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Articulating Economic Modernization and National Integration at the Periphery: Addis Ababa and Sidamo's Provincial Centers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Charles W. McClellan
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Extract

Addis Ababa, founded a century ago, has exerted influence over its periphery like no other Ethiopian town before it. From a straggling, disjunctive village in the 1880s, Addis Ababa (New Flower) developed into one of the largest urban centers in Africa. By the end of World War II, it was a city of over a half million people and home to the Organization of African Unity and several other international bodies. The growth of this metropolis was phenomenal, particularly since it emerged within an economy that was 90 percent agricultural and largely feudal.

After serving initially as Shewa's provincial center, Addis Ababa became the imperial capital in 1889 with Menilek's accession to the Ethiopian throne. Addis Ababa also became the geographic center of an Ethiopia that in the 1880s was in the process of constituting itself both physically and culturally. The twentieth century provided Addis Ababa and its imperial resident with the technological and economic means with which to dominate and defend a state that was larger than that of any previous Abyssinian ruler. Modern firearms permitted the conquest of areas never before subject to the Abyssinian monarch; improved communications in the form of roads, transport vehicles, telegraph, and telephone gave the center the means with which to supervise a distant periphery; new export crops and improved access to international markets insured the financing of these modern innovations. Addis Ababa was at the heart of these changes. Its own evolution and development reflected the efforts of both Menilek II (r. 1889-1913) and Haile Sillassie I (regent 1917-1930; emperor 1930-1974) to modernize and centralize the feudal state.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , April 1990 , pp. 29 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1990

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