A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991. Bahru Zewde
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as the naggadras (head merchant), and he was entrusted with ensuring the safety of the group under his leadership. The merchants were exposed to the hazards of both man and nature. Not only did they have to cross deserts and ford rivers, but they also had to endure the whims and caprices of petty and big chiefs. The innumerable toll-stations along the route had a particularly negative effect on the trade. Conversely, the control of trade routes to augment their revenue was a matter of prime importance to political authorities.
In addition to the two main arteries of trade, there were three other types of interaction. The first was localized trade in the highlands. The second was trade relations between the peripheral lowlands and the adjoining highlands, such as between the Anuak and the Oromo and between the Afar and the highlanders. The third was what we may with some anachronism designate trans-frontier trade, such as trade from Wallaga to Sudan and from southern Ethiopia to the coast of Somalia – both precursors of the much more intense commercial links later fostered by neighbouring colonial powers.
4. Trade routes of the nineteenth century (adapted from M. Abir, Ethiopia: The Era of the Princes, London, 1968, and Guluma Gemeda, ‘Gomma and Limmu: The Process of State Formation among the Oromo in the Gibe Region c. 1750–1889’, MA thesis, Addis Ababa University, 1984)
2. The external challenge
Renewed European interest
The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1632 was followed by what amounted to a period of disenchantment with and rejection of Europe by Ethiopia. With the exception of the visits of the Scottish traveller and explorer, James Bruce, in the eighteenth century and of the French physician Charles Poncet at the end of the seventeenth, there was little interaction. This situation began to change significantly at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Europe approached Ethiopia with redoubled energy. The Ethiopians responded with a feeling combining eagerness and caution.
The revival of European interest in the Ethiopian region was not a unique phenomenon. It was part of the general European penetration of Africa in the nineteenth century, and it was multifaceted. In essence it had economic origins. The industrial revolution that transformed European society, starting from the end of the eighteenth century, at the same time ushered in a new pattern of relationship between Europe and Africa. The revolution in production could not be contained within the confines of Europe. The manufacture of industrial goods far in excess of what Europe itself could consume made the conquest of the African market imperative. Thus, in Ethiopia, as elsewhere in Africa, the European officials who came into contact with Ethiopian rulers were above all ambassadors of commerce. This was clearly the case with the first European official to set foot on Ethiopian soil in 1804: Sir George Annesley, later Viscount Valentia, from Britain. The promotion of commerce was the dominant theme of the first treaties concluded between European officials and Ethiopian authorities, such as those between Negus Sahla-Sellase and the British Captain W. Cornwallis Harris (1841) and the French Rochet d’Hericourt (1843), and between Ras Ali II and the British Walter Plowden (1849).
A second dimension of European interest in Ethiopia, as in the rest of Africa, was a resurgence of missionary activity. In spite of the bitter legacy of the Jesuit experiment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans applied themselves to the task of proselytizing Ethiopians with renewed zeal. Nor was this activity confined to the Catholics. It was the Protestants, mainly of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) of London, who pioneered this new phase of evangelical activity in the nineteenth century. Samuel Gobat was active in the north, in Tegre and Bagemder, while C.W. Isenberg and J.L. Krapf operated mainly in Shawa. On the Catholic side, the path was cleared by Giuseppe Sapeto and was followed by Giustino De Jacobis, who in 1839 founded the Lazarist mission in northern Ethiopia. Seven years later, the founder of the Capuchin order in Ethiopia, Cardinal Massaja, arrived.
Side by side with the official envoys and the missionaries came the scientists and explorers. Among the pioneers were the German Eduard Rueppell and the two French brothers Antoine and Arnauld d’Abbadie. The d’Abbadie brothers have now come to occupy a prominent place in Ethiopian studies, thanks to their prolific writings. European scientists investigated the country, ranging from its botany to its ethnography. They did so with such energy and perseverance that Dajjach Webe Hayla-Maryam of Semen is reputed to have commented: ‘One collects our plants, another our stones; I do not know what you are looking for, but I do not want it to be in my country that you find it’ (Rubenson, Survival, 54).
These facets of European interest in Ethiopia – the commercial, the official, the missionary and the scientific – were very much interconnected and reinforced each other. The scientists were not disinterested academics, but often engaged in political affairs. The missionaries enjoyed moral, and sometimes material, support from their states. Both missionaries and those who came on official missions dabbled in scientific or pseudo-scientific studies of the country. The missionary Krapf was actively involved in the negotiations for the treaty between Shawa and Britain. Sir George Annesley, who had come to Massawa with the aim of conducting botanical and geographical investigations, readily engaged in exploring ways of promoting trade with Ethiopia. Nor was missionary activity totally divorced from commercial matters. Proselytization, it was hoped, would promote trade and capitalism.
Egyptian expansion
Yet, compared with the desperate scramble that was to characterize European penetration of Africa in the last quarter of the century, these early European sallies into Ethiopia were of a tentative nature. Expansion of a more vigorous kind came from nearer home. It was Egypt, the country with which Ethiopia had had the longest foreign contact in its history, that presented the initial challenge. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Egypt was undergoing a significant process of change which was to have an enduring effect both on its internal shape and its foreign policy. The short-lived Napoleonic occupation of Egypt (1798–1801) was not uneventful. While it lasted, it undermined the Mamlukes, who had ruled the country for nearly six centuries, and brought distant echoes of the French Revolution to the banks of the Nile. Its termination under a combined Anglo-Ottoman assault had two lasting consequences – the beginning of British interest in Egypt and the Red Sea, and the emergence of Muhammad Ali, the Albanian adventurer in the Ottoman army who established the dynasty that was to rule Egypt for a century and a half.
Muhammad Ali’s first task was to deal the final blow to the tottering Mamluke power. Then, after establishing a secure economic and military base for his own power, he turned his attention outwards. His expansion in the direction of Syria was frustrated by the British; but it was his southward expansion which was to have a lasting impact and pose a threat to Ethiopia. The defeat of the Funj kingdom of Sennar in 1821 inaugurated Egyptian rule in Sudan. At the same time, it ushered in a period of border skirmishes between the Egyptians, who were vigorously pushing eastwards, and the Ethiopian rulers of the borders, ranging from Dajjach Webe of Semen to Dajjach Kenfu of Dambya. The latter’s half-brother, Kasa Haylu, inherited these skirmishes – a situation which had considerable effect both on his rise to power as Emperor Tewodros and in the shaping of his personality.
Further, with Muhammad Ali’s conquest of Arabia, Egypt was emerging as the new power on the Red Sea, replacing the moribund Ottoman empire. This had the salutary effect of reviving the Red Sea trade. For Ethiopia, however, it meant – as in the western borderlands – the implantation of a more dangerous neighbour. Although the Ottoman Turks had occupied Massawa as early as 1557, and continued to maintain the fiction of a principality known as Habasha (Abyssinia) as part of their domain, by the beginning of the nineteenth century Ottoman authority on the coast was non-existent. Local power was exercised by their one-time viceroys, the naibs of Arqiqo, who had established over the years a mode of peaceful co-existence with the highland rulers of Ethiopia, more exactly those of Tegre. Egyptian occupation of Massawa in 1841, ostensibly on the grounds of legal right to former Ottoman possessions, changed the situation. In Ethiopian parlance, nevertheless, both Ottoman and Egyptian continued to have an identical appellation: ‘Turk’.
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