Etana Dinka on state-society relations within the Ethiopian empire

Etana Dinka (James Madison) joins the JAH's Shane Doyle (Leeds) to discuss state-society encounters in western Ethiopia. Using the province of Qellem as a window, Dinka details processes of contesting, negotiating, and legitimizing the imperial state over a period spanning from 1908 through 1933. Drawing upon his reading of dynamics in Qellem, Dinka argues that the history of Ethiopian imperialism should be contextualized and studied alongside scholarships on contemporaneous European colonial endeavors in Africa. This groundbreaking approach challenges the metanarratives presented both by the Ethiopian grand tradition and Oromo historiographies.

Dinka's open access article '"Eating A Country": The Dynamics of State-Society Encounters in Qellem, Western Ethiopia, 1908–33', appears in Volume 63, Issue 2 of The Journal of African History.