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SAHEED A. ADEJUMOBI, The History of Ethiopia. Westport CT and London: Greenwood Press (hb $45/£25.95 - 978 0 31332 273 0). 2007, xix+219 pp.
This book on Ethiopia is part of a new series by Greenwood Press on country histories. This accounts for the ambitious title, the format and the nature of the information presented in this book, obviously intended for general, nonspecialist readers. The author is a US historian of Nigerian descent working at Seattle University and a relative newcomer to the subject of Ethiopian studies. He has written an original and interesting account which will stimulate readers to know more about Ethiopia, a complex country with a peculiar place in Africa due to its long tradition of independence in the political and religious domains, and its almost 1,700-year-old written literary tradition. After a brief introductory chapter, the book treats Ethiopia's history mainly from the late nineteenth century onwards. The country's symbolic role in Black diaspora liberation discourse and nationalism in colonial times is emphasized ('Ethiopianism') as well as Ethiopia's slow and ambivalent encounter with 'modernity'.
The book is the latest contribution to a series of general histories of Ethiopia published in the last decade or so (by Bahru Zewde, Berhanou Abebe, Teshale Tibebu, H. Marcus, R. Pankhurst and P. Henze); it is different in that its approach is geared more to modern concerns with globalization, transnational influences, the role of Ethiopia in US African-American discourse, and issues of cultural identity. This is the advantage of the book: the explicit framing of...