the nineteenth century, against the Italians. In 1889 the
throne went to Menelik II, who was immediately faced with
the interest of Italy in establishing a colony there. In 1885
the German chancellor Bismarck had convened a
conference in Berlin where the European powers hatched
the “Scramble for Africa”—that is, they decided how to
divide up Africa into different spheres of interest. At the
conference, Italy secured its rights to colonies in Eritrea,
along the coast of Ethiopia, and Somalia. Ethiopia, though
not represented at the conference, somehow managed to
survive intact. But the Italians still kept designs, and in 1896
they marched an army south from Eritrea. Menelik’s
response was similar to that of a European medieval king;
he formed an army by getting the nobility to call up their
armed men. This approach could not put an army in the
field for long, but it could put a huge one together for a short
time. This short time was just enough to defeat the Italians,
whose fifteen thousand men were overwhelmed by
Menelik’s one hundred thousand in the Battle of Adowa in
1896. It was the most serious military defeat a precolonial
African country was able to inflict on a European power,
and secured Ethiopia’s independence for another forty
years.
The last emperor of Ethiopia, Ras Tafari, was crowned
Haile Selassie in 1930. Haile Selassie ruled until he was
overthrown by a second Italian invasion, which began in
1935, but he returned from exile with the help of the English
in 1941. He then ruled until he was overthrown in a 1974
coup by the Derg, “the Committee,” a group of Marxist army
officers, who then proceeded to further impoverish and
ravage the country. The basic extractive economic
institutions of the absolutist Ethiopian empire, such as gult
(this page), and the feudalism created after the decline of
Aksum, lasted until they were abolished after the 1974
revolution.
Today Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the
world. The income of an average Ethiopian is about one-
fortieth that of an average citizen of England. Most people
live in rural areas and practice subsistence agriculture.
They lack clean water, electricity, and access to proper
schools or health care. Life expectancy is about fifty-five
years and only one-third of adults are literate. A