3. The Gondarine Tributary-Military State

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 differences, of the two countries thusly: receptive insularity, idealization of an alien culture, sacralization 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, commercialized agriculture, and agro-processing workshops that supplied manufactures to a growing urban economy.

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.

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 sending 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).

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 produce 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).

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.

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 various 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.

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 collectively 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 superior 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).

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 program 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 districts of Eritrea after 1880 to obtain land for Italian settlers and to undermine resistance to colonialism by the ristegna gentry.

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.

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 administrative corps numbered 80,000 in 1665 (Fukuyama 2012: 329).

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).

Tewodros II tried to form centrally-controlled and integrated regiments rather than relying provincial 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.

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 successfully 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 development of a national army, a Pan-Ethiopian economy, modern communications, and an official culture whose main feature was the use of the Amharic language in government and education.”