Ten years after defeating the Italians at Adowa in 1896, the Christian monarchy of Ethiopia was more powerful than it had been at any time since the fifteenth century. Recent territorial expansion had brought its frontiers to the extremities of the Ethiopian plateaux, which contained the most fertile and populous parts of north-east Africa. One-quarter of the Somali people were incorporated in Ethiopia. The rest were nominally subject to Britain, France and Italy, who had annexed to their colonial empires the whole of the sea coast. Between them, Britain and Italy claimed vast tracts inland but had occupied very little. The Italians had held on to the fertile highlands of Eritrea, which had once been part of the Ethiopian empire; elsewhere, except for riverine strips in Somali country, the European territories permitted little more than seasonal grazing. Thinly spread, the Somali and ‘Afar pastoralists were still largely independent in 1905. Aside from the Christian empire of Ethiopia and the narrow band of European control, the only political centre towards which wider loyalties might gravitate was the Islamic reform movement led by Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdallah Hasan. This seemed capable of creating a successor to the confederations of Muslim farmers, both riverain and highland, which had prospered in the Horn for several centuries until the mid-nineteenth century.

The demography of north-east Africa has received little serious study, and it is possible to make only the most tentative observations. By 1905 there were probably no more than two million people left outside the Ethiopian empire, whose population was estimated by informed foreigners in the early twentieth century as between eight and thirteen million.