Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia offers an original perspective on how the rulers of Ethiopia - one of the great subcenters of agricultural innovation and development - used land to support their dominion. Crummey draws on all the surviving documents pertaining to the holding and granting of agricultural land in the Ethiopian highlands from the thirteenth to the twentieth century. By examining how social relations affected the conditions for economic production and how people of power drew on the wealth created by society's basic producers, he provides new insight into how ordinary farming and herding folk were incorporated into and affected by the institutions that ruled them.

In October 2016, the Ethiopian administration declared a State of Emergency in response to anti-Government demonstrations and mass riots. Officially said to result from subversive activities channelled from Eritrea, Egypt and diasporic populations in the West, the evidence in fact suggests that the riots stemmed from widespread internal dissatisfaction. Large-scale land dispossessions following bilateral deals with transnational agribusiness, damming of major rivers, construction of sugar estates and industry parks as well as urban sprawl have put pressure on agricultural and rural areas. Today, displacement, drought and widening inequalities surround fears of severe food shortages and political instability. Drawing on informant testimonies, court archives, field reports and other sources, the author examines these developments in Ethiopia's lake region. He shows how transformations over time in spatial politics, state-society relations and the organization of production and exchange have influenced the situation today, and reveals the impact of these changes on a population of smallholder farmers for which agriculture is not only the mainstay of the national economy but a way of life. Getnet Bekele is Associate Professor of History at Oakland University, MI, where he teaches African History and the Environmental and Economic History of Africa and the Global South.

Reframes the story of modern Ethiopia around the contributions of the Oromo people and the culturally fluid union of communities that shaped the nation's politics and society.

From a war-torn and famine-plagued country at the beginning of the 1990s, Ethiopia is today emerging as one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa. Growth in Ethiopia has surpassed that of every other sub-Saharan country over the past decade and is forecast by the International Monetary Fund to exceed 8 percent over the next two years. The government has set its eyes on transforming the country into a middle-income country by 2025, and into a leading manufacturing hub in Africa. The Oxford Handbook of the Ethiopian Economy studies this country's unique model of development, where the state plays a central role, and where a successful industrialization drive has challenged the long-held erroneous assumption that industrial policy will never work in poor African countries. While much of the volume is focused on post-1991 economic development policy and strategy, the analysis is set against the background of the long history of Ethiopia, and more specifically on the Imperial period that ended in 1974, the socialist development experiment of the Derg regime between 1974 and 1991, and the policies and strategies of the current EPRDF government that assumed power in 1991. Including a range of contributions from both academic and professional standpoints, this volume is a key reference work on the economy of Ethiopia.

Since 1991, there has been renewed debate in Ethiopia concerning the implication of the country s past for the present polity. The long-standing debate was given an added impetus by Eritrea s independence from Ethiopia and the threat of disintegration posed by the continued struggle for self-determination by other ethnonational groups. Ethiopianist scholars, always committed to the indivisibility and unassailability of the Ethiopian state, blamed the country s political troubles on nationalist scholars, accusing them of fabricating history and instigating people into taking up arms against the state. Vowing to protect Ethiopia from further disintegration, the Ethiopianist elite called on patriotic scholars to challenge, expose, and discredit what they described as the politically motivated propaganda of irresponsible nationalists. In Contested Terrain, a team of historians and sociologists confront the scholarship of power that dismisses politically engaged scholarship in the name of academic objectivity. Based on the experience of the Oromo in Ethiopia, they tackle the methodological and political challenges of nationalist scholarship within the highly contested terrain of Ethiopian studies and argue that objectivity in scholarship should not mean neutrality in the face of injustice and exploitation. In eight chapters, they show that scholars can recover the experiences of the disadvantaged and underrepresented and give voice to the powerless and downtrodden. They demonstrate that there is no contradiction between challenging prevailing dogmas and inherited orthodoxies in academia on the one hand and giving support to struggles aimed at ending exploitative practices and dismantling institutions of oppression on the other. Academic objectivity must not be a tool for questioning the scholarly value of nationalist scholarship solely on the basis of the scholar s commitment to certain political causes. As an intellectual enterprise, politically engaged scholarship should be judged on its own merits, not on the basis of its implications for the well-being of political entities. -- Amazon.com.

Drawing on nine case studies, this book offers a comparative ethnography of the contested powers that shape democratization in Ethiopia. Focusing on the competitive 2005 elections, the authors analyze how customary leaders, political parties and state officials confronted each other during election time.