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TSEGAYE TEGENU, The Evolution of Ethiopian Absolutism: the genesis and the making of the fiscal military state, 1696-1913. Studia Historica Upsaliensa 180, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1996, 281 pp., 198.00 kroner, ISBN 91 554 3856 3.
Very much the outcome of a Ph.D. thesis, and often overwhelmed by detail and a plethora of Amharic technical terms, this book nonetheless makes an important contribution to an understanding of the development of Ethiopian statehood in the two centuries preceding the rise of Haile Selassie. As the subtitle indicates (much more helpfully than the title), the author is concerned with the means by which Ethiopian rulers extracted from the economy the resources required to maintain a substantial military apparatus. The underlying theme is that the disasters of the sixteenth century, notably the devastation of the highlands by Ahmad Gragn and the Oromo invasions, led to changes in the mode of military organisation and the techniques of warfare. Far from the commonly accepted picture of a peasant levee en masse, these depended on professional military forces controlled by central and regional rulers. These forces were in...