In the years after the liberation of Ethiopia in 1941, the playwright, author, and civil servant Käbbädä Mika’él (1916–98) wrote a series of studies that recalled the pioneering histories of the years before 1935. The first of these was his 1947 work Ityop̣yanna me’erabawi śelleṭṭané, or Ethiopia and Western Civilization, which was issued in a joint Amharic-English edition by Berhanenna Sälam. Dedicated to the restored Emperor Ḫaylä Śellasé, its frontispiece announced Käbbädä's threefold desire to “enlighten his countrymen,” “lead the general reader to a better understanding of Western Civilization,” and “make known to the outside world the efforts put forth by the New Ethiopia in striving to attain modernization.” Yet Käbbädä's purpose was more polemical than these anodyne pronouncements implied. After an opening quotation from Goethe, he presents a systematic analysis of the tension between the West's myriad accomplishments and its use of slavery. He opened with juxtaposing chapters on “the Formation of States” and “the Meaning of Slavery,” followed by “the Greek Philosophers” and “Slaves Among the Greeks,” in which he reflected on the irony that Plato boasted of his freedom only to be enslaved himself. Käbbädä continued with treatments of “The Renaissance” and “Slavery in the Middle Ages,” and then turned to the more modern topics of American plantations, the Haitian and French Revolutions, the abolitionist movements in the United States and Britain, the “Troubled Century” of nationalist foment, and the “Mechanical Age” of industrial achievement. These last two eras, he judged, had jointly contributed to the end of slavery. He then went on to demonstrate—with documentary evidence—that Emperor Ḫaylä Śellasé had formally abolished slavery in his own country, and thus “Ethiopia had found her Lincoln,” as etégé Mänän had suggested many years before. In recognition of this fact, Käbbädä concluded his work with a chapter on “The Great Achievements of Haile Selassie.” His new world history was an ambitious and assertively corrective study of Western civilization, one that traced the antagonism between philosophical ideals and historical realities.

Though Käbbädä's work offered its readers a provocative critique of the West, its argument rested upon strong historicist foundations.