Imperialism In Ethiopia

Ethiopia is something of an outlier in modern African history in that it was largely spared from European colonization in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some have ascribed this anomaly to the strength of the Ethiopian state compared to other African polities, the difficulty of the geography, and the ineptitude of the Italians as a colonial power, and while there is some element of truth to these statements, the crux of Ethiopia success lies elsewhere. What ultimately spared Ethiopia from colonization was not its inherent strength, but rather the decision on the part of Emperor Menelik II to trade a degree of independence for sovereignty by submitting to the European system of international order and using European rivalries to maintain Ethiopia’s …show more content…
This claim, however, fails to recognize both that Ethiopia was not unique as a centralized polity and that Ethiopia’s strength on the eve of the war had been greatly diminished. Aside from Ethiopia, several states, including “Madagascar, Egypt, Buganda, and Bunyoro,”9 had similar centralized structures, and yet all were either colonized or reduced to tributes. While centralization likely conferred an advantage to Menelik as he raised and trained an army to defeat the Italians, as Acemoglu and Robinson correctly point out when writing on Ethiopian absolutism in Why Nations Fail10, it could not have conferred enough strength in of itself to cause Ethiopia’s success, given that all other centralized African states capitulated to European imperialism. Additionally, the Italian invasion came towards the end of a famine that is estimated to have killed nearly a third of Ethiopians. The strength of the state had been significantly diminished by the famine, as much of the population was displaced, killed, or weakened, meaning that the invasion came at a time when the Ethiopian state was least