| Chapter 1: | Historical Background |
Starting from the year 1769 until 1855, Ethiopia saw the era of the princes, when centralized control by the emperors residing in Gondar entirely ceased. It was a time when the Oromo expansion had reached the heartland of Amhara and Oromo warlords became king makers who brought royal children from their mountain prisons (at that time, all claimants to the throne, except the ones chosen to be monarchs, were imprisoned) and crowned them as emperors. In reality, however, the emperors had only nominal authority and regional feudal kings of Tigray, Gondar Gojam, Shoa, and Wallo enjoyed total autonomy.
Emperor Tewodros eventually reestablished centralized control over the autonomous highland principalities and championed the first modernization effort in Ethiopia. He was the first emperor to try to institute land reform in feudal Ethiopia where one-third of the arable land was controlled by the church and the rest by a few landlords. But his development aspirations were cut short in 1868 when he committed suicide with a gun that had been given to him by Queen Victoria. The Napier expedition that defeated Tewodros and subsequently led to his suicide was aimed at freeing British diplomats detained by the emperor in retaliation for lack of a prompt answer to a letter he wrote to the British queen. The era of Emperor Yohannes IV of Tigrai followed.
For many years, Yohannes and his army commander and viceroy in Mereb Melash (Eritrea), Ras Alula, supported by Ethiopians from other regions, repulsed a series of invasions by the Turks, the Egyptians, and the Italians. The emperor later died at a moment of victory over the Mahidists from the Sudan and was succeeded by Negus Menelik of Shoa whose peasant fighters defeated an Italian colonial army at the famous battle of Adwa in 1896.
In the wake of the victory, Emperor Menelik’s realm which had started to expand prior to the Adwa war, was consolidated. He championed a process of modernization of Ethiopian autocracy by opening the first Western-type school in 1905 and sending Ethiopian students to the West to study modern technology, following the footsteps of the Meijis in Japan. The first railway line connecting Djibouti on the Red Sea coast and the Ethiopian hinterland was built during his reign at the end of the 19th century and was then extended to Addis Ababa in 1918. He also introduced modern hospitals, the telephone, telegraph, electricity, and motorcars.