonded laborers. Free market in land was
the norm in a country where land was sellable but not a commodity. The king
directly controlled the army through appointed but largely unpaid governors under
the command of the abba dula. A unitary state was forged with an absolutist ruler
who was, however, refreshingly dependent on land taxes and trade taxes. In contrast
with Ze-Dengel and Tewodros II, Jimma Abba Jiffar I may rightly be given the
ironically anti-gadaa epithet: “Land is free, but man is unfree.” The inanimate
object was luckier than the animate one.
A novelty of the Jimma monarchy was that land was privately owned and rela-
tively freely capitalizable. The King, not claiming to own all land even, in theory,
was simply the biggest landlord in the kingdom. He headed an independently-
landed ruling class which included many economically but not militarily powerful
families (Lewis 2011; Fernyhough 1986).
This landholding system affected the mode of monarchical governance in several
important respects. It allowed for a rather modern distinction between state assets
106 4 The Shewan Fiscal-Territorial State
and personal assets—something which took the Shewan state much longer to
establish. High-ranking state offices were non-hereditary which gave the ruler the
latitude to emphasize merit tempered by the need for loyalty. No official was allowed
to live by direct taxation although many received outright land grants. Others were
unpaid notables of independent means who derived non-pecuniary benefits from
official titles.
Accordingly, the king retained and paid his own military rather than relying on
the requisitionable militia of the regional governors. As in Shewa, appointed gover-
nors were rotated frequently to prevent the acquisition of an independent power
base. Finally, revenue from the slave trade as well as slave-cultivated estates was of
great importance which is unusual for an Ethiopian polity. Abba Jiffar II (r. 1878–
1932) himself was reputed to have personally owned some 10,000 slaves which
prompted Emperor Menelik II to call on him to manumit them.
Interestingly, the subversion of the communal ethos of a pre-state Oromo and the
complete takeover of the well-established Sidama kingdoms by the Oromo warrior
class created the presumption of a tabula rasa in land tenure, ideology, and political
authority (Fernyhough 1986). The Jimma autocracy introduced to the region a rather
modern system of big landlordism where land was treated as a commodity, and
cultivation was done in the style of the Latin minifundia by a mixture of indentured
labor (corvée and slaves) and tenant labor. Just as importantly, the concentration of
power in the household of the king overcame the fetters of communal obligations
while permitting some delineation of the public sphere and the private sphere.
Though smallness (less than half a million subjects) and land-lockedness were
major constraints, the maintenance of law and order, and the protection of private
property rights facilitated the emergence of a thriving economy. This remarkably
efficient landlord-cum-slave system managed to expand its fiscal base by promoting
organized production of cash crops, a thriving slave trade, and an extensive cottage
industry.8
Economic logic ensured that the other attributes of Jimma to be similar to the
Shewan model. An aggressive program of territorial expansion resulted in the con-
fiscation of much land from weaker communities as well as constant mutual raiding
among neighboring principalities. Frequent promotion, in the classic Ethiopian
fashion, was also followed by the demotion of top non-hereditary officials was a
favorite tactic for preventing the proliferation of competing power centers. Crown
Councils had little power in both cases which explain the persistence of disruptive
conflicts over succession.
8
The contrasting Shewa-Jimma models of Ethiopian state formation provide a much-needed cor-
rective for two strands of rather sterile debate on Ethiopian historiography (Donham and James
2002; Clapham 2002): the great history of a semitized Abyssinia (represented by Shewa) as against
the anthropology of the Cushitic remainder (represented by Jimma). The first is stereotypically
presented as a feudo-imperial state while the latter is presented as a gadaa-democratic state
although this clan-based system did not even include all Oromo much less embracing universal
equality that modern liberalism demands. Both regimes were quintessentially African, autocratic,
and patrimonial. If anything, the Shewa state was more liberal culturally while the Jimma state was
more liberal economically.
4.4 The Limits of Tributarism for Nation-State Formation 107
It should be clear by now that, in the mixed crop-animal complex of the highlands,
a high degree of contestability of power (i. e., social mobility across class positions
and status lines) pervaded the low-trust chain of surplus extraction. The multi-
layered network of personalized reciprocity throughout the hierarchy, down from
the Emperor to the lowliest soldier, may be usefully called tribute farming. The
tribute farmer, unlike the tax farmer, engages in the collection and sharing of tribute
having been empowered by superiors with some political authority. Given its extrac-
tive bent, tribute farming inevitably engendered a conflict trap.
While class positions were rigid, social mobility for individuals was significant and
at times meritocratic. An ambitious and capable individual often occupied more
than one class position at the same time or moved up a class status or two within the
9
Mohammed Hassen (1994: 197) offers the following explanation for the inability of the fractious
Oromo mini-states of the southwest to consolidate their stateness by building on a shared political
culture: “In short, both Limmu-Ennarya and Jimma failed to unify the region into a single political
unit… First, the rivalry among the Gibe rulers consumed their creative energy and diverted their
attention from the common danger that was to ruin all of them… Secondly, the weakness of the
defense system was reflected in the absence of firearms in the Gibe region and Wallaga.”
108 4 The Shewan Fiscal-Territorial State
structure of overlordship. Many upstarts with an invented royal pedigree even man-
aged to turn their martial skills into an emperorship—Kassa of Quara (Tewodros II)
and Kassa of Enderta (Yohannes IV) come to mind (Caulk 1978a; b; Crummey
1986; Wolde Aregay 1986). Furthermore, the resources that can be captured through
arm’s-length tributarism imposed sharp limits on the size of the ruling class or the
emergence of a distinct class culture—the overlord was little more than a glorified
peasant in both worldview and life style, at least until after World War II.
This reading of Ethiopian economic history and the history of the state throws a
much-needed light on several of features of Ethiopian agrarian relations. Authority,
including that of the emperor, was rarely hereditary. Resourceful upstarts with
good martial and leadership skills had the incentive to form coalitions among dis-
gruntled members of the nobility, the gentry, and even the peasantry to win high
offices. That was why young princes were banished for life to glorified penal colo-
nies, and the defiant outlaw out to redress injustice by a ruler is the stuff of legend
in rural Ethiopia. These personalized contests came close to extinguishing the state
during 1770–1855 and ended only with the establishment of a modern bureaucracy
after 1930.
The multi-ethnic nobility was a politically and socially self-conscious aristoc-
racy headed by the monarch. The governors of the large provinces and hereditary
principalities enjoyed significant autonomy from the Crown to be able to enforce
whimsical modes of governance. Membership in the ruling class was based on a
combination of the pedigree of birth, merit (martial and administrative), loyalty to
the overlord, and hereditary rights. Big-manism, deeply steeped in martial ethos,
shaped the patron-client relationship throughout the chain of hierarchy, and each
player in this choreography ritualistically ‘cringed to superiors and condescended to
inferiors.’ Pervasive shirking and low trust among the elite, of course, had the effect
of magnifying myopia which discouraged public investment in infrastructure,
extension services, and education.
Low-level administrators and the ecclesiastical elite served as intermediaries
between the producer and the non-productive classes by enforcing obedience, trib-
ute payments, and militia obligations. Being a member of the yeomanry and yet
advantaged by better financial and human capital, this stratum might have served as
an agent of systemic change. The gentry could have used its limited but not incon-
siderable political skills to organize peasant movements for reform (see Tareke
1991, for an overly heroic rendering of sporadic peasant-based insurgencies), or to
invest its own resources in the production of wealth. It was, however, too politically
dependent and heterogeneous to come to its own.
Peasants for their part colluded with challengers and pretenders in the hope of
getting a break from the winner. Just as often, they followed an upstart overlord into
less defended and less populated districts in search of land or tribute payers. The
lesser Gobez Aleqa sought to build up their “reputational capital” as worthy local
leaders by their martial skills, generosity, and astuteness in the low-intensity arms
race. When all else failed, producers sought to increase their welfare by limiting
output to subsistence levels, especially livestock wealth, which was most prone to
be looted (Pankhurst 1966; Caulk 1978a, b; Tareke 1991).
4.4 The Limits of Tributarism for Nation-State Formation 109
The soldiery, along with the priesthood, was an important outlet for young
p easants who understandably loathed the life of the lowly farmer. Soldiers histori-
cally attached themselves to regional strongmen or the imperial army and, being
mostly non-salaried for a good half of the period under review, lived off herdsmen
and cultivators. When social order broke down, unscrupulous governors resorted to
looting with impunity even their own home districts, let alone more distant and
better-endowed borderlands.
It was a sign of progress that the institution of a specialized soldier-gentry class
(Chewa), was gradually supplanted by the imperial army and regional neftegna mili-
tia. It is, therefore, understandable that when the fortune of their overlord changed
for the worse, the retinue displayed their rational opportunism by unceremoniously
switching sides in favor of the victor (Caulk 1978a, b; Tegenu 2007). The highly
personalized model of traditional leadership and followership was unstable indeed.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church, as the fountainhead of education and
the symbol of national unity, provided ideological justification for the existing
order. In return, it benefited handsomely from royal patronage in the form of large
endowments of gult land. The priesthood was predominantly of peasant stock. The
upper echelon of the ecclesiastical elite, which comprised the leaderships of the
autonomous monasteries and the highly decentralized parishes, showed little incli-
nation for reformist activism when it came to economic life or civil rights. As the
reformist Emperor Tewodros discovered in the 1860s, the Church was a bastion of
conservatism when it comes to tinkering with the tributary system.
The merchant class, consisting mostly of politically marginalized Ethiopian
Muslims and small colonies of expatriates (mainly Yemeni, Indian, Armenian and
Greek), was engaged in the domestic long-distance trade or external trade. Long
distance trade was highly valued and protected by fiscally constrained rulers since
it enabled agricultural surpluses, and alluvial gold or forest products to be sold in
distant markets or exported abroad to finance imports of arms and luxury goods.
The low-productivity economy could not support sizable towns, much less big cit-
ies. As a result, most of the domestically produced handicrafts and tools, quite infe-
rior when compared with those of Egypt, China or India, were supplied mostly by
endogamous artisanal minorities (Gamst 1970; Pankhurst 2012). The material cul-
ture was hardly more distinguished than the political culture.
Ethiopia’s tributary agrarian system, which long ago emerged out of its tribal cocoon
managed to outlive its shelf life for too long. The inescapable conclusion is that
agricultural underdevelopment in Ethiopia had to do with the uneasy coexistence of
a landed but incompletely free peasantry and a powerful but fragmented overlord
class deadlocked over the distribution of rural surplus. Demographic pressure is, in
reality, endogenous to the process in that it tends to raise land productivity but low-
ers labor productivity (Abegaz 2005; McCann 1995).
110 4 The Shewan Fiscal-Territorial State
James McCann (1987, 1995) rightly notes that the Ethiopian agrarian cycle
opens as the population expanded into areas with a relatively abundant land. Here,
residence-based and open-access institutions prevail. Demographic pressure mani-
fested itself in such processes as migration to the highlands by pastoral people and
the lowlands by the sedentary people. The non-irrigable river valleys enjoyed good
land but an unhealthy climate and a higher variability of precipitation.
An overriding motivation of the balager was securing the subsistence needs
of the family—a goal that was constantly undermined by predatory wars, pesti-
lence, and weather-related crises (Pankhurst 1966). In scarce land regions, agri-
cultural intensification in the form of biological and labor investment, multiple
cropping, and reduced fallow periods were used to enhance output per acre. In
labor scarce zones, expanding the use of animal traction and attracting wage
labor or tenants were important. The economics of a subsistence tributary sys-
tem, however, militated against significant capital deepening or the application
of innovative technology.
In this environment, the peasantry displayed extraordinary resourcefulness by
resisting dispossession of its customary landholdings, switching to more lucrative
occupations (soldiery and priesthood), and expanding the area of cultivation, alter-
ing crop or livestock mix (in favor of sorghum, maize, and khat), or even foregoing
above-subsistence production in the knowledge that what is not produced cannot be
stolen. Too few found it rewarding to invest in human and physical capital in the
absence of an incentive-compatible social contract (Easterly 2001).
Unable to build a strong united front, the tributor class was left to fight over
increasingly meager scraps. Unable to turn its access to land into political auton-
omy, the landed peasantry became pauperized.
Smallholders under-invested in productive assets and over-invested in defensive
assets relative to the optimal level because of high insecurity regarding both the rate
of taxation (tribute) and its capricious variability. In the absence of credible protec-
tion by the State, the Ethiopian peasant remained woefully and willfully poor
responding only to demographic pressure to restore subsistence requirements. This
social class, in effect, resigned itself to an untenable life of “getting by”—a condi-
tion that is ironically idealized in the folk version of Church teachings. The dissipa-
tion of scarce resources on predation or resistance against pillage, therefore,
undermined the foundations for high agricultural productivity. The political trap
pushed the entire economy into a poverty trap.
The military tradition of this agrarian system can then be understood as a product
of the interactions among the three sources of elite wealth: land whose scarcity rose
steadily, labor whose scarcity fell steadily, and income overrights for the titled class
whose value fluctuated withe the seesaw between the independent producer and the
state-dependent appropriator. The hemmed state elites operated in this manner until
the ascendancy of Shewa with its access to cash crop-based revenues and steady
increase in urbanization.
Figure 4.3 illustrates a model of distributional contests between wealth appro-
priators and wealth producers. It captures the behavior of the two contending classes
of a tributary agrarian economy.
4.4 The Limits of Tributarism for Nation-State Formation 111
Fig. 4.3 Endogeneity of output shares and production level under tributarism. (Sources and Notes:
Author). Effects of distributional struggles (from initial equilibrium, A). B’: AC1 pivots to AC2 but
PC1 remains unchanged (extractor share rises from 35% to 50%): output declines markedly to Q4
due to the disincentive of producers to maintain high production. B: PC1 pivots to PC2 but AC1
remains unchanged (producer share rises from 65% to 75%): output declines to Q3 due to the
disincentive for extractors to maintain their violence-reducing public services to producers. A’:
PC1 pivots to PC2 and AC1 to AC2 (negative-sum extractive contests between appropriators and
producers with initial shares restored in the ratio of 35%:65%): output declines markedly to Q2
I explore what it would take for Africa to mount a successful very-late industrialization drive in
10
Basically, the Shewan sireet-sir’at nexus which favored a ruling class whose
primary route to wealth accumulation was the acquisition of ever higher mili-
tary ranks and loftier civilian titles. This system of overlordship had momen-
tous implications for the political and economic order. State authority tended to
be both over people for service and over land for tribute in the core provinces.
However, it was over people in large parts of the highland periphery where the
land/labor ratio was high.
As we will argue in the next chapter, the most telling sign of how far SS had devi-
ated from the governance model set earlier by the Gondar is the way it fell. The old
state elites which had the most to lose from the abolition of the monarchy, being
entirely urban-based and dependent on the Emperor, could not develop an alterna-
tive political base.
The contestants for the capture of SS were not interested in crowning them-
selves; they instead wished to abolish it in favor of a republican form of govern-
ment. The contestants, unlike the regional warlords of yesteryear, lacked an
autonomous economic base to reward followers and to fund the requisite militia.
They were instead products of the state itself—as beneficiaries of modern education
and as public employees. This explanation has domestic and external dimensions.
Domestic Extractive Contests: The use of tributarism as a conceptual entry
point bares the intimate linkages between property rights and productivity. Secure
control over the production process (either by a peasantry or by a landlord class)
provides a strong incentive for productivity-enhancing investment. Ethiopian patri-
monialism clearly failed to meet this requirement of modernity.
Shewan tributary relations existed between the Emperor and the hierarchy of
underlings (internal tributarism) as well as between the Emperor and various self-
governing principalities in the borderlands (external tributarism). One objective of
the Crown, which was accomplished, was to transform external tributarism into an
internal one through territorial expansion and consolidation. The other, much harder
challenge, was to transition from a tributary state to a tax state.
Royal absolutism as a description of practice is, therefore, largely inapt in this
case for two reasons (Perham 1969). Firstly, because power was fragmented rather
than concentrated. Incessant contests for the most lucrative titles and offices were
the norm among state elites. Secondly, the system was also vulnerable to endemic
contestations between the overlord aristocracy and the landed peasantry over eco-
nomic appropriation (Tables 4.5 and 4.6).
As a part of Italian East Africa, Ethiopia momentary lost its sovereignty, a good
portion of the small cadre of the educated was liquidated, good farmland was desig-
nated for Italian settlement, an urban-based military administration was consoli-
dated, an alien ethnically- and racially-segregated administrations were introduced,
and the incipient modern infrastructure was hastily expanded (Larebo 1994; Sbacchi
1985). Just as importantly, the titled and nationalist aristocracy was dispossessed of
its land and positions. This, to a large extent, wiped the slate almost clean for the
reinvention of the Ethiopian state under a post-Menelik Shewan dynasty.
Although the de facto British military administration of 1941–1944 had a big
influence on government policy, the restored Emperor Haile Selassie I managed to
114 4 The Shewan Fiscal-Territorial State
The combination of splendid isolation for nearly half a millennium following the
rise of the Ottomans produced technological stagnation and a deep-seated siege
mentality. This was rudely exposed by the shocks of the two Italian invasions, the
first (1896) ending with the colonization of the province of Eritrea and the second
(1935) which provided opportunities for revamping the moribund order (Truilzi
1982; Sbacchi 1985; Larebo 1994). Furthermore, ceaseless Arab destabilization tied
to control over Nile waters and the Red Sea undermined the delicate domestic bal-
ance between a multiplicity of tributors and tributaries.
The belated post-Adwa modernization efforts of Menelik, the appearance on the
scene of a small cadre of educated Ethiopians, the disruptive but also constructive
effects of the occupation by Italy and Britain, and the entry of the U.S. as a patron
all contributed to the fierce urgency of a modernization drive (Perham 1969;
Clapham 1969; Retta 2012). For the first time, tributes were converted into taxes
and fees, the very idea of constitutional rule including modern civil and criminal
codes was imaginable; professional civil and military services were established
albeit under the tight control of a neo-patrimonial and autocratic emperor; post-
secondary institutions and urban centers appeared on scene; and the country was
slowly integrated into the world economy via trade and aid.
116 4 The Shewan Fiscal-Territorial State
What emerged after 1942 was, therefore, a territorial and quasi-modern state
with some Weberian trappings (a Constitution, professional army and civil s ervice,
and a system of taxation), a cohesive multiethnic Royal Court elite personally
controlled by the Emperor, and marginalized traditional elites of the northern
core and the newly incorporated southern provinces. The post-1955 order was a
hybrid, neo-patrimonial with a rational-legal edifice dominated by rampant rent-
seeking (the politics of the belly, aka meblat11) revolving around loyalty to the
autocratic Emperor. Ordinary citizens in all parts of the empire, the religious
institutions, and civic or professional societies were either captured or thoroughly
marginalized as dependents.
Overall, SS managed to improve upon three of the building blocks of a modern
state: a national lingua franca in Amharic, a legitimizing ideology, and quasi-
monopoly over the instruments of large-scale violence. Shewa’s genius for melding
the legacies of Axum and Gondar with the new demography of the diverse cultures
of the richer southern hinterland was key to its success as a trailblazer of a modern
Ethiopian state.12 It, however, failed to fulfill the other requirements: robust decen-
tralization for sharing power and respecting regional identities, a capacity to pro-
vide basic public services to all, and effective restraints on power-holders in the
form of the rule of law, separation of church and state, and avenues for popular
participation in public affairs.
We conclude from this that the tributarism was perhaps a necessary starting point
but ultimately insufficient to serve as a springboard for robust state building. The
causal mechanism that explains the delayed transition from a civilizational state to
a modern nation-state, and concomitantly from subsistence agriculture to industri-
alization, is to be found at the nexus between internal and external forces, and ulti-
mately the buoyancy of the fiscal base.
The limited modernization eventually gave birth to an incongruous revolutionary
state after 1974 which will be examined in the next chapter. This radical and
extremely violent “experiment” in social engineering was implemented first under a
nationalist military regime presiding on a socialist-war economy, and followed by
11
Historically, the discouragement of productive uses of the extracted surplus was partially miti-
gated by the tendency to expend it in the locality (for militia, church-building, charity, lavish
feasts, etc.) in which it was generated (Reid 2011). Ironically, this moral economy was thoroughly
undermined to the detriment of subsistence producers with the emergence of large garrison towns
and Addis Ababa under as preferred residences of the aristocracy and as centers for transforming
tribute into cash or imported trinkets. Unfortunately for Marx’s “potatoes in the sack,” there were
too few urban factories to absorb the surplus army of peasant labor.
12
Henze (2000: 120–21) puts it thusly: “Shoa’s dynamism may be attributable in part to its amal-
gam of ethnic groups with varying traditions. The Amhara of the more northerly regions—western
Wollo, Gojjam, and Begemder—contributed much less creative energy to the process which
enabled Ethiopia to triumph over its world-be colonizers during the final decades of the nineteenth
century… [T]he Tigrayans mad a major contribution to the revival of Ethiopian political momen-
tum during the last third of the nineteenth century… [T]he impetus toward moving boldly into the
modern world was weaker in Tigray than in Shoa. The social conservatism of the Tigrayans left
them trailing the Shoans.”
References 117
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References 119
This chapter explores how the twin forces of post-war globalization and the
imperatives of modernization changed the terms of power play between Ethiopian
state elites and non-state actors to produce radical institutional changes. The
Revolutionary State (RS) upstaged the old order but failed in many important respects
to devise enduring institution that resonate with societal norms and changing needs.
One consequence of the changes in the material basis of the state is the hyper-central-
ization of the state and the other is the institutionalization of a mixed bag of inclusion
and exclusion, both of which undermined many laudable gains in the project of
nation-state building during 1855–1974 in exchange for largely symbolic victories.
Under the RS, the façade of constitutional rule was elaborately rationalized by a
seductively populist Marxism informing a totalitarian ideology of the primacy of an
incongruous class struggle in a non-industrial society. This has lately transmogrified
into political ethnicity in arguably the most thoroughly post-tribal country in Sub-
Saharan Africa. The RS is technocratically and coercively stronger than its monar-
chist but permissive predecessors, but much less meritocratic and accountable to
citizens. The revolutionary state also made significant progress in delivering on the
lofty promises of durable peace, and rapid and egalitarian economic growth.
The postwar world order under Pax Americana delivered many positive externalities
for weak states. It oversaw a golden age of global economic growth; it facilitated the
decolonization of Africa and Asia; it bestowed sovereignty on states many of which
are probably otherwise non-viable; and the Cold War gave small states significant
leverage in playing one bloc against the other to extract significant development or
military aid.
Following the two oil shocks of the 1970s, however, the global political economy
entered a new phase. It even elicited a thankfully short-lived hubris-laden talk of the
‘end of history,’ the ‘new globalization,’ and the ‘end of liberalism.’ These momen-
tous developments included the dead hand of the moribund Soviet model of state
socialism which collapsed under the weight of an ossified hyper-bureaucratism, and
the technology revolution that was triggered by digitization and containerization.
To this, we may add the fact that the world economy has become truly multipolar
once again with the US-EU and China-Japan (along with the rest of East Asia)
each claiming some 40 percent of the global gross output of some $100 trillion in
purchasing-power-parity terms. While right-wing parties in the citadels of capital-
ism are looking for protection of the homeland from the evils of globalism they
nurtured, tin pot dictators currently holding sway in much of Africa are devising
ingenious ways to feign electoral mandates with the formidable bullet box serving
as a failsafe backup against the ever-treasonous ballot box.
It is in this new global environment that we can understand the anachronistic
embrace of state socialism by the Derg and the uncritical embrace of the much-
hyped “national question” peddled by the infantile Ethiopian Student Movement
(which engendered the likes of the TPLF, OLF, and EPLF). The latter, of course,
had to grapple with the domestic discontents and the global realities of neoliberal-
ism by resorting to anomalous dispensations such as ethnic federalism and a dis-
guised Marxist party-state “governing” a market economy.
As we saw earlier, it took Ethiopia some 120 years to transition from a historic
tributary-military state with a strong core population to a functioning fiscal-territorial
state. By 1974, the country would boast a few integrative state-led institutions
5.1 Anachronistic Statism and Atavistic Tribalism 123
(educational, military, civil service, and trade associations) but not national political
parties or a dense set of professional associations to facilitate the political assimila-
tion of its culturally diverse and urbanizing population. By 1980, though, the state
had managed to monopolize power by methodically displacing all other political
actors under the mantra of ‘Ethiopia First.’ By 2015, Ethiopian nationalism had to
contend with strident voices peddling particularistic, me-too nationalisms.1
Paradoxically, this mix of a technocratically strong state and a progressively
enfeebled political society has resulted in a dogged de-building of an integrated
multicultural state by unwittingly facilitating the polarization of its polities along
ethnic, religious, or regional lines. This duality of a strengthened technocratic leg
and a weakened accountability leg of the political order is a characteristic feature of
postcolonial rather than non-colonial state formations.
The question then is why Ethiopia, with the pedigree of a resilient civilizational
state which has flirted with light versions of constitutional monarchy and state
socialism, has found it so elusive to develop effective political and economic institu-
tions that meld inclusiveness with capability. I insist on the point that the root cause
is to be found in the continued absence of an independent economic base for ambi-
tious elites who are condemned to trail-blaze a myopic political entrepreneurship by
capturing the state by force or even by vote. The challenge for us then is to explain
why Ethiopia has not succeeded in transforming its longstanding advantage of hav-
ing an indigenous state to solidify its diverse polities into a cohesive citizenry that
is loyal to the national state.
To begin to answer this question satisfactorily, we need to define the feasible
pathways open to Ethiopian state builders. Using political entrepreneurship as a
conceptual entry point (predatory or developmental), we scrutinize the achieve-
ments of the two revolutionary regimes in post-1974 Ethiopia—the nationalist mili-
tary regime of 1974–91 and the ethnonationalist-militarist Tigrean regime during
1991–2015.2
1
Since my objective here is to identify notable continuities and significant changes in the history
of Ethiopian state formation, I had to give a short shrift to two strands of literature on the revolu-
tionary state. One strand analyzes the genesis and performance of the two post-1974 regimes by
academics as well as members of various political groups which have been contending for state
power. The second strand, properly dubbed Eritreanism, is intensely vitriolic and politically self-
serving as evidenced by such fanciful claims as Ethiopia being a country only a century old or
Ethiopia being ‘invented’ by the bogeyman of a “black-colonialist” Menelik II.
2
The cut-off date of 2015 may seem entirely arbitrary for a still-ruling regime, albeit no longer con-
fident or cohesive. This is so for three reasons: twenty-five years is a long enough record for assess-
ment; the end of 2015 marked the culmination of a totalistic control of society by the deep state; and
2015 also marked the nation-wide uprisings against the self-styled Tigrean minority rule which is
widely viewed as the beginning of the end of the second revolutionary government. The regime
declared military rule by a command post in the Fall of 2016; its ruling coalition shows unmistak-
able signs of implosion; and it continues to roil under a legitimation crisis sapping its will to rule by
naked force in the face of defiance by the youth across the country. Credible reports by human rights
organizations and the reports of the U.S. and E.U. governments suggest that tens of thousands of
political prisoners languish in the regime’s many dungeons, and some hundred thousand youths
have been rounded off from the streets and their homes in the so-called reeducation camps.
124 5 The Ethiopian Revolutionary State
The other possibility is the situation where elites are united by common interest
and leadership, but non-elites are hopelessly divided. In this case, an inferior and
unstable equilibrium would prevail that is bereft of both the rule of law and broad-
based accountability. This seems to be the case for Ethiopia today.
Autocrats and dictators, being self-interested and rational, understand incentives
and abide by certain rules. They must generously treat the few dozen powerful back-
ers (called essentials, chosen from a much larger selectorate and an even larger but
powerless electorate) to form a winning coalition (Bueno de Mesquita and Smith
2011). The Prince is then well advised to be mindful of certain realities: politics is
about getting and holding onto political power; leaders should rely on as small a
winning coalition as possible; if the winning coalition is small, but the real selector-
ate is large, then the essentials will always be at risk of being replaced and will
support the ruler so that they can keep receiving their private payoffs; and when the
winning coalition is small, the leader has no choice but to siphon off public and
private resources to pay off his essential backers.
Transition to long-term stability and maturity may ironically come from success-
ful economic development that is spearheaded by a developmental regime. The laws
of cumulative causation and the law of unintended consequences may apply here.
Such a regime, rationally seeking growth-based legitimacy and a bigger taxable base,
126 5 The Ethiopian Revolutionary State
may very well sow the seeds of its own destruction. This reminds us of the attempted
‘controlled modernization programs’ which inadvertently facilitated the demise of
such authoritarian monarchies as the Shah of Iran and Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia
(Moore 1993).3 With these tantalizing thoughts in our toolbox, let us scrutinize the
Ethiopian RS more closely.
Mindful of the new global context and using the conceptual framework of tribu-
tarism, we are now ready to offer a fresh look at the nature of the third variant of
the Ethiopian state. A noted in Chap. 3, the Gondarine State, like its contempo-
rary Afroasian peers, was tributary-military rather than fiscal-territorial. Such a
state was neither bureaucratic nor absolutist. It was a rather decentralized entity
relying on church-based legitimacy and occasional punitive expeditions to fend
off threats to the state. Its successor, the Shewan State managed the remark-
able feat of transforming the Gondarine tributary state into a territorial state by
obtaining international recognition of its borders after doubling its size by World
War I. Furthermore, it laid down a barely secure fiscal base strung together from
disparate sources, in part by skillfully cultivated tentative economic links with
the world economy.
Shewa was unusually positioned to accomplish unprecedented political central-
ization and territorialization (Tables 3.1 and 5.2). For one, Shewa developed an
unusually multi-ethnic coalition of state elites which served as an unflinching flag-
bearer of a united Ethiopian state that spared the country from European colonial-
ism. This state-class allied itself with a State-Church as it sought to lay down the
foundations of Ethiopian nationalism. After World War II, the Shewan State man-
aged to establish a professional civil service and army along with a modern civil
code and penal code, recruited increasingly by merit rather than by loyalty alone or
genealogy (Perham 1969; Clapham 1969).
Emperor Menelik II’s defensive territorial acquisitions during 1875–1898, the
self-serving claims of revisionists to the contrary, reunited the tributary polities
of medieval Ethiopia. This was certainly in part a response to the internal com-
petition of regional kings for new resources (most notably between Negus Tekle
Haymanot of Gojam and Negus Menelik of Shewa, the supremacy of the latter
3
Moore (1966) identifies three historical routes from agrarianism to the modern industrial world—
two capitalist and one socialist. One pathway is a bourgeois-aristocracy alliance against a politi-
cally fragmented peasantry which explains the emergence of a capitalist-democratic order (as in the
United Kingdom and France). A second pathway is a bourgeois-aristocracy alliance to capture the
state and repress a peasantry that posed a political threat (as in Germany and Japan). The third route
is a worker-peasant alliance, led by the urban intelligentsia, that repressed the fledgling bourgeoisie
and the atavistic agrarian elite to create a totalitarian-commandist state (as in Russia and China).
5.2 The Legacies of Shewa Inform a Revolution 127
having been settled at the battle of Embabo). Just as importantly, it was a response
to a ggressive European colonialist expansion in the Horn of Africa (Larebo 1994,
2016; Clapham 2017).
This southward expansion evidently had three consequences of much signifi-
cance for subsequent linkage between ethnicity and power in Ethiopia. Firstly, the
expansive state’s leaders and followers were predominantly Amharic-speaking
Shewans of Amara, Oromo, Gurage, or mixed genealogies. Secondly, power
shifted from the northern Abyssinian power centers reflecting the economic inter-
ests of the new hegemonic state elite based in Addis Ababa. Thirdly, although
pre-WWII Ethiopia was governed as a highly decentralized system of 42 histori-
cal provinces, it became progressively centralized afterward (Zewde 1994). As
Clapham (1988) perceptively observes, the disempowerment of the regional aris-
tocracy had two contradictory effects: the regime cut itself from its traditional
base in the countryside as well as from wider political constituencies emerging in
the modern sector.
This neo-patrimonial system inevitably gave rise to a new bureaucratic elite of
officeholders who aspired to convert political empowerment into economic empow-
erment by deploying the fiscal and regulatory authority of the state. To ward off
the dissimilation that eventually took the form of political ethnicity, a national
128 5 The Ethiopian Revolutionary State
4
This idea of a division of labor among culturally-defined “peoples“of Ethiopia is applauded by
Donald Levine (1974) and Messay Kebede (1999) in teleological formulae for the modernizing
and consolidating Ethiopian nationhood. Levine’s recipe dubiously but optimistically presumes
that ethnolinguistic groups are cohesive political actors: Tigrean-Agew thesis, Oromo antithesis,
and Amara synthesis. Messay, on the other hand, calls for reconciliation of the supposed Tigrean
restorationist drive, Amara longing for a resurgence, and Oromo search for self-assertion. Why the
presumed Tigrean restorationist sentiment and the Oromo search for full inclusion have transmog-
rified, in the eyes the respective ethnic politicians, into a dissimilation that is driven by an anti-
Amara and anti-Ethiopian nationalism cannot be understood from these fanciful grand
formulations.
5
Christopher Clapham (2002: 53) sums it up well when he writes: “Not only was the record of
imperial state consolidation from the reign of Tewodros onwards quite extraordinary in its own
right; it also created patterns of development in the Horn that set it sharply apart from other regions
of Africa… In particular, it acquired neither the institutional nor the political characteristics of
colonial rule … The distinctive features of the Ethiopian state, including the land question, the
national question, the relationship with Eritrea, and the possibility of a revolution of a kind
unimaginable in other parts of Africa, all derive from this legacy.”
6
Richard Greenfield (1965) uses the label “empire state” (not clear if the empire-builders are not
culturally alien or geographic neighbors) to describe the mix of a centralized and personalized state
authority presiding over an ethnically heterogeneous population. This characterization, however,
confuses with an incendiary effect the imperial Ethiopian expansion and consolidation of its cul-
tural and historical periphery with a colonial expansion by an alien power. The “greater Ethiopia”
perspective, in cultural terms, offered by Levine (2000) offers a better view of the many cultural
commonalities of the peoples of the Horn which is key to understanding the continued attachment
to the idea of Ethiopia by ordinary folks throughout the country.
5.2 The Legacies of Shewa Inform a Revolution 129
created dualities between city and country, and between the Center controlled by a
multiethnic ruling class and the two disgruntled Periphery—comprising the eco-
nomically marginalized North and the politically marginalized South.
The Shewan dynasty was overthrown by the non-commissioned officers of its de
facto praetorian guard in February 1974. The military regime was, in turn, replaced
in 1991 by two Tigrigna-speaking liberation fronts: the Tigrean People’s Liberation
Front (TPLF) based in Tigray and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF)
based in Eritrea. The former continues to rule Ethiopia while the latter declared an
independent state of Eritrea in 1993.
The two versions of what I, perhaps inaptly, call the Revolutionary State (RS)
have some commonalities and some differences. These regimes share the three
characteristics of being revolutionary, authoritarian, and populist. What makes them
‘revolutionary’ in the Ethiopian context is the fact that they are republican and opted
for radical economic and political reforms. They are ‘populist’ because they offered
short-termist and grandiose popular solutions to complex structural problems. They
are ‘authoritarian’ because they denied independent political and economic space
for organized citizens on pain of state-sanctioned violence against any and all signs
of opposition to the ruling clique. They, however, differ in other respects.
The Garrison-Populist regime (1974–1991) was militarist, centralist, and abso-
lutist, but redeemably Ethiopian-nationalist. The Ethnocentric-Capitalist regime
(1991–) is equally militarist, centralist, and absolutist, but also Tigrean-supremacist
and viscerally anti-Ethiopian-nationalism. The socialistic rhetoric notwithstanding,
it has self-servingly gone with the global grain to embrace capitalism—albeit a
blatantly crony one.
We will now characterize the two regimes by identifying the significant continu-
ities and radical breaks with the millennia-old monarchist tradition of the Christian
Ethiopian state. Given the large extant literature on the subject, I must necessarily
be highly selective based on salience to the themes of this book.
The two variants of RS, identified by the type of regime that captured the
Ethiopian state, have broad similarities as well as notable differences. The Garrison-
Populist RS was based in the urban centers and assumed power in a creeping coup
d’état. It purported to mobilize the oppressed masses against all elites—nationalist
as well as secessionist.
The Ethnocentric-Capitalist state was also a part of the urban Left, and its gue-
rilla struggle matured in Tigray’s Dedebit lowlands and the long-denuded high-
lands. Their provincialist mindset, born of the marginalization of one of the historic
provinces, still flirts the option of secession for a greater or Abay Tigray or even a
Tigray-Tigrign state with Eritrea. Ironically, the Tigrean elite was historically a part-
ner with the Amaricized elite in dominating the Ethiopian state. Ironically, the pau-
perized rebelled for itself rather than for Ethiopia against the enriched Addis Ababa
after a long-lasting pretense of “keeping up appearances.”7
7
Its Eritreanist rhetoric notwithstanding, the Tigray has little in common with a post-Menelikean
South. Tigray instead is an integral part of the long-marginalized northern core (and the most
autonomous at that), and its unbecoming representatives are feigning to be ethnically discrimi-
nated when it is clearly not the case.
130 5 The Ethiopian Revolutionary State
In the absence of the rule of law and a modicum of constitutional order, the
revolutionary- populist elites defined accountability in terms only of ensuring
security and basic needs. Both the Derg junta and the TPLF (Tigrean People’s
Liberation Front) tribal politicians paternalistically deployed the heavy hands of
the state to expand pro-poor investment in basic education, basic health, food secu-
rity, wider access to clean water and electricity, and improved road and rail connec-
tivity. The TPLF has been particularly adept at mobilizing foreign development aid
to fund its pro-poor policies. To maximize foreign exchange earnings, the EPRDF
state has also invested in high-modernist projects in power generation and cash
crop estates (especially sugar) and facilitated party companies and FDI as well as
remittance inflows.
The removal by the military of a senile Emperor and a rootless aristocracy, which
almost entirely depended on his patrimony, exploded into a civil war after 1975.
One battle line for state power was drawn between the Marxist-Leninist Ethiopian
People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) and the Derg and its allies (mainly the All-
Ethiopia Socialist Movement, Meison). In 1977–78, over 10,000 idealistic youth
were recklessly sacrificed in the ensuring political struggles between the agents of
the so-called red terror and white terror (Clapham 1988; Zewde 2014).
The urban-based scramble for the reigns of the state was compounded by the
legacy of secessionist and internecine wars, especially in Eritrea and the Ogaden.
The moribund monarchy, despite its heroic achievements in rebuilding the post-
1942 state, systematically preempted the emergence of a capable, Ethiopian-
nationalist leadership to put the country on an irreversible path of inclusive
modernization.
The project of defending and consolidating a centralized state was intensified by
the Derg but with some notable differences from the approach refined by the
SS. First, the Derg tried to mask its totalitarian predisposition by creating an out-
wardly decentralized administrative system of 30 regions delimited quite reason-
ably by broad cultural similarities, local history, and the imperatives of development
(Wubneh 2017). Since self-administration ultimately should mean power-sharing,
regional autonomy under an authoritarian-hierarchical regime became little more
than what is called manipulative decentralization.
Secondly, the Derg eliminated, rather than coopted, the intermediate socio-
political strata located between Haile Selassie’s state and what remained of the
diverse customary governance systems. Nonstate leaders were disempowered by
the loss of authority that is not tied to officeholding and the delegitimizing public-
enemy labels of “feudal” or even “bourgeois.” This amorphous class, an important
traditional conveyor belt between the State and ordinary subjects, historically
included persons and groups with independent economic bases (businesspersons
and the gentry), respected elders (religious leaders and respected heads of notable
local families), and educated reformers (Perham 1969; Zewde 2001). With the ten-
132 5 The Ethiopian Revolutionary State
tacles of the militarized state now stretched out unmediated to the micro level of the
neighborhood (kebele and got), the dream of popular sovereignty in a republican
state soon dissipated. This template, as we will see below, was applied with a ven-
geance by the regime that came next.
Third, since legitimacy depended on taming large-scale violence and the promo-
tion of development, the regime needed to mobilize various constituencies through
the media of captive “mass” organizations (peasant associations, urban-dwellers’
associations, women’s organizations, youth organizations, labor unions, and the
like) as convenient disguises for its coercive rule (Clapham 1988; Ottaway 1987).
Despite its populist coloring, this unprecedented degree of state intrusion into pri-
vate lives reinforced Ethiopia’s (Highlander, to be correct) tradition of opportunist
contestation of, and deference to, authority (Levine 2000; Vaughan 2003, 2011).
Lacking disciplined party structures, at least initially, the military regime had to
rely on a mobilized “lumpen proletariat” in the urban areas to do its bidding of
gangster violence that left a lasting scar on the society. Political engagement became
the fifth rail (korenti) of politics. The Derg also instituted draconian methods of
cowing down the professional civil service. This was enforced by Stalinist cadres
and military commissars, supported by like-minded civilian radicals (especially
Meison) who perhaps unwittingly provided ideological and organizational scaffold-
ing for the capture of mass organizations including peasant militia (Kebede 2011).8
Unable to map out an alternative blueprint of governance, it took the Derg a
decade to consolidate unchallengeable authority. It hyper-politicized the urban
kebele and the peasant associations and hijacked independent trade unions and
urban-based mass organizations. It belatedly, under pressure from Gorbachev,
formed a vanguard party in 1987—the Workers Party of Ethiopia (WPE). These
efforts allowed the military regime to deeply penetrate society, mobilize human and
material resources for the war economy, implement land nationalization along with
cooperativization, mount an impressive mass literacy campaigns, initiate villagiza-
tion programs, and raise a huge peasant militia against several secessionist forces
and urban competitors for power.
By the end of the 1980s, a hyper-centralized state was in place with Ethiopian
nationalism as its legitimizing banner. The constitution and the reluctantly orga-
nized a state-party were aimed primarily at appeasing state employees and urban-
ites. Loyalty, more than competence, was the principal criterion of recruitment.
Democratic centralism was adopted precisely because it was consonant with a
8
Messay Kebede (2011) suggests that the Ethiopian Left failed to fully implement its public pro-
fessed goals of bringing equality and prosperity to all citizens because its utopianism was inher-
ently conflictual with equally compelling hunger for exclusionary powerholding—thereby putting
Marxist-cum-nationalist ideology in the service ultimately regressive projects. This, of course,
means that understanding the underlying structures of power is more important than the ideologi-
cal justifications of the contenders for state power since any politico-economic order can be cred-
ibly justified by fuzzily presented ideologies, including Marxism. The language of the dictatorship
of one class over another is malleable enough to be easily transmuted to the rightness of liquidating
other enemies of “the oppressed people,” whether the presumed oppressors belong to other ethnic
groups, religions, or regions.
5.3 The Garrison-Populist Regime 133
highly centralized (and personalized) authority of the big man under the guise of
collective leadership.9 Collective leadership gave way to the rise of an autocrat in
Mengistu Haile Mariam after 1978—a pattern that was very much in evidence in
Teferi Mekonnen the regent after 1920, and in Meles Zenawi after 2001.
Land reform was arguably the most lasting legacy of the Revolution in that it
uprooted the tributary economic foundation of political power for the monarchy
while robbing the civilian Left of its most potent cause for political mobilization.
One damaging consequence of the land reform program seems to have eluded even
the most astute of observers. Nationalization, as noted earlier, dispossessed the
smallholder ristegna of the North and the Center, which comprised about two-thirds
of the farming population. There was, as noted earlier, no landlord class except a
few members of the royal family who amassed large estates cultivated by small-
holders. The disempowering impact of this well-meaning but regressive move,
including the disarming of the peasantry thus leaving it defenseless against abuse by
cadres, did not become evident until after cooperativization and villagization were
introduced beginning in 1978.
The sharecropper peasants of the central and southern provinces certainly did not
appreciate the straightjacket nature of the new usufruct right until the state resumed
to siphon off economic surplus, albeit using bureaucratic methods. In the end,
everyone became a tenant of a capricious landlord-state (Abegaz 2004).
To its credit, and aside from ending the ossified monarchy, the Derg instituted
many pro-poor policies which made it quite popular among a substantial sector of
the variously aggrieved population. These measures included an award-winning
campaign to reduce illiteracy, a substantial expansion of schools and clinics, the
provision of water and electricity to forgotten rural settlements, the expansion of
rural roads and telecom services, and the haphazard villagization of many scattered
homesteads purportedly to facilitate the provision of public services but also to
enhance state control of the peasantry. This is but the quintessential tradeoff offered
by authoritarian-populist regimes offer between freedom and prosperity.
The combination of domestic attacks on the military regime by various radical
groups and external invasion by an emboldened Somalia provided the right oppor-
tunity to tap into the seemingly bottomless well of Ethiopian patriotism and to liq-
uidate political competitors within and without the ruling military clique. After
1978, the age-old authoritarian political and organizational culture produced a
depraved strongman in the person of Mengistu Haile Mariam. The enduring politi-
cal culture of intolerance and dogmatism also produced the mutual destruction of
the two main leftist parties, EPRP, and Meison. This paved the way for the rise of
the equally authoritarian trinity of ethno-nationalist “liberation fronts” in EPLF,
TPLF, and OLF (Zewde 2014).
9
Clapham (1990: 65) also notes that the absence of political parties “is often ascribed by Ethiopians
to cultural traits, and especially the pronounced lack of interpersonal trust, and the difficulty of
organizing any cooperative institution in a hierarchically structured society.” This sweeping state-
ment, though containing a grain of truth, begs the question: which large-scale society is not hierar-
chically structured, including mature democracies?
134 5 The Ethiopian Revolutionary State
The regime intensified its anti-secessionist war on the TPLF, OLF, and EPLF
deploying the largest army in Sub-Saharan Africa which was supplied with sophis-
ticated Soviet arms. The sudden collapse of the USSR and the mismanagement of
the economy were predictably the key reasons for the Derg’s downfall. The alien-
ation within its ranks, as evidenced by the decimation of senior officers of the mili-
tary following an attempted coup d’etat, active destabilization by Western powers,
and rejection by every sector of society of its sadistic brutality were also contribut-
ing factors for the ignominious downfall in May 1991. Centralized authority under
socialism was, ominously for Ethiopia, also embraced in a pernicious form by the
liberation movements based in Eritrea and Tigray—two provinces with a deeply
pauperized peasantry long accustomed to searching for sustainable livelihoods by
outmigration or joining the soldiery (Berhe 2009; Greenfield 1965; Young 2006).
The alienation of the so-called Abyssinian North, typified but certainly not repre-
sented by the Tigrean highlands of Eritrea and Tigray alone, the false consciousness
of the Amara in confusing cultural hegemony with economic and political power,
and the temptation of political Islam to deploy petrodollars to advance the cause of
Arab regional hegemony all conspired to occupy the vacuum left by the defunct
military-nationalist regime. The structural failure of tributarism also exposed the
country to suffer yet another political experiment in an un-creative destruction of its
pedigreed legacies.
The ethnocentric-capitalist state, which emerged in full form during 1995–2005,
started to look like a spent force 10 years later. The first half of the period, 1991–
2012, was bookended by major wars. The civil war, spearheaded for decades by the
Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Tigrean People’s Liberation
Front (TPLF), intensified in 1989–1991. It culminated in the displacement of the
Derg by a TPLF-led coalition of ethnic-based political organizations under the
name of Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF).
During the honeymoon period of 1991–94, the EPRDF presided over a half-
hearted post-conflict and post-socialist political settlement. The national army was
unceremoniously disbanded, and the top echelon of the civil service was dismissed.
However, other Derg state institutions were preserved—most notably, the state
bureaucracy’s answerability to party commissars, nationalized land, the command-
ing heights of the economy, and the party-state control apparatus down to the neigh-
borhood level. The top echelon of the professional civil service was purged under
cover of civil-service reform funded by the civil service restructuring programs of
the willfully ignorant World Bank and other international financial institutions.
Prices were progressively decontrolled, and privatization of state enterprises (largely
for the benefit of political allies) was undertaken. To the delight of donors and citizens
alike, independent civic organizations (including a relatively free press) and opposition
parties were permitted during this honeymoon period. The national army and security
5.4 The Ethnocentric-Capitalist Regime 135
PCI PCK
4500
4000
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3000
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0
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1992
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2004
2006
2008
2010
2012
2014
Fig. 5.1 Ethiopia: income and fixed capital per head, 1950–2014. PCI per capita income, in con-
stant PPP dollars, PCK per capita capital stock, in constant PPP dollars. (Sources and Notes: Penn
World Tables 9.0)
POP PCI
1400
1200
1000
800
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0
1972
2006
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1952
1954
1956
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Fig. 5.2 Ethiopia: population and income per head, 1950–2014 PCI per capita income, in constant
PPP dollars, POP total population (in 100,000 to facilitate the graphing; 1000 means 100 million).
(Sources and Notes: Penn World Tables 9.0)
On the ashes of the Shewan state, the military bureaucracy created a pathological
set of political institutions with three distinct pillars. The first of these rested on the
restoration of an ‘imagined’ Tigrean superiority that is erroneously based on the
myth of an Axumite civilization that was ahistorically credited to the contemporary
residents of the region.10 This reminds one about many an Ethiopian emperor of low
birth conveniently claiming descent from King Solomon to shore up their exclusive
claim to the throne.
The second pillar promotes a polarizing political ethnicity which is unraveling the
bonds that were painstakingly developed over the centuries among the culturally
diverse communities that call Ethiopia home. This stratagem of minority rule by
Tigreans is brilliant and yet delusional. While Tigray today has the second largest
industrial base in the country after Shewa, this is purely a product of the untenable
political monopoly that has blatantly been channeling state, Party (EFFORT and
METEC), and foreign investments to its ethnic homeland. As the experience of an
independent Eritrea starkly confirms, an, even more, poorly-endowed Tigray has little
chance of economic viability if and when it is cutoff from the Ethiopian hinterland.
The third pillar, an extreme version of what was employed by previous regimes,
is the institutionalization of a kakistocracy—a government of the least competent
and the most unscrupulous. That is, loyalty to the ruling clique trumps merit and a
commitment to honorable principles of public service. Again, this is in keeping with
the cynical tradition of RS.
10
Although the highlands of today’s’ Tigray and Eritrea were seats of the now-defunct Axumite
state, there is much evidence to substantiate the case for the Agew and the Kunama as the pioneers
of this remarkable world civilization. The Agew themselves assimilated various cultural groups in
northwest Ethiopia before being absorbed by the Amhara after the thirteenth century.
5.4 The Ethnocentric-Capitalist Regime 137
This linking particular nationalities to territorial entities created incentives for the agents (titled
11
affiliates) to disregard the commands of the principal (the TPLF) whenever the central oversight
mechanisms declined along with the rewards of compliance. The alphabet soup of liberation fronts
and movements are beginning to metastasize which was the case in the dying days of top-down
communist federations in the USSR and Yugoslavia.
138 5 The Ethiopian Revolutionary State
12
The 1995 Constitution divides the country territorially into 9 federal units (called regional states)
based on the patterns of spatial settlement of predominant linguistic groups (Tigray, Amhara,
Oromo, Afar, Somali), some of which are a willy-nilly amalgamation of many ethnic groups
(SNNP, Benishangul-Gumuz, Harari, and Gambella), and two economically important federal cit-
ies (Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa). The ruling party kept its ‘liberation front‘title purporting to
represent Tigreans—about 6% of the population. Just as bafflingly, it imitates the defunct Soviet
Constitution by granting the right to secession for any ethnic-based regional state (Article 39.4).
Other notable features include no independent constitutional court (Article 62 and 83), incorpora-
tion of the full gamut of universally declared rights (Articles 14–38), and state ownership of all
land (Article 40.3).
Based on census data, Ethiopia is a country of ethnic and religious minorities: two linguistic
groups of equal size (Amhara and Oromo) account for two-thirds of the population; and the reli-
gious distribution is just as interesting—Ethiopian Orthodox (45%), Sunni Muslim (35%) and
Protestant (20%). Interestingly, Ethiopian Muslims are also culturally diverse: half are Oromo, and
one-sixth each are Amara or Somali. According to Posner (2004), Ethiopia is surprisingly among
the moderately ethnically fractionalized countries among other African countries of its size (such
as Nigeria, DRC, South Africa, Tanzania, and Kenya). Some two-thirds of the ethnolinguistic
groups resided largely in four former provinces: Gamo-Goffa, Keffa, Sidamo, and Illubabor.
5.4 The Ethnocentric-Capitalist Regime 139
c onsequences which remain quite unsettling for the postcolonial African states who
wish not to open Pandora’s Box of the sacrosanct colonial borders. Although it does
provide a measure of local self-rule, ethnocentric decentralization tends to be
administrative rather than devolutionary and often replicates corrupt national-level
practices at the local level. And, of course, ethnic patterns of voting will be a reality
for a long while even without ethnic-based administrative units until urbanization
makes the place of birth irrelevant to economic opportunity.
Another hallmark of power relations instituted by the regime is the melding of
statism with political ethnicity as a foundational principle. The new constitutional
order has reinforced the structural fragility of the national state by emphasizing the
supremacy of primordial group rights and introducing two competing lines of
authority—party and state, much less a nation-state.
Just as importantly, TPLF’s decentralization has created a hybrid system that is
partly technocratic (conditional revenue sharing with little local participation) in the
highlands and partly patrimonial (sharing of resources coming from the center to
maintain local political alliances) in the more communal lowlands. This form of
political ethnicity has also introduced, much like the cases of Malaysia and Apartheid
South Africa, the pernicious notion of ‘dual citizenship’ whereby the presumed sons
of the soil are first-class citizens. This undermines inter-group trust which is neces-
sary for a robust multiethnic state.
In a nutshell, this top-down model of federalism has four distinctive features.
Autonomous status is thrust upon ethnically delimited regional states to be run by
the new class of invested ethnic politicians. Each subnational group is intended to
be dominant in one, and only one, regional state regardless of population size. There
is a mismatch between the top-down territorial assignment of a homeland for each
ethnic group and the reality of high geographic mobility and inter-ethnic marriage.
Finally, the hegemony of a single party reduces the power of federal units while also
providing the glue to hold them together in the absence of viable democratic institu-
tions (Abegaz 2015a; Selassie 2003).
The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. Instead of fostering the much-
touted inter-communal peace, the mode of ‘governance by accentuating inter-group
conflict’ has turned out to be recklessly violence-prone. Gross human rights violations,
which underlie Ethiopia’s consistently dismal international rankings, are the stuff of
numerous credible reports, including those by Amnesty International (AI 2017) and
Human Rights Watch (2017). Here are some illustrative manifestations of the ‘man-
aged conflict’ mode of governance that has prevailed in the country since 1991:
• The Amara (more appropriately, native Amharic speakers) have been especially
targeted by the regime for collective punishment. Forty-two highly respected
professors were summarily fired from Addis Ababa University in 1993 by their
presumed ethnicity; over 22,000 ethnic Amhara were expelled in 2012 from the
Guraferda district of the SNNP Regional State. Over 10,000 ethnic Amhara resi-
dents were also summarily expelled in 2013 from Benishangul-Gumuz Regional
State. More disturbingly, some three-quarters of a Tigreans have been settled in
the historically Gondar districts of Wolqait, Tsegede, and Humera after the vio-
lent expulsion of native residents. The federal government, by all indications, has
connived with these odious acts of ethnic cleansing.
140 5 The Ethiopian Revolutionary State
13
A revealingly funny anecdote has it that an officer of the Derg was giving a speech at a political
rally urging villagers to vanquish their “class enemies.” There is no good word for social class in
Amharic. The word, medeb, is used but it generally refers to rank or a raised mud seat/bed. When
a farmer asked the officer what his class was, he confidently but with apparent innocence replied
that he was a lieutenant in the army!
5.4 The Ethnocentric-Capitalist Regime 141
With respect to ethnicity, the “liberation” movements had to grapple with the two
mutually incompatible features of political ethnicity. One is the notion that there are
internalized fixed markers by which people can self-identity and be reliably classi-
fied by outsiders. The other is that political ethnicity sits on a quicksand—an iden-
tity malleable and transient enough to be instrumentally manipulated by a
self-serving ethnocratic elite willing to concoct an imagined history of a gloriously
cohesive but oppressed kin (Collier 2009).
The party-state’s political world is one of monopartysm, state developmental-
ism, ethnic-based administrative order, privileged group rights over individual
rights, intolerance of an independent press or civil society organizations, selec-
tion criteria for state bureaucracy that favor loyalty over merit, and a regimented
market economy dominated by politically-linked state, party, and private enter-
prises. It also prefers organizational parallelism whereby a party-based network
of commissars trumps the formal decision-making power of the professional
civilian and military-security services. This means, among other things, that
the directions of the economy are decided solely at the Prime Minister’s Office
(Zenawi 2012).
Several arguments have been advanced to explain why the TPLF, with its dog-
matic cocktail of Marx, rent-seeking, and developmentalism and hailing from one
of the historic centers of the Ethiopian nationalism,14 sought to reconstitute a state
that has already moved away from atavistic primordial politics into artificially con-
jured quasi-sovereign territorial, ethnic units. One argument is that the TPLF stands
for the enshrining of Tigrean supremacy albeit in a republican garb, along the lines
of the Era of the Warring Princes of 1770–1855 that was ironically launched by
Mikael Sehul of Tigray.
Another interpretation is that, in a predominantly rural society where modern
classes are underdeveloped, ethnicity and religion provide the emotional pull that is
necessary for the success of Front-led mobilization of aggrieved populations. The
glaring inability of pan-ethnic political organizations, Marxist or liberal, to gain deep
traction substantiates this structural problem. The politically enterprising sons of the
soil whose economic empowerment lies in the political world found it effective to
deploy identity politics to secure the capture of the regional state or, preferably, the
national. This clearly captures the ambitious of a section of Oromo politicians today.
Finally, as demonstrated by the policies of the Italian and British occupation
governments during 1935–45, Ethiopian nationalists continue to be viewed by
the big powers as less pliant clients than upstart ethnic politicians. Recalcitrant
nationalists tend to be externally destabilized by the big powers of the West as
amply demonstrated by the political histories of Africa, Latin America, and the
Middle East.
14
This realist-politics led Bahru Zewde (2014: 275) to wonder: “It has remained one of the ironies
of history that the uncompromising championing of the principle of self-determination (up to and
including secession) has come from a group originating from the historical core of the Ethiopian
polity.” How much the shift of the power center from Gondar to Shewa has contributed to alien-
ation from the modern Shewan state by the residents of the Eritrean and the Tigrean plateau
remains ill-understood.
142 5 The Ethiopian Revolutionary State
The solution offered for the incompleteness of the project of national-state build-
ing was driven by the diagnosis, often self-serving, of this failure. If, as the Derg
did, the national question is understood as one of cultural oppression of some
nationalities, then regional self-administration is what is called for. If, on the other
hand, the national question is conceptualized as one of irreconcilable ethnic oppres-
sion, then orderly secession becomes the right solution.
As Vaughan (2003) rightly observes, the implementation of ethnic federalism
revealed both support and misgivings by the intended beneficiaries. In regions out-
side the heartland of Ethiopian nationalism, self-administration was widely viewed
as a gift which brought access to educational and judicial systems now administered
in their own languages, employment opportunities in local state agencies, better
representation at the regional and federal levels, and more budgetary allocations to
previously marginalized communities. On the other hand, the TPLF/EPRDF paid
insufficient attention to the subtleties of local conventions, including the nature and
boundaries of group solidarity, the legitimacy accorded to traditional elites relative
to modern elites, differing attitudes toward the status accorded to mother tongue
relative to Amharic, and the nature of inter-group competition.
Just as importantly, the regime underestimated the emboldening effects on ethnic
politicians to challenge the commissar system, at the local level and the federal
level, that enforces the TPLF’s claim of liberating its co-ethnics who are now enti-
tled to extraordinary rewards. Hence, the growing demand for ethnic fiefdoms
within the large regional states or for exercising Article 39 of the Constitution which
theoretically grants the right to secede from the top-down federation.
As noted above, the mantle of legitimacy for the TPLF/EPRDF state, especially
following the rise of Meles Zenawi as the strongman after the intra-TPLF split of
2001, was the anti-liberal ideology of the deep state. In theory, such a regime is revo-
lutionary because it purports to enjoy a mass base of support and claims to speak for
the rural poor (Vaughan 2011; Vestal 2013; Lefort 2015). It is democratic because it
professes a commitment to inclusiveness of the oppressed. It is a Party-State since
there is no practical distinction between the sole ruling party and the State.
Just as importantly, the regime aspires to be developmental because it seeks to
bring about the material prosperity of the people both as an expression of its popu-
list ideology and as an instrument of legitimation by its economic achievement
(UNDP 2012; Zenawi 2012). This is a two-fold claim. One pertains to the desire to
boost state capacity in terms of organizations (development banks, party companies,
state companies, and appropriate development strategies) and centralized control
and allocation of economic rent (Kelsall 2013). The other has to do with the desire
to treat the fledgling and the politically unaffiliated private sector as a junior partner
in development rather than as a leader or an equal partner (Abegaz 2013; Vaughan
and Gebremichael 2011).
There is, in fact, a four-way stranglehold on the modern economy. One grabbing
hand is the state-enterprise sector which dominates air, power, telecom, banking,
transportation, and some subsectors of manufacturing. A second is the ruling-party’s
business conglomerates, with an estimated 3 billion USD in paid-up capital (not to
mention billions of unserviced loans from the state banks) and disguised under the
5.4 The Ethnocentric-Capitalist Regime 143
legal fiction of private endowments, which are engaged in a wide variety of indus-
trial, agricultural and service industries. The third is the politically-connected, and
nominally foreign-invested, business empire of Midroc Ethiopia which also has
extensive investments in agriculture, industry, and services. This may be undone by
the recent arrest, ensnared by the Saudi Arabian anti-corruption campaign, of Sheikh
Mohammed al-Amoudi.
The fourth is the Metals and Engineering Corporation (METEC), the TPLF’s
military-controlled conglomerate engaged in the production of both military and
civilian engineering products. Established by the Derg and given expanded author-
ity in 2010, METEC was recently called on by the Parliament to account failure in
managing no-bid construction contracts involving multi-billion state projects
(Fantahun 2017). The enfeebled native private sector and the growing foreign direct
investors have yet to constitute a credible countervailing force in the growing urban
economy.
The commonly-cited agents of economic transformation in developing econo-
mies are a developmental regime, a nucleus of an entrepreneurial business class, and
a large enough initial investible surplus (from resource rent, development aid, or
trade margins). A Developmental State is essentially a state with effective politico-
economic institutions that can render the transformative vision of a developmental
regime politically feasible and economically desirable. The developmental regime,
as a particular political settlement among party, military, bureaucratic and business
interests, can be usefully grouped into one of two distinct classes: a partnership
between a hegemonic ruling elite and a coalition of powerful non-state political and
economic elites or a benevolent dictatorship which may still harbor paternalistic
hostility toward an independent business class (Box 5.1).
Marketists developmentals come in two flavors. The first variant is the quasi-
democratic corporate coalition for growth such as India after 1990, Thailand,
Indonesia, or Malaysia. Other examples are the party-led and a market-friendly
partnership with the private sector as was the case with pre-1980 S. Korea or Taiwan.
The second variant is what we call vanguardist regime which is hostile to the politi-
cally uncaptured business class and prefers, for example, national mobilization for
growth by diktat. Examples include post-socialist China and Vietnam as well as the
authoritarian-populist regimes of Ethiopia and Rwanda (Abegaz 2013, 2018).
Continuing in the fine tradition of socialistic regimes which instinctively seek
performance-based legitimacy, the revolutionary regimes of the post-1974 period
have brought significant improvements in living standards. At the same time, indica-
tors of accountable governance have hardly budged (Table 5.3).
The TPLF/EPRDF, in contradistinction to the dominant current in Ethiopian
political history, viscerally stands against Ethiopian nationalism. As noted earlier, it
is a quintessentially Tigrean revanchist, deeply statist, and vanguardist. It believes
in struggle credentials, military power, absolutism in treating open opposition as
automatically treasonous, and thinks of the previous regimes in pathological terms
(Clapham 2017; Vaughan 2011).
By obliterating the distinction between party and state (and between the pub-
lic and the private), it practices a system of hierarchical dual political authority:
144 5 The Ethiopian Revolutionary State
Party bodies duplicate government counterparts much like the defunct Soviet state,
and the internal directives of the Party have primacy over the rules and regulations
of the government.15
In addition to rigging the political system under the veneer of a modern constitu-
tional order, the regime has instituted an internal passport system that mandates
classification of all citizens by ethnicity (shown on their identity cards as in
Apartheid South Africa) who are entitled to full privileges only in their Party-
designated homelands. Predictably, this separate-but-equal governance model by
ethnic fiefdoms has also made pastoral areas even more prone to endemic conflict
pertaining to electoral campaigns, huge land grabs for commercial plantations, bud-
getary allocations, and competition for water sources and pastures (Lefort 2015).
All said, the replacement of the official ideology of Ethiopian nationalism by
ethnonationalism has had contradictory effects on the project of building a nation-
state: it has provided expanded space for marginalized groups to assert themselves
culturally and politically while emboldening some ethnic politicians to seek their
own independent states. It has thereby constitutionalized ethnic (rather than citizen)
sovereignty with a Stalinist theoretical right to secession, albeit after jumping
through many onerous hoops. Furthermore, diasporization has created a
cosmopolitan population that is altering the terms of political engagement with its
new ideas and financial resources (Levine 2011).
As a result of domestic and global developments, the revenue base of RS2 has
three pillars. They share of government revenue in national income has risen while
the tax-to-GDP ration (at 13%) remains among the lowest in Africa; the source of
the revenue is more diversified today (income, sales, export of services, export of
diversified basket of goods); and the size and the share of foreign-derived income
(official aid, remittances, and FDI) have increased markedly. In fact, the $12 billion
in inward flows of foreign exchange in 2015 comprised in equal thirds by aid, remit-
tances, FDI plus exports. Another twist is that RS2 is also distinctive in the signifi-
cance of institutionalized corruption with as much as 3 billion dollars of outflows in
the form of illicit trade alone (World Bank 2017, Table 1).
The country’s produced and non-reproducible stock of wealth underpins national
income and well-being. When measured comprehensively, national wealth includes
produced capital, natural capital, human capital, and net foreign assets. Produced
capital includes physical capital and urban land, measured at market prices. Natural
capital (comprising energy, minerals, agricultural land, and forests) is measured as
the discounted sum of the value of the rents generated over the lifetime of the asset.
Human capital (comprising education, skills, and health status) is calculated as the
discounted value of earnings over a person’s lifetime. Finally, net foreign assets are
15
Pausewang, Tronvoll and Aalen (2002: 230–231) put the matter this way: “During the ten years
of EPRDF rule, it has become apparent that the government has established and reinforced a two-
track structure at all administrative levels. It has built up a formal structure of democratic institu-
tions to keep in line with the promises it made to the Ethiopian people and the demands and
expectations of Western donors… But below the surface, it has built a party structure that keeps
tight control at all levels and makes sure that no one can use these democratic institutions effec-
tively to challenge its power.”
5.5 The Paradox of State-Building and Nation-Debuilding Under RS 147
Table 5.5 Wealth per capita in Ethiopia and comparator countries, 2014 (in US$)
Countries Total wealth Produced capital Natural capital Human capital Net foreign
assets
ETHIOPIA $13,125 1,347 5,284 6,723 –229
Egypt $38,470 5,605 11,229 22,591 –955
India $18,211 5,161 4,739 8,755 –474
Kenya $19,412 3,356 6,771 9,556 –271
SSA $25,562 4,017 9,225 12,680 –360
Source: Lange et al. (2018, Appendix B). SSA Sub-Saharan Africa
the sum of a country’s external assets and liabilities. Global GDP at market prices
was around 75 trillion; global wealth was 1,143 trillion U.S. dollars (Lange, et al.
2018, Table ES.1). This means the average world wealth per capita of $168,580 is
over 10 times that of Ethiopia.
Long-term growth of per capita income is driven by population growth and effi-
cient management of the demographic dividend and the country’s portfolio of
assets. Table 5.4 reports trends in population growth in Ethiopia while Table 5.5
shows wealth per capita. Compared to the high-income countries (70%), Ethiopia’s
human capital accounts for half of its wealth per head. While natural capital accounts
for two-thirds of wealth in low-income countries, Ethiopia’s share is only 40 per-
cent. Since the fiscal base cannot depend on natural resource rents, the country has
no choice but to manage its renewable agricultural capital well and build up its
human capital. The bottom line, once again, is that competition for scarce resources
among regional elites goes a long way toward explaining the enormous challenge
faced by ambitious Ethiopian state builders throughout its history.
5.5 T
he Paradox of State-Building and Nation-Debuilding
Under RS
(of medium or large population sizes) to bear the risks of excessive fractionaliza-
tion—just two ethnic groups account for two-thirds of the population and adding two
others raises the share to 80 percent. It is a large country but one with a low level of
income inequality—thanks to a radical land reform program and little mining endow-
ment to reinforce the equalizing effects of labor-intensive industrialization. And most
importantly, its widely-shared political culture has provided the resiliency need for
the state in the face of frequent and disquieting regime changes.
So, how do we then explain the Ethiopian paradox? The Ethiopian puzzle is not
a clear-cut case of a resounding success in state building and a partial success in
nation-building. It is rather one of great beginnings and great unfinishings, espe-
cially on the latter front.
After 1900, the trajectories of state formation and nation formation became
sharpened. For the conservative state elites of Gondar and Shewa, viability entailed
concentric circles of authority. The emperors had first and foremost to consolidate
control over the core provinces from Massawa to Lake Zeway by forging close alli-
ances with a network of provincial lords as well as appointed governors. To expand
the tributary base, including access to the sea, the emperors had to prevail over the
fractious and ever-rebellious chiefdoms and sheikdoms.
A notable critical juncture for modernization drive came in the form of two major
wars with imperial Italy (in 1895 and 1935) which induced a serious defensive move
to establish a central government with the trappings of a modern bureaucracy and a
market economy. The failure of the second Shewan state to undertake industrialization
and progressive accommodation of the new political forces emerging from limited
modernization, especially after the wakeup call of the 1960 attempted coup d’etat by
the Neway brothers. This event qualifies as a second critical juncture. The failed coup
d’etat eventually emboldened the educated youth to engage civically thereby pav-
ing the way for the emergence of two revolutionary regimes since 1975—a national-
ist military regime presiding over a socialist war economy, and an ethno-nationalist
regime presiding on a fractious crony capitalist economy. The transition between the
two revolutionary regimes constitutes the third critical juncture in a century.
In the final analysis, at the risk of sounding to economic-determinist, the cumula-
tion of meager tributes, the binding constraint on Ethiopian state formation is the glar-
ing absence of a state elite with an independent economic base. As I underscored in the
previous two chapters, Ethiopian state building has long been entrapped by the logic of
overlord state elites impelled to rely on office-holding to extract economic surplus
from small producers in a manner that enfeebles both economic growth and central
political authority. This practice intensified in different forms even after the replace-
ment of the monarchy in 1974 by two successive revolutionary-authoritarian regimes.
I have offered here one plausible explanation for the failure of the Ethiopian
states (Christian as well as Muslim) to nurture modern bureaucracies and salaried
armies, and to enforce the requisite restraints on the power of the sovereign (through
autonomous Crown Councils, Constitutions, and power centers). While economic
rent from the large estates owned by the members of the royal family, the nobility,
and the provincial governors were certainly important, the primary source of income
for the military aristocracy was tribute (usufructuary rights over state lands or over-
rights to taxes and tribute granted by the state or its agents) which was inextricably
linked to office-holding. In other words, accumulation of wealth was dependent on
5.5 The Paradox of State-Building and Nation-Debuilding Under RS 149
the quantity and quality of land and labor under one’s crown-sanctioned jurisdiction
(as the benefices of office) rather than on the size one’s family estate (landlordism).
In this subsistence-oriented non-urban society, the degree of access to interna-
tional trade made a critical difference to the balance of power among contending
power-holders since trade was the primary mechanism for converting extracted
domestic economic surplus into imported arms and status goods. The insular and
contest-prone domestic economy was bereft of cities, industry, plantations, mines,
or native-controlled interregional commerce.
My approach to resolving the paradox contributes to the extant literature in three
important areas. First, it provides a meta-analysis of the thickly descriptive litera-
ture on Ethiopian economic history by using a coherent theoretical framework for
thinking about the dynamics of transition from a civilizational state to a modern
nation-state. Second, it highlights the non-feudal rist-gult land institution of Ethiopia
as the cornerstone of the political power. Third, it recasts the forces that shaped the
evolution of the Ethiopian state in a comparative framework with similarly-situated
Afroasian empires.
Traditional Ethiopian political culture, at least in the highlands, is basically illib-
eral since it embraces versions of all but political rights. Political socialization takes
place primarily at the level of the state-linked institutions. What it lacks, therefore,
is an effective restraint on powerholders through such devices as a practically hon-
orable constitutional order and civic values about the universality of human rights
and civil liberties.
The major factor for the persistence of an unstable anocracy, is, in the final analy-
sis, the persistence of mass poverty in almost all regions. Ethiopia remains one of
the world’s poorest countries with a per capita income that is only 40% of the aver-
age for Subsaharan Africa. Despite an agricultural growth-driven reduction in pov-
erty, the intensity of poverty is national in scope, albeit with intra-regional and
inter-woreda disparities. As shown in Fig. 5.3, parts of Oromia and Southern
Nations, and most of Amhara show the greatest proportion of woreda in which the
income share of bottom 40 percent of households is higher than the national average
(World Bank 2017).
While great attention has been given by the state elites of the past 50 years to
meeting basic needs, the Ethiopian state remains extractive and intolerant of public
space for organizations not connected to it. The urban-based captive state, with a
substantial coercive power to advance the interests of a tiny state elite, has been
unable to fully legitimize itself by accommodating the diverse economic and cul-
tural interests of its dismally poor and politically hapless citizenry.
The ethnic-federalist model of state-building in a country without a history of
ethnic-based sub-states is fraying fast with the tale-tale signs of nation de-building
and failing to ensure that the administratively created federal units do not replicate the
excesses of unitary centralism under the Derg (Gerring et al. 2004). In the canonical
cases of federalism from below such as the former USSR and Yugoslavia, disintegra-
tion has readily produced viable successors since the Russian and Serbian constituent
polities had pre-existed the federal union with recoupable territorial identities.
Ethiopia, on the other hand, has a political tradition of church- or mosque-
mediated state formations, not ethnic-based statehood. There was no “Tigrean,”
150 5 The Ethiopian Revolutionary State
Fig. 5.3 Equality-in-poverty: density of the bottom 40% of the income distribution. (Source:
World Bank (2017: 13))
16
Clapham (1988: 26) may have been too hard in prematurely declaring that a common secular
nationalism was aspirational when he says: “It is a multiethnic nation riven by conflicts not only
with those who deny the basis of Ethiopian nationalism but even with many of those who accept
it.” But, this has become increasingly true in the three decades since he offered this assessment.
5.5 The Paradox of State-Building and Nation-Debuilding Under RS 151
THE STATE
(centralized & territorial)
CD CD
RD RD
Fig. 5.4 Two contrasting conceptions of Ethiopian political order. → direction of political
restraint, CD constitutional democracy (capable state + Bill of Rights + substantive democracy),
RD revolutionary democracy (capable state + rule by law under a vanguard party + procedural
democracy). (Sources and Notes: Author)
Historically, the political divide took place between the oval-shaped Christian
highlands and the predominantly Muslim lowlands of the Rift Valley in the east and
the Sudanese borderlands in the west (Markakis 2011). The Christian state had a
core population with a lingua franca of Amharic and other five important languages
for national integration—Oromiffa, English, Tigrigna, Somaligna, and Sidamigna.
The modern Ethiopian state has proved strong enough to mount a respectable
development drive with a modicum of efficiency, but too weak to permit space for
the necessary economic emulation as well as competition among the organized
interests in society. The ideal of state capitalism is governance based on a cadre of
benevolent planners rather than by democratically elected politicians.17 The two
cohorts of revolutionary elites have failed to outgrow their youthful infatuation with
statism and populist Marxism to mask their kleptocratic rule.
It is worth remembering that the exercise of state power is about two things
which are conflated by the sanitized good-governance rhetoric of the World Bank
and other international actors (World Bank 2017). It is fundamentally and struc-
17
Micklethwait and Woodridge (2014: 262) rightly note that democracy is neither a universal value
nor an automatic byproduct of development: “Western countries almost invariably introduced the
mass franchise only after they had already introduced sophisticated political regimes with power-
ful legal systems and entrenched constitutional rights—and they did so in cultures that cherished
notions of individual rights.”
152 5 The Ethiopian Revolutionary State
turally about the extent of institutionalized power sharing among the fundamental
interests in society in a manner that is considered legitimate by the society itself.
Asymmetry of power expresses itself in exclusion, state capture, and a mix of cro-
nyism and clientelism. Bad governance, of course, undermines the effectiveness
of both the public sector and the private sector and undermines state capability. It
also erodes a regime’s legitimacy thereby inducing large excluded groups to resist
openly and violently (Cederman et al. 2012). The e mergent Amara and Oromo
resistance, having overcome fear itself, is a case in point.
All said, after 2015, several features of the post-1974 RS have become evident.
One is the failure of socialism, as an ideology of a unitary state resonates with the
masses in a non-industrial society. The second is the failure of ethnic federalism as
a strategy for minority rule or as a strategy for building a nation-state with self-
governing local communities. It instead proved politically polarizing and
destabilizing. The third is the twinning of state-debuilding and the decoupling of the
vanguard party from the state.
These processes have been taking place simultaneously and have yet to play
themselves out fully. Even the most pan-ethnic primate city of Addis Ababa is not
spared from protection racket given its highly-valued assets (Box 5.2).
This tension is, however, compounded by the bidirectional causality between the
interpretation of the lived experience of ethnic status and the calculative collective
action directed toward competition for power in a society of scarce resources. These
tensions and fissures are longstanding contributors to state fragility of Ethiopia
(Table 5.6). The latest fragility index puts the Ethiopian state only slightly above the
failed state of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and certainly as far as one can
be from Denmark.
In conclusion, the Ethiopian revolutionary state managed to build up consider-
able technocratic capacity under a developmental mantra and financed largely by
externally-sourced funds rather than domestic resources. But, the country remains
in a straightjacket long in the making: state-mediated ‘politics of the belly’ and
political ethnicity’s polarity can hardly be tamed by sham elections and grandiose
development projects alone.
Broad-based and sustainable citizen engagement is the only way to restrain pow-
erholders to mind the interests the collective while supporting the emergence of a
capable Ethiopian state has remained an elusive dream. A citizen-based institutional
design and engagement is the way to fuse the twin needs of state capability and state
accountability both of which are essential foundations for a modern political and
economic order. But how it can be done remains entirely unclear, but it is much
more fruitful to debate the future with knowledge of the past but focused primarily
on the better prospects for arriving at a win-win outcome.
5.5 The Paradox of State-Building and Nation-Debuilding Under RS 153
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Part III
A Modern African Political Order
Chapter 6
Implications for Reforming
the Postcolonial State
This chapter distills the central lessons from the positive analysis for the normative
task of rebuilding a postcolonial state—one that is capable, legitimate, bound by the
rule of law, and subject to accountability mechanisms which resonate with enduring
African core values. There is much to preserve from the colonial and postcolonial
legacies, but there is also much room for new ideas and institutions. One lesson is
the need to ensure secure property (especially land) rights to families and corporate
groups. Another is decentralized self-governance either in a unitary form or a fed-
eral form. A third is the anchoring of state revenues, the types of taxes collected
from citizens as well as resource rent from the domestic economy, to cement the
nexus between public financing and government accountability to citizens.
The principle of no representation without taxation seems to apply universally.
The institutionalization of organically internal restraints on powerholders and reli-
able support for legitimate wealth-creating activities will go a long toward ensuring
both political freedom and economic freedom for all Africans.
I argued above that absolutism is unhelpful as a framework for understanding
Ethiopian underdevelopment. There were incessant contests for offices by the over-
lord class as well as between the overlord class and the landed peasantry. In other
words, the Crown was often too weak to provide security of property and public
goods in the service of growth but strong enough to claim tribute by enforcing the
rights of the state through episodic punitive measures to give credibility to implied
threats emanating from the Court.
The tributary perspective sheds much-needed light on why Ethiopia and other
precolonial African societies became highly prone to political fragmentation, state
fragility, economic stagnation, and victimization to external empire builders. To put
it bluntly, Ethiopian peasants remained poor not because they were over-exploited,
but ironically because they were not exploited enough by a class commerce-minded
feudal lords of entrepreneurial landlords. Being landed alone may be necessary but
not sufficient for freedom from want and tyranny. It had its price; so, of course, is
being landless. History is full of cruel ironies, indeed.
Global trends in governance during 1800–2016 show that autocracies started out
strong, declined until the end of the nineteenth century before rising precipitously
during 1940–1980, and followed by a precipitous decline since then. Democratic
experiments became palpable in the age of industrialization (post-1870), experi-
enced substantial gains since 1950, and have plateaued after 1980 (Marshall and
Elzinga-Marshall 2017).
A typology of the interactions between the trajectories of nation formation and
state formation is provided in Table 6.1 which puts together the various strands of
thought on the subject. It suggests that, when nation-building and state-building
are both top-down, a centralized unitary state is often the result. Where the oppo-
site is the case, a decentralized unitary state or a loose federation is likely to result.
In the intermediate case of a combination of a bottom-up nation building and a
top-down state, a federalist settlement is a likely outcome. Where nation-building
is top-down, a faux federalism can hardly be distinguished in practice from cen-
tralized unitarism.
These lessons of history and the theory of political order in general, and the tra-
jectories of state formation in particular, suggest strongly that political settlements
that accommodate the interests of all major groups in African society are likely to
produce viable coalitions for shared prosperity and shared political governance.
These conditions exist when there are sufficiently empowered elites representing
the various domestic sectional interests—the economic classes (sedentary agricul-
turalists, pastoralists, mercantile, or industrial), the religions (Christian, Muslim, or
6.1 The Postcolonial African State 161
Indigenous), and the major ethnic groups. The balancing of enlightened parochial
interests and the deterrence that comes from credible resistance to the abuse of
power are likely to produce a stable equilibrium which will give the project of
nation-state building a fighting chance.
In the age of high globalization, external factors are likely to be important, too.
Neocolonial relations, military as well as development aid, have impinged on the
resolution of legitimate domestic political contentions in favor of client regimes
(World Bank 2017). On the other hand, progressive international norms such as
universal human and civil rights and the responsibility to protect groups abused by
despotic governments can aid the democratization process especially if impunity is
restrained sufficiently by international law.
of ethnicity are known to operate jointly are also malleable (see Bates 2006, for a
review). Until classes are sufficiently developed to provide a firm basis for pan-
ethnic mobilization, ethnicism and provincialism are likely to be tapped and
reframed situationally by rational politicians who are intent on nurturing neopatri-
monial or clientelist politics.
There are indeed notable features of the post-1960 African state which are driven
partly by the global environment and partly by domestic forces born of geography
and colonial legacy. Firstly, the international state system does not automatically
confer internal legitimacy to neither the state nor a particular regime. While external
legitimacy does weaken the direct link between intra-state war and state formation,
it has also had the unintended effect of fueling intra-state civil strife.
Secondly, the substantial reduction of the risks of external wars also made for the
extraverted postcolonial state. That is, the neocolonial state is unhealthily less
embedded in its domestic economy and polities than in its clientelist relations with
powerful states—in the context of the Cold War and, now, the War on Terror. The
taxation-representation linkage thereby weakened, and insecure regimes became
extraverted or sought to exploit resource rents where feasible.
Thirdly, the premature introduction of the territorialist model of statehood with-
out a corresponding economic base has meant that non-territorial tributarism had to
be reconciled with hard national boundaries (Herbst, 2000). One result has been the
proliferation of parasitic regimes with stupendously myopic mindsets. Rentier states
may have bypassed the fiscal base problem (tradeoff between taxation and represen-
tation), but they often fall back on narrow patrimonialism or clientelism when elec-
tions became the international norm. In the end, they delegitimize themselves in the
eyes of citizens (Englebert, 2000).
Fourthly, the territorial demarcations, being willy-nilly products of colonialism,
ended up fragmenting polities and nations across state boundaries. More impor-
tantly, they are widely viewed by African regimes as sacrosanct if only to stem
destabilizing secessionism. The dilemma has also preempted opportunities to
adjust borders or to transcend them altogether—albeit in the context of regional
economic integration, federations, or confederations. Whenever a state becomes
fragile, shadow states led by warlords tend to proliferate to fuel civil strife and wars
of secession. The ongoing tragedies of central Africa and the Horn of Africa are
cases in point.
The project of state elites to seek legitimacy, through aggressive assimilation and
national-territorial rather than kin-based citizenship, turned out to be a daunting
challenge even in promising countries such as Kenya, Cote d’Ivoire, and Ethiopia.
The rule of law was declared in the form of constitutionalism but was honored in its
breach. Stability trumped justice.
This may very well be why the accountability leg of a modern political order
proved the most elusive to attain. By 1970, half of independent Africa had a military
government; and despite a renaissance of democratic elections in the two decades
since 1990, Africa is fast reverting to its old habits. Since the preconditions for the
rooting of democratic institutions is systematically undermined by self-serving rul-
ers, creative ways of building-in restraints on powerholders will have to be devised.
6.2 Institutionalizing Restraints on Powerholders 163
The receding memories of the lived experience of colonization and the fad of
electoral politics have exposed the fissions among Africa’s still ethnocentric poli-
ties. The promising but glass-house economies of Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Zimbabwe,
and Kenya have fallen into political polarization along ethnic or military-civilian
lines. Ethnic minorities have established authoritarian-populist regimes which have
obliterated the distinction between state and party in Ethiopia, Uganda, Zimbabwe,
Eritrea, and Rwanda. Kleptocrats have taken over in Angola, Equatorial Guinea,
Gabon, the DRC, and both Sudans. Political empowerment of the Black majority in
South Africa is coexisting uneasily with enormous concentration of economic
power in the hands of the white minority in South Africa. Precarious balancing of
politics characterizes Tanzania, Senegal, Ghana, Zambia, and perhaps Nigeria.
An alarming number of African states have devised a stratagem that stems chaos
but also enshrines ethnic dictatorship. Societies most prone to this dispensation
have tended to be those with acute inter-communal competition and group animosi-
ties where factionalism renders inter-elite national coalitions rather fragile. This is
magnified wherever easy-to-loot resources exist.
What is interesting is that, even in mining-poor countries (Ethiopia, Rwanda, and
Uganda), the traditional modes of creating nation-states through cooptation and
assimilation are too slow or infeasible in the eyes of myopic ruling elites. A better,
albeit short-termist, strategy is to use a combination of tactics. One is to constantly
and situationally foment conflict among subordinate groups along ethnic cleavages,
or regional and religious faultlines. Demonizing targeted competitors and meting
out collective punishment is a strategy for solidifying power by a minority.
This system of ruling “by managed conflict” may concede to junior partners of
the ruling coalition some power in direct proportion to their violence potential
(NWW 2012; Horowitz 1985). It also privileges loyalty over merit in the recruit-
ment of cadres and relies on its sectional favoritism in the form of nepotism and
regional favoritism. All these strategies are designed to prevent the emergence of a
grand oppositional coalition of territorialized ethnies which, even under normal cir-
cumstances, is difficult in a diverse society. Civil strife has the habit of getting out
of control sooner than later. The cautionary tales come from the millions of lives lost
in the Soviet Collectivization Drive, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the
Rwandan Genocide.
Encouragingly, some African constitutions insist that political parties have a
‘national character’ to stem polarizing ethnocentrism or another form of sectional-
ism. The transition to a liberal democratic order has to honor individual freedom,
including consociationalist arrangements among corporate groups to ensure a stabi-
lizing power-sharing arrangement. The latter has, however, proved to be more prone
to fragility even in the developed countries (such as Belgium or Spain) let alone in
the emerging ones (such as Nigeria, Lebanon, or Yugoslavia).
In a nutshell, one can reasonably argue that three distinct possibilities exist
for building a capable and accountable African state that can embrace the core
164 6 Implications for Reforming the Postcolonial State
A
B C
Bill of Rights
Rights -based electoral Rights -based electoral
democracy catering mainly to democracy upholding popular
an oligarchy [India]. sovereignty and the people’s
will [Denmark].
If a country starts out from a position of an illiberal regime practicing regular elec-
tions and delivering paternalistically popular economic and social results (South
Korea), then it can traverse two alternative roads to Denmark.
One path is the short one of directly committing to a Bill of Rights while focus-
ing on meeting popular demand (path C). The other is the indirect road of regressing
in public-service delivery but progressing toward a constitutional order. If, on the
other hand, a country practices procedural democracy while serving the interests of
an oligarchy (Mexico), it can get to Denmark by committing itself to fundamental
rights and delivering popular results (path A). Finally, an electoral democracy with
a strong rights-based tradition (India) finds it easiest to join Denmark by empower-
ing poor voters rather than just the powerful coalition of business, farming, and
bureaucratic interests (path D).
Restraints on powerholders can in exceptional circumstances come from judi-
cious interventions by enlightened foreign patrons deeply interested in enforcing
respect for universal rights that are enshrined in various United Nations treaties
(Rodrik 2012). Unfortunately, multilateral organizations tend to be captured by the
big powers who fall back in the habit of myopically defining their geopolitical,
political interests. This often entails giving a blank check to pro-growth client
regimes, however repressive they may be to their hapless citizens.
The aid-reform literature also suggests that, even when donors insist on weak
forms of governance reforms (such as those aimed at reducing non-institutional-
ized corruption), political conditionalities can be costlessly ignored by self-pre-
serving regimes (World Bank 1997; 2017). New donors and investors such as
China and India are too business-minded to care about human rights in Africa
(Dreher et al. 2017).
It is a well-known fact that high economic inequality makes voters in emerging
democracies vote in favor of politicians with extreme policies. Deep-seated extrac-
tive institutions make politics attractive to, or biased in favor of, strongmen. This
preempts the emergence of an effective party system that can produce socially desir-
able alternatives.
The implications for development and aid policy are clear enough. One cannot
simply impose, as multilateral development organizations have done for decades,
the institutions of an open-access order where the political and economic conditions
for their viability do not yet exist (NWW 2012). Channeling aid money through
exclusionary political institutions and trying to fix micro-markets technocratically is
often illusory in terms of sustainability. As Acemoglu and Robinson (2012: 450)
rightly note:
The institutional structure that creates market failures will also prevent implementation of
interventions to improve incentives at the micro level. Attempting to engineer prosperity
without confronting the root cause of the problems—extractive institutions and the politics
that keeps them in place—is unlikely to bear fruit.
But more realistically, the reins of political restraint on officeholders must come
from within—from the application of the principle of the sovereignty of free citi-
zens over their government. This is because human and political rights are properly
vested in citizens who must muster the ability and the willpower to defend them. In
this respect, the practice of civic activism is generally associated with the e mergence
166 6 Implications for Reforming the Postcolonial State
of the middle class. There is some evidence that a lower middle-class is emerging in
Africa (AfDB 2011). However, civic space and civic courage can exist only after
effective coordination mechanisms are cultivated. The intergovernmental mode of
development aid delivery, therefore, needs to be supplemented by direct financial
support to the fledgling private sector and to the non-partisan rights-based civic
organizations.
parties led by urban members of the intelligentsia with shallow ties to their constitu-
encies easily fall victim to factionalism.
Two illustrative instances in Ethiopian political history underscore the tradeoff
between selection and election. In the making of the 1930 imperial Constitution, the
“progressive faction” led by Bejirond Tekle Hawariat argued for a European-type
legislative lower house and direct popular elections for the representatives. The
“reactionary faction” led by the powerful Ras Kassa argued for an advisory legisla-
ture and direct selection of representatives by the agents of the Crown. While the
first won the case for a quasi-constitutional monarchy, the latter won the day for an
enfeebled first experience at a Parliamentary rule, some 250 after the Glorious
Revolution in England (Retta, 2012; Zewde, 2014). The direct elections under the
revised 1955 Constitution, with a more empowered legislature, were hardly a quan-
tum jump in political development precisely because the societal preconditions for
meaningful electoral politics still did not exist.
The instructive lesson for us comes from the impressive argument made by Ras
Kassa which underscored the fact that (a) the nobility led all the wars to defend the
sovereignty of Ethiopia and deeply cares about the welfare of society, and (b) the
poor and illiterate citizenry lacks a basic understanding of representative govern-
ment or political values that undergird a modern constitutional order. Judicious
selections may very well pave the way to meaningful elections the distant future. In
any case, the rich multicultural heritage is an asset to build on—not to reinvent the
state but to progressively perfect it in Ethiopian terms (Gedamu 2011).
This reality was amply confirmed by the fleeting decade of multiparty politics
during 1995–2005. Despite the rush of opposition parties to formulate paper-per-
fect “liberal” party constitutions and electoral platforms, partly because it was
globally fashionable to do so, they all fell prey to successive episodes of big-man
factionalism or found voters more susceptible to identity politics or even vote
selling than to issue-oriented campaigns.
Clear thinking about vision and strategy about a post-dictatorship transition
then assumes great significance. Ayittey (2012) astutely underscores the impor-
tance of a creative destruction of the repressive security state which has managed
to put a chokehold on the machinery of politics and the economy, if not civic soci-
ety. He specifically identifies a recapture of the state institutions by a broad-based
coalition of fundamental interests in society and economy, without which an irre-
versible movement away from totalitarianism is impossible. These institutions
include the civil service, the judiciary, the media, the military and security appara-
tuses, the academic institutions, the constitution, and the commanding heights of
the economy.
When crisis-induced auspicious political conditions for pluralism somehow
emerge, a post-EPRDF Ethiopia will then have to undergo a trifecta of transitions.
The first is political—a transition from a strange mix of universalist-populist
authoritarianism and an atavistic ethnocracy to some sort of a pluralist system of
equal and free citizenship. The second is economic—an Ethiopia-tailored transition
from non-industrial destitution to robust industrialization with an affordable social
safety net for all. The third is strategic—a transition from a state-party-led develop-
ment to a mutually constraining and empowering partnership between a growth-
friendly state elite and the private business class.
168 6 Implications for Reforming the Postcolonial State
What can we learn from high development theory to guide us in identifying sen-
sible reforms for Ethiopia’s predicaments? The following near-axioms encapsulate
some of the lessons from theory and successful country studies.
First, successful developers tend to be stable, open, market-driven, well-
governed, and high investors. These ingredients are interlinked and can be met in
more than one way depending on the initial circumstances of a latecomer. Second,
authoritarian methods can be growth-friendly, but only in the early stage of develop-
ment where people and resources can be reallocated heavy-handedly from the less
productive segments of the economy to the more productive sectors with significant
efficiency gains (Tesfaye 2017). Third, appropriate institutions are initially products
of bite-size incremental reforms made possible by the prospects of a revolution.
Fourth, a popular uprising that favors radical change tends to occur when eco-
nomic conditions start to get better as the duality of rising capability and rising
expectations (the tunnel effect) embolden long-disempowered citizens to demand
substantial gains. Fifth, primordial methods of political and economic mobilization
are inherently self-defeating in the long run because they limit the size of coalitions,
undermine inter-communal trust, and ossify oppressive governance. Finally, the
most effective way to attract large foreign investment is to treat the national business
community and the Diaspora with as much respect, if not more, as foreigners.
How do we then move away from zero-sum political contests to a world of win-
win outcomes which are informed by a shared vision of freedom and prosperity for
all? Six guiding principles come to mind for institutional design to help shape the
debate on the post-EPRDF state.
Principle 1: Single Ethiopian Citizenship The flirtation with ethnic federalism
has constitutionalized the pernicious notion of ‘dual citizenship’ in multiple sov-
ereignties within the state. Each Ethiopian becomes first and foremost a citizen
of the assigned ‘ethnic homeland’ in which some are labeled natives while others
automatically become migrants, and secondarily a citizen of the national state
with theoretically constitutionally guaranteed rights to live in peace and freedom
anywhere in the country. This bifurcated and system of conflicting citizen sover-
eignty and group sovereignty has encouraged politically-motivated “othering” in
favor of co-ethnics which inevitably invites a long-lasting contagion of reprisals.
Multiple citizenships are a reckless recipe for state de-building by effectively
disenfranchising millions of citizens in regional governments rather than a secure
foundation for a system based on nondiscriminatory rights for all (Selassie,
2015). This is why citizenship must be indivisible and national. The absurdity of
it is that all three postwar Ethiopian constitutions prohibited dual citizenship
with foreign states.
Principle 2: Amharic as the National Language It is a sad commentary that one has
to make the point that Amharic, with some three-quarters of the population speaking
it as a primary or secondary language, serves as the common (official and working)
language at the national, regional, and local levels. This is a precondition for a com-
mon national citizenship and national economic integration. Other languages, such
6.3 Re-imagining the Post-Revolutionary Ethiopian State 169
as Oromiffa and English, should also be accorded a national status while many
others (Somaligna, Tigrigna, Sidamigna, Guragna, and Affarigna) should have a
prominent place in the relevant regions.
Principle 6: Enhancing the Technocratic Capabilities of the State Unlike the case
of some over-developed states where ‘starving the beast’ may have resonance, the
African state actually faces a balancing act involving twin challenges. It needs to be
bigger and better to enforce citizen rights and to provide key public services in areas
where it has a comparative advantage over the private sector. It also needs to face
limits to ensure its accountability to the broadest cross-section of interests in a
diverse and rapidly-changing society. Over-emphasizing one challenge (i.e.,
accountability) may undermine the gains made on the other front (i.e., capability).
Principles 4 and 5 are often ill-understood in Ethiopian political discourse. Many
falsely assume that federalism is the only system that would ensure decentralized
170 6 Implications for Reforming the Postcolonial State
The binary choice between federal and unitary should, therefore, give way to one
between decentralized-unitary and decentralized-federal. The operative feature is
“decentralization.” So, which is better for a demographically diverse and economi-
cally underdeveloped country with a long history of a resilient national state?
The clear winner, in my judgment, is the decentralized unitary system which
will strengthen the nation-state’s technocratic capability while cementing citizen
loyalty by allowing for a robust local self-government. Federation works best
in more developed and homogenous societies where decentralization does not
threaten a strong-enough central state to guarantee the freedom of equal citizen-
ship for all. As the economy industrializes and urbanization breaks down parochial
identities, a geographically mobile population will find the distinction between
the two alternatives increasingly unimportant. But at the current stage, the choice
matters greatly.
6.4 The Virtues of Decentralization 171
the empirical support for federalism versus unitarism, Gerring et al. (2004) con-
clude that a centralized constitutional system with sovereignty monopolized by a
national government is superior to one in which national and subnational govern-
ments meaningfully share power.
Two strong findings emerge from the existing cross-country studies. For one,
unitary systems tend to out-perform federal systems on just about every dimension
of government performance, public participation, and citizen well-being that is con-
sidered. Second, governmental effectiveness, political stability, political participa-
tion, and social welfare, are also more effective or efficient in a unitary system than
in federal systems. Federal systems instead provide for broader participation at
some cost in terms of economic or administrative efficiency.
The academic community also disagrees on the relationship between decentral-
ization and economic growth. Some authors find a positive relationship while others
find a negative relationship. Why a robust relationship remains elusive is unclear,
but country context and initial conditions matter greatly.
So, which is better for a culturally diverse Sub-Saharan Africa—federalism or
unitarism? We cannot explore the full answer here, but there are some pointers
worth noting.
The two-by-two typology outlined above yields two hybrid models that Africans
can choose from. The choice is between a centralized federal arrangement (EPRDF’s
Ethiopia or Russia, both with constitutional guarantees that are not fully honored in
practice) or a decentralized unitary arrangement (the Polish model with a constitu-
tion or the U.K. model without). The remaining two choices are either inferior (a
hyper-centralized unitary such as Ethiopia under the Derg) or unattainable for a
long while (such as the federalism-from-below of the USA or Germany).
The degree of geographic and demographic diversity matters greatly. Whichever
administrative model is adopted, it cannot be exclusionary by being anchored in
religion, ethnicity, or region. It should be built around free citizenship with the geo-
graphic delimitation reflecting historical ties, the physical limits of current transport
connectivity, and resident preferences.
Ethiopia can certainly draw inspiration from self-governing units (gizat, kifle-
hager, or astedader) with strong regional identities that cut across ethnicity and
often religion (Mehretu 2012; Wubneh 2017). These can be improved upon, say, by
granting major municipalities (especially, Addis Ababa and Harrar-DireDawa) self-
government status, expanding the number to some 20 economically viable units of
4–6 million people, and allowing referenda to determine regional borders.1
One more issue worth contemplating is the design of an appropriate electoral
system. Elections have proved destabilizing in African societies where pan-ethnic
and pan-regional democratic norms that undergird viable institutional practices
1
For Ethiopia, at least, one line of thinking is that some 550–600 ethnically diverse electoral dis-
tricts, giving rise to some 20 regional states (kifle-hagerat). The basic political unit, the woreda
(county) on average will have 175,000–225,000 people (of the 105 million Ethiopians in 2017). A
typical woreda is big enough to manage its hospitals and schools (up to secondary schools) and
small enough to be within half a day on a mule-back or a few hours by bus for citizens who need
to reach administrative centers or big markets
6.5 Concluding Thoughts 173
State formation and state building have assumed different forms in different parts of
the world and at different times within the same sub-region. As generalizations go,
we can say that European states and colonial states were shaped largely by external
forces of competition and wars of occupation and settlement. On the other hand, the
formation of civilizational states in Afroasia was shaped more by internal than by
external factors.
If one dares take the liberty to stake out a discernible macroscopic view, one can
easily discern a political cycle of sorts in medieval Ethiopian political history. While
the transition from the Zagwe (Agew) State to the Solomonic (Amara) State during
the period that spanned circa 950-1550 AD was remarkably tranquil, subsequent
periods of dynastic transition that involved a protracted transition period. The transi-
tion between the closed political orders of Solomonic State and the Gondarine State,
which absorbed the consequential insertion of Islam and the Oromo into the Christian
hinterlands, took about 100 years (roughly, 1530-1630). These encounters gave birth
to a more diverse, demographically as well as religiously, Ethiopian society.
The transition between the closed political orders under the Gondarine State and
the Shewa State, which accomplished a remarkable degree of assimilation of the
non-Abyssinian peoples of the central highlands, also took a little over 100 years
(roughly, 1770-1900). What we have been witnessing since about 1974, then, is an
incomplete third transition to either a hegemonic Oromo-led ethnocentric state or a
democratic pan-Ethiopian state anchored in equal citizenship.
Ethiopia may appear sui generis in its 400 years of an earnest search for a viable
nation-state. This long journey entailed wrenching as well as victorious periods of
consolidation (1600–1670), fragmentation (1770–1855), restoration (1855–1890),
foreign penetration (1890–1955 for Eritrea and 1935–41 for the rest of the country),
consolidation and revival (1945–1974), and a revolution of sorts (1975–2015). Once
again, the tale-tale signs of a brave new world are evident from recent nation-wide
popular uprisings against an authoritarian and exclusionary rule which may have
ominous endings that evoke the tragedy or Rwanda or Syria. The interplay of the
external and the internal, and the predilection of state elites to encase the imported
(the gold) in a domestic garb (the wax) seems to have suffered severe diminishing
returns (Levine 2014).
174 6 Implications for Reforming the Postcolonial State
Intensity of
Exclusionary
Politics
LKA
ZAF
ETH
Fig. 6.1 Exclusionary identity and political consciousness. ETH = Ethiopia, LKA = Sri Lanka,
ZAF = South Africa. (Sources and notes: Author)
realistic. This presupposes that the dangerous hump is somehow crossed with the
state intact—Syria, Iraq, and Yugoslavia provide sobering examples of this middle-
income political trap.
If mutually destructive politics is the Achilles Heel of African industrialization,
then institutional innovations will have to be found. The imperatives of statecraft are
such that enduring political institutions must be built to implement sensible devel-
opment policies and to build-in post-election accountability.
We conclude by identifying two areas of research, at least as they apply to
Ethiopia. There is a great need to understand the value of protracted cultural assimi-
lation (through trade, migration, and exposure to state-enforced order) in explaining
the befuddling resiliency of Ethiopian national identity in the face of the ebbs and
flows of state control of society. In other words, why have not things fallen apart?
Another area of inquiry pertains to the role of an accelerating urbanization and
industrialization in laying down the foundations of transformation into a robustly
democratic and prosperous nation-state.
Globalization and ICT technologies are bound to accelerate the process by which
exclusivist political identities give way to a national and even a cosmopolitan one.
How latecomers can benefit from the fusion of the political and the economic as
well the tight interlocking of the domestic and the foreign deserves a deeper explo-
ration than has been attempted here.
References
Court the emperor and his courtiers, protected by royal troops and
served by retainers, who make important decisions and dis-
pense justice in the absence of separate government institu-
tions to do so.
Critical Juncture a window of opportunity, much shorter than a normal period,
that entails contingent decision-making by elites in a world
of great uncertainty and unpredictability.
Critical Period a period of inexorable atrophy of the old order and a progres-
sive build-up which often gives way to a radically new, but
not necessary superior, order.
Debr a large and well-endowed church, as opposed to Gedam (an
endowed monastery).
Democracies of age in many low-scale societies, age is an important factor in
distributing political power or participation. In some African
societies, political power was traditionally held by elders
(gerontocracy). In democracies of age, however, individuals
participate in the system with authority varying with age.
Democracy a system of government which relies on free and fair elections
for choosing leaders by citizens enjoying full sovereignty,
including protection of universally-recognized rights (human,
civil, and political) under an impartially applied rule of law.
Empire-State a core state with a loose control over a far-flung empire over
highly diverse but culturally-related populations which is dif-
ferent from a colonial state with little or no cultural bond
with the vast majority of the people in its colonies.
Ethnicity a specific primordial group which is made up of people who
identify themselves as belonging to the group based on mark-
ers such as a common language, heritage, or religion.
Federalism a system of government with a constitutionally-defined division
of power between the central government and the federal units
which devolves significant authority to self-governing states.
Feudalism the reciprocal legal and military obligations between the
monarch and the lords who monopolize ownership of
land and local administration. Serfs who work the land in
exchange for subsistence plots and protection, and interme-
diaries such as vassals and the clergy provide protection and
spiritual guidance.
Gadaa a variant of the age-set-based self-governance system of
many agro-pastoralist African societies, including the Oromo
clans (gossa), whereby various age groups (say, every 8
years) are assigned specific social and military functions.
Gebbar a subject who is obligated to pay tribute or tax to an ultimate
authority (an institution such as the state) for the right to land
or other productive assets. In modern parlance, a gebbar is a
taxpayer. In Oromo polities, the Gebbaro are conquered and
dispossessed tenants working for their new masters.
Glossary 181
Open-access Order a society that solves the problem of violence by granting
individuals or groups access to economic and political
markets via legitimate rules of competition. In such mod-
ern orders, all citizens have the right to form contractual
organizations which enable sustained wealth creation
as well as undergird an active civil society and political
society since the state has mustered the revenue base to
enforce a monopoly on violence.
Overlordism claims to revenue or tribute from landed producers based
on service by a titled class of intermediaries serving a
sovereign or the state.
Parliamentary system a system of government in which the parliament (leg-
islature), and not the president or the monarch, is the
most powerful political institution. Alternatively, a
Presidential system: a government in which the most
powerful political position is that of the president.
Patrimonialism a system of transactional political governance whereby
the rulers share the largess that comes with officeholding
to supporters, usually kin. Neopatrimonialism modifies
this system in state societies with a quasi-bureaucratic
system that collects revenues and serves as a conduit for
dispensing entitlements to the core constituencies of the
state elite.
Peasant an independent landowning class of producers supplying
a part of their output to the market, and subject to extra-
economic relations with the agents of the state.
Peasantization the process of transforming free communal or indentured
cultivators into independent peasants. Proletarianization
of peasants under wage labor in commercial farms,
mines, and factories under capitalism is the last stage of
this transformation.
Political culture norms concerning the exercise of political authority,
expressed in practices and institutions, which provide
political legitimacy.
Rent (Economic) extra-normal returns to an asset created as a result of
manipulation by the politically well-connected.
Ristegna Rist is land perpetually owned by members of an extended
family who can trace their lineage to a founding father or
mother, and can fulfill the tribute obligations imposed on
the land. Ristegna is one is thus entitled to rist land.
Sovereignty the right and the ability to exert unquestioned political
authority over a given territory or a given people. In a
democratic society, internal sovereignty resides in the
citizens.
Glossary 183
A Aston, T., 20
Abegaz, B., xviii, 50, 60, 61, 66, 67, 71, 109, Axum, 42, 43, 57, 59, 64, 74, 82, 116
111, 112, 124, 130, 133, 135, 137, 139,
142, 143, 169
Abir, M., 44, 62 B
Absolutism, 4, 8, 12, 26, 28, 48, 113, 159 Balabat, 95, 97, 99
Absolutist-military, 64 Bale, 69, 91, 101
Acemoglu, D., xiv, xvi, 4, 6–8, 12, 13, 16, 23, Bali, 91, 102
25, 26, 50, 74, 165 Bates, R., 6, 15, 16, 18, 21, 27, 51, 162
Adal, 43, 73, 91, 96, 169 Begemdir, 68, 89, 92, 94, 95, 100, 101
Addis Ababa, 58, 88, 91, 92, 94, 95, 116, 127, Bekele, Y.D., 169
129, 130, 137–139, 152, 153, 172 Belgium, 160, 163
Afar, 91, 102, 138, 140 Bellucci, B., 46
Africa of the colonial trade economy, 161 Beni Shangul, 73, 91, 102
Africa of the concession-owning Berhe, A., 134
companies, 161 Besley, T., 15, 27, 50
Africa of the labor reserves, 161 Bete kahnat, 68
Afroasian road, 21 Bete-mengist, 68
Age of commerce, 18 Bete-seb, 68
Age of industry, 18, 85, 86 Betre-mengistawi sir’at, 93
Agew, 64, 94, 99, 102 Boix, C., 15, 18
Ahmad, S., 66 Botswana, 174
Ahmed, H., 66 Bueno de Mesquita, B., 12, 27, 124, 125
Aksumite, 62 Byzantine, 71
Aleqnet, 73, 74
Amara, xvii, 64, 88, 94, 99, 127, 128, 134,
138, 139, 150, 152 C
Amhara, 65–69, 71, 88, 89, 95, 116, 136, 138, Canada, 74, 160, 171
139, 149, 169 Caulk, R., 77, 108, 109
Amin, S., 23, 161 Cederman, L., 152
Aqgni abbat, 70 Central America, 21
Argobba, 63 Central Asia, 41, 43, 51
Arsi, 70, 91, 95, 100, 101, 104 Centralized unitary, 160, 170, 171
Asante Union, 49, 50 Chifra, 14
Ashburner, W., 40, 71 Chika-Shum, 97
China, 4, 10, 15, 17, 24, 26, 31, 33, 35, 38, 58, Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic
107, 109, 122, 126, 135, 143, 165, 171 Front (EPRDF), 134, 135, 137, 138,
Chisegna, 67, 72, 87, 94–98 140, 142, 143, 167, 168, 170, 172
Citizenship, xiii, 4, 11, 12, 19, 20, 128, 137, Ethnocentric-Capitalist state, 129
139, 162, 167, 168, 170, 172 Eurasian road, 21
Civilizational states, xiv, 24, 31–51, 73, 81, Exclusionary institutions, xiv, 4, 7, 23, 24, 26,
116, 123, 149, 173 27, 59, 86
Clapham, C., 106, 112, 115, 126–128, Extractive contests, 4, 18, 36, 50, 60, 64, 92,
131–133, 143, 150 113, 124
Clark, G., 15, 20 Extractive institutions, 7, 23, 26, 59, 165
Clientelism, xiii, 152, 162
Coffee, 62, 85, 94, 100, 114
Collier, P., 15, 23, 125, 141 F
Congo, DRC, 48, 152 Federalism, 35, 122, 137–139, 142, 149, 152,
Corporate, 11, 15, 21, 22, 34, 46, 70–72, 143, 160, 168, 169, 172
159, 163 Fernyhough, T., 101, 105, 106
Corvée, 71, 97–99, 106 Fetha Negest, 39, 58, 71, 74, 75
Cote d’Ivoire, 162, 163, 174 Fief, 14, 41, 61, 68, 73, 93, 102
Court, 44, 45, 51, 64, 66, 68, 71, 72, 74, 81, Findlay, R., 79
86, 88, 93, 97, 98, 103, 116, 138, 159 Fiscal-military, 65
Crony capitalism, 117, 148 Fitawrari, 92
Crummey, D., xvi, 45, 67, 72–74, 77, 79, 108 Flora, P., 19
Fragility, 16, 19, 22, 27, 46, 58, 124, 139, 152,
154, 160, 163
D Freehold, 39, 70, 90, 92, 96, 99, 100, 103
Dale, S., 37, 40 Fukuyama, F., xiv, 9–11, 13, 15, 22, 25, 36,
Decentralization, 14–16, 32, 34, 46, 59, 61, 37, 125
62, 86, 99, 109, 114, 116, 126, 127,
131, 137, 139, 159, 160, 169–173
Democracy, 11, 125, 127, 145, 151, 164 G
Denmark, 152, 154, 164 Gadaa, 103, 105, 106
Derg, 140, 142, 143, 149, 170, 172 Garrison-populist regime, 129–134
Developmental neo-patrimonialism, 137, 144 Gebbar, 67, 68, 98
Developmental regime, 125, 143, 144 Geez, 43, 44, 77, 86
Developmental state, 23, 143, 144 Geopolitics, xviii, 13, 34, 94, 112, 130, 165
Dire Dawa, 137, 138 Germany, 126, 160, 172
Domar, E., 26, 60 Gerring, J., 149, 172
Domar thesis, 60 Ghana, xv, 46, 47, 49, 163
Dominant strategy, 40, 76 Gibe, 69, 85, 91, 102, 103, 107
Donham, D., 99, 102, 106 Gibir, 67, 68, 71, 97, 98
Dreher, A., 165 Globalization, 58, 121, 122, 130, 161, 175
Gojam, 44, 68, 69, 72, 80, 85, 88, 90, 92, 94,
95, 100–102, 107, 112, 126, 170
E Gondar, 39, 42–45, 57, 58, 60–62, 64–74, 76,
Eastern Europe, 17, 37 79, 80, 85, 86, 88, 90, 92, 94, 101, 102,
Egypt, xv, 24, 38, 41, 42, 47, 61, 69, 72, 81, 112, 113, 116, 139, 141, 148
109, 161, 163 Gondarine state, 41, 42, 44, 57–82, 89, 101,
Englebert, P., 162 103, 114, 126, 127
Era of the warring princes, 44, 79–81, 141 Gonga, 101
Eritrea, 58, 68, 70, 72, 74, 86, 88, 94–96, 101, Goody, J., 71
112, 114, 123, 128, 129, 131, 134–136, Gorecki, D., 40, 71
145, 163, 173 Gragn, A., 66
Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), Greenfield, R., 128, 134
122, 129, 133, 134 Guinier, L., 173
Index 187
Gulf of Aden, 43 Keffa, 44, 69, 70, 79, 91, 95, 100–102, 104, 138
Gult, 39, 57, 61, 67, 70, 73, 74, 77, 86, 95, 97, Kelsall, T., 124, 142, 164
98, 109, 149 Kenya, 24, 102, 114, 138, 162, 174
Gultegna, 73, 87, 90 Kibre Negest, 75, 86, 114, 127
Gurage, 63, 88, 91, 102, 104, 127 Killil, 137
Kingdom of Dahomey, 49
Kleptocracy, 10, 15, 151, 163
H Kongo, xv, 38, 45, 46, 48
Hadya, 66, 91, 102, 169 Korea, 24, 32, 143, 165
Haile Selassie I, 70, 75, 82, 86, 88, 92, 100, Kornai, J., 22
113, 126 Kuran, T., 71
Haldon, J., 23, 25
Handley, A., 164
Harrar, 69, 70, 73, 85, 91, 99, 103, 107, 170, 172 L
Harrarge, 91, 95, 100 Land institutions, 23, 57, 66–68, 70–74, 81,
Hassen, M., 62, 102, 103, 107 87, 92, 94, 107–109, 112, 149
Hegemony, 24, 63, 134, 139, 144 Larebo, H., 113, 115, 127
Henze, P., 43, 81, 116 Lasta, 72, 89, 90, 95, 169
Herbst, J., 21, 162 Latin America, 16–18, 141
Hobsbawm, E., 9, 13, 24 Lefort, R., 142, 146
Hudad, 74, 97 Legesse, E., 102, 103, 135, 169
Huntington, S., 9, 13, 25 Levine, D., xiii, xv, 21, 43, 59, 68, 75, 94, 128,
Hydraulic despotism, 79 132, 146, 150, 173
Lewis, H., 102, 103, 105
Liberalism, 106, 122
I Lineage groups, 102
Illiberal, 11, 127, 138, 149, 165
Imamate, 183
Inclusionary institutions, xvi, 4, 7, 27 M
Industrialization, xiv, 14, 16, 20, 31, 38, 42, Maddison, A., 42, 65, 71
58, 64, 112, 116, 124, 125, 148, 160, Malaysia, 139, 143
167, 175 Mali, xv, 46, 48
Iran, 38, 40, 126 Malthusian stagnation, 20, 26
Isaac, E., 43, 59 Mammadoch, 62, 66, 89
Islam, xviii, 24, 26, 41, 43, 46, 57, 62, 65, 69, Markakis, J., 151
89, 103–105, 134 McIntosh, S., 21, 22
Italy, xvi, 60, 69, 86, 87, 91, 115, 148 McNeill, W., 16
Mehal Sefari, 99
Mehretu, A., 172
J Meison, 131–133
Jacques, M., 32, 36 Mekwanint, 66, 87
James, W., 102, 106 Melkegna, 97
Japan, 15, 17, 24, 32, 38, 42, 58, 59, 64, 122, 126 Menelik II, xv, 45, 70, 72, 82, 85, 87, 88, 90,
Jembere, A., 74, 75 91, 99, 106, 123, 126
Jihad, xv, 43, 44, 58–60, 65, 69, 82, 89 Mengist, 25, 70, 97
Jimma, 28, 73, 91, 92, 94, 97, 99, 101–107, 170 Mengistu Haile Mariam, 133
Jimma Abba Jiffar, 104, 105, 107 Mesafint, 66
Jizya, 40 Micklethwait, J., 22, 151
Migdal, J., 9, 11, 15, 16, 25
Mislene, 92, 97
K Mkandaware, T., 176
Kakistocracy, 136 Monroe, J.C., 45, 49
Kapteijns, L., 72, 102 Moore, B., 13, 126
Kebele, 130, 132, 135 Multinational state, 19
188 Index
N R
Nash equilibrium, 76 Ras, 39, 65, 80, 90
Nation-building, xiv, xv, 12, 19, 20, 81, 128, Red Sea, 43, 44, 58, 60, 64, 114, 115
147, 148, 160 Reid, R., 21, 45, 116
Nation-state, xiv, xvi, xxiv, 13, 19, 24, 25, Rent-seeking, xvi, xviii, 5, 20, 60, 116, 124, 141
28, 38, 42, 60, 71, 80, 88, 107–110, Revolutionary state (RS), xix, 58, 82, 114,
112–117, 121, 146, 149, 152, 161, 116, 121–154
163, 166, 170, 173, 175 Rights, xiii, 6, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 21, 22, 26, 32,
Neftegna, 67, 95, 96, 109 34, 36, 37, 39–42, 44, 48, 50, 60, 64,
Negus, 65, 90, 104, 126 68, 70, 72–74, 77–79, 88, 90–92, 95,
Neguse-Negest, 66 98, 99, 104–106, 108, 109, 112, 113,
Neo-patrimonial regimes, 16, 115, 127, 128 123, 128, 130, 137–141, 149, 151, 159,
North (Maghrib) Africa, 161 161, 164, 165, 168, 169
Rist, 39, 57, 67, 68, 70–74, 77, 78, 91, 94, 95,
97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 112, 149
O Ristegna, 67, 68, 72–74, 90, 94, 112, 133
Oligarchy, 10, 165 Riste-gult, 73, 95
Olson, M., 16, 27, 38, 75 Robinson, J., xiv, xvi, 4, 6–8, 12, 13, 16, 21,
Oromo, xvii, 43, 44, 58, 59, 62–67, 69, 80, 81, 23, 25, 26, 165
88, 89, 91, 94, 96, 98, 99, 102, 103, Russia, 24, 33, 37, 38, 42, 58, 64, 87, 126,
105–107, 127, 128, 138, 140, 150, 152 160, 170–172
Oromo liberation front, 138 Rwanda, 143, 163
Orthodox Tewahido Church, 109
Osafo-Kwaako, P., 21
Ottaway, M., 128 S
Ottoman empire, xvi, 39–41, 57, 60 Safavid, 28, 39–41
Overlordism, 90 Sahara, 45, 49, 161
Ox-plow, 97 Sahelian zone, 22
Oyo, xv, 49 Sahle Selassie, 69, 87, 103, 104
Sarsa Dengel, 63, 75, 78, 82, 102
Saudi Arabia, 143
P Savanna, 22, 161
Pankhurst, R., 43, 61, 62, 68, 71–73, 98, Segmentary, 88, 102
108–110 Selassie I, 70, 82, 86, 88, 92, 100, 113, 126
Parliamentary system, 138 Senegal, 163, 174
Parrott, D., 10 Shewa, xix, 42, 44, 64, 68, 69, 72, 74, 80,
Party-state, 122, 134, 141–143, 167 85–90, 92–101, 103, 104, 106, 107,
Pastoralism, 22, 79 110, 112, 126–131, 136, 141, 148
Patrimonial-bureaucratic, 41 Shewan state, xix, 51, 58, 59, 68, 85–110,
Patrimonialism, 10, 113, 128, 137, 162 112–117, 126–128, 136, 148
Patrimonial regimes, 16, 139 Shiftnet, 79
Perham, M., 60, 66, 99, 113–115, 126, 131 Shumamint, 66, 87
Persia, 24, 41 Shum-shir, 66
Persson, T., 15, 27, 50 Sidama, 44, 62, 79, 91, 102, 103, 106, 153
Political culture, 9, 13, 15, 24, 49, 51, 59, 64, Sidamo, 70, 91, 95, 100, 138
77, 79, 86, 89, 90, 93, 94, 99, 102, Simien, 44, 68, 80, 88, 90, 94, 95
107–109, 133, 148, 149 Sira’t, 61
Political order, 32 Sireet, 67–73, 95
Polity, xiii, 9, 25, 35, 37, 68, 75, 102, 106, Skocpol, T., xviii, 15
115, 141, 145, 150 Slavery, xv, 6, 8, 22, 23, 44, 48, 58, 92,
Postcolonial state, xviii, 16, 27, 159–175 101–107
Post, K., xv Solomonid, 42, 57
Poverty, xviii, 23, 25, 28, 48, 110, 149, 150, 164 Somalia, 24, 58, 114, 133, 161
Presidential system, 169, 173 Songhay, xv, 46
Index 189
South Africa, 58, 124, 138, 139, 146, 160, Tributor, 17, 23, 32, 39, 41, 51, 67, 77,
161, 163, 174 110, 115
South Korea, 143, 165 Triesman, D., 171
Sovereignty, xiii, 9, 11, 14, 19, 23, 40, 48, 65, Trimingham, J. S., 43, 103
113, 114, 122, 128, 132, 137, 138, 146, Turkey, 38, 58
165, 167, 168, 170, 172
Spain, 4, 26, 88, 160, 163
Spaulding, J., 72, 102 U
Spruyt, H., 13, 18, 24 Uganda, 163
State building, xiv–xvi, 11–13, 20, 39, 51, Unitarism, 160, 170, 172
60, 81, 107, 114, 116, 122, 128, 142, Urbaniti, N., 11
147–149, 151, 152, 160, 161, 166, 173 Usufruct, 60, 68, 133, 148
State formation, xv–xviii, 5, 10, 13–18, 20, 21,
24, 25, 31, 33–35, 37, 38, 43, 46, 50,
60, 64, 81, 86, 93, 102, 104, 107–117, V
123, 130, 148, 149, 160, 162, 173, 175 Vanguardist regime, 48, 143
Stateless, 22, 43, 101 Vansina, J., 21
Stateless societies, 45 Vaughan, S., 132, 137, 140, 142, 143, 150
Stateness, 107 Vestal, T., 142, 150
State socialism, 122, 123 Vicious circle, 4, 7, 23, 27, 48, 81
Sudan, 24, 44, 72, 80, 102, 114, 163 Virtuous circles, 4, 7, 12
Sultanates, 40, 91
Sweden, 36, 171
W
Wag, 80, 90, 95, 169, 170
T Wag-Shum, 68
Tamrat, T., 43, 59 Waqf, 39, 42, 73
Tanzania, 138, 163, 174 Weberian, 41, 116
Tegene, H., xvi, 72, 73 Western Europe, 8, 11, 17, 27, 33,
Tegenu, T., 109 34, 64
Temben, 90 Whitfield, L., 164
Territorial national state, 34, 60 Wintrobe, R., 16
Tewodros II, xv, 45, 69, 77, 78, 80, 82, 85, 87, Wolde Aregay, M., xiii, 62, 63, 85, 108
89, 105, 108 Woldemariam, M., 100
Thies, C., 53, 176 Wolde Mesqel, M., 92
Tibebu, T., xvi Wollega-Kellem, 91
Tigray, 68, 69, 72, 80, 88, 90, 92, 94, 95, 101, Wollo, 44, 58, 62, 64, 66–69, 72, 80,
112, 116, 129, 134, 136–138, 169, 170 88–90, 92, 94–96, 100, 101, 103,
Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), 82, 107, 112, 116
122, 129, 131, 133–135, 137–139, Wolqait, 68, 95, 139, 169, 170
141–143, 170 Wooldridge, A., 13, 22
Tilly, C., 6, 10, 15, 16, 20, 24, 34 Workers Party of Ethiopia (WPE), 132
Transhumance, 183 World Bank, xix, 11, 18, 22, 74, 134, 149,
Tributarism, xvi–xviii, 21, 23, 35–37, 45, 151, 161, 165
49–51, 107, 108, 113, 116, 117, 124, Worreshekhoch, 89
126, 134, 162 Wubneh, M., 131, 172
Tributary-civilizational state, 31–51
Tributary mode of production, 23
Tributary state, xvii, 25, 32, 51, 57, 58, 60–68, Y
70–82, 86, 88, 97, 113, 126 Yeju, 44, 58, 62, 66, 68, 69, 72, 80, 89, 90, 95,
Tribute, xvi, 13, 22, 23, 26, 27, 32, 34–36, 41, 103, 107, 170
44, 46, 49, 50, 58–62, 64, 66–71, 73, Yemeret sireet, 68
74, 77–81, 86, 90, 91, 95, 97–99, 104, Yohannes IV, 70, 80, 82, 85, 87, 108
107, 116 Yugoslavia, 137, 149, 163, 171, 175
190 Index