Title:
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Re-imagining Empire : Ethiopian political culture under Yohannis IV, 1872-89
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This thesis is concerned with the question of how the Ethiopian monarchy reconstructed
and reinvented itself after more than a century of decline. It examines the internal
dynamics of this process, by utilising primary source materials in indigenous Ethiopian
languages. The main sources used are chronicles commemorating the reign of Y ohannis
IV, the second of the monarchs who presided over the period widely regarded as
marking the beginning of modem Ethiopian history. Chapter 1 outlines the main social
and political themes essential for an understanding of Ethiopia in the late-nineteenth
century. It deals with the origins of the national ideology, church-state relations, patronclient
relations, the economic basis of society and land tenure. I then sketch the
historical debate surrounding the period that provides the immediate context for the
monarchy of Y ohannis IV. Chapter 2 examines the rise to power of Y ohannis and
analyses this process by addressing understandings of authority, leadership and the role
of charisma in the Ethiopian context. Chapter 3 examines how Solomonic genealogy
and the religious symbols embedded in the glorious past of the monarchy were
mobilised by Y ohannis to further his project of imperial reconstruction. Particular
attention is paid to his coronation ceremony in 1872, as an example of the mobilization
of imperial ideology, here expressed through the pageantry of political ritual. Chapters
4 and 5 look at the functioning of the Ethiopian political scene. Here oral sources
supplement documentary material in order to identify new mechanisms and institutions
that characterised the political culture of late nineteenth-century Ethiopia. Using
historical narrative, reconstructed by tracing the lives and careers of prominent
individuals on the political scene, I explain the dynamics of the centrifugal and
centripetal forces that characterised centre-periphery relations. Chapter 6 examines the
revived structure of the empire based on the concept of the king of kings and his
relationship with his subordinate regional ruler.
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