4. The Shewan Fiscal-Territorial State

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 campaign spanned 5 months and 580 miles. It was rivaled among nineteenth century military campaigns 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.”

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 disintegration 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.

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 dependence to introduce significant legislative reforms of the land tenure system and government administration, restored Eritrea and the Haud to Ethiopia, and introduced a revised Constitution which granted limited political rights to citizens.

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-administrative 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.

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 condition of access to land. So, a gebbar is the occupant of a gibir-paying land. In the newer and military-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.

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 registered upon a list and it was the duty of the local headman to see that there were enough of them to support the soldiers.”

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 commercialization 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).

The contrasting Shewa-Jimma models of Ethiopian state formation provide a much-needed corrective 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.

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.”

I explore what it would take for Africa to mount a successful very-late industrialization drive in another volume (Abegaz 2018).

Historically, the discouragement of productive uses of the extracted surplus was partially mitigated 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.

Henze (2000: 120–21) puts it thusly: “Shoa’s dynamism may be attributable in part to its amalgam 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 momentum 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.”