Living in the Italian colony of Eritrea during the first decades of the twentieth century, a young scholar named Gäbrä Mika’él Germu (1900–1969) decided to create a compendium of local history. He consulted numerous learned elders, church manuscripts, and European publications, recorded his findings in a small notebook, and added his own textual annotations, interpolations, and commentary. When this work was complete, Gäbrä Mika’él finished his compilation with a striking fifty-three page Amharic history of his own colonial world entitled Tarik iṭalyanna ityop̣ya, or History of Italy and Ethiopia. In it, he used his research to survey the history of imperialism over the long term. He began with a chronology that proceeded from the Spanish conquest of the Americas to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and then turned to a close study of the inaugural phase of colonialism in the Horn of Africa—from the Assäb-to-Adwa drama of the Italian conquest to the dynamics of domination, collaboration, and resistance in the highlands. To present this complex story, Gäbrä Mika’él employed two intertwined conceptual frames. On the one hand, he narrated the course of events related to the establishment of colonial rule, and on the other, he offered a pseudo-prosopography of Eritrea's first generation of Italian conquerors and their often-rebellious native subjects. By fusing the study of an unfolding historical process with accounts of the individual lives it shaped, Gäbrä Mika’él reconceptualized local history through the analytic category of empire. In so doing, he produced one of the first problem-oriented histories in the vernacular tradition. Braudel would have approved.

This chapter contends that Gäbrä Mika’él's efforts exemplify a new variety of vernacular historiography that emerged in Italian Eritrea. In the years between 1890 and 1941, the northernmost branch of the Ethiopian historical tradition began to develop distinct colonial inflections, and this subtle shift in outlook began to distinguish some Eritrean historians from their Ethiopian counterparts, who were then grappling with different historical questions. The cause of this shift is relatively straightforward. As Italian subjects, Eritreans experienced a host of disruptive developments related to the colonial situation north of the Märäb River.