In the last three decades, our understanding of the Indian Ocean slave trade has greatly expanded. Recent studies document that African slaves were moved quite extensively around the western Indian Ocean that included the East African coast, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent. The western Indian Ocean is the vast maritime region located between the western coast of the Indian subcontinent and the East African coast. It also includes the Red Sea and the Gulf. Trading in slaves is known to have taken place in this region as late as when Periplus Maris Erythraei was written (c. 150 AD). The 1820 General Treaty of Peace that the British concluded with all major sheikhs along the Arabian coast of the Gulf can be regarded as the starting point of British anti-slave trade activities in the western Indian Ocean.

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. The provinces north of the capital, Addis Ababa, had long been Christian, and there Muslims tended to be landless traders. Exemption from all taxes was granted to veterans and other soldiers, governors and their agents, and local Oromo, Walamo and other notables, who had allied with the emperor Menelik and his generals. Until the 1920s, European control in the Horn of Africa was largely confined to a few seaports: Djibouti, Zeila, Berbera, Mogadishu and Brava. The advent of Fascism made a more immediate impact on Italian Somaliland. Of its million or so inhabitants, perhaps one-tenth were cultivators, and these were concentrated near the Benadir coast. Within the frontiers of Italian East Africa, new administrative borders were drawn in order to encourage regional affinities and undermine loyalties to the Ethiopian Empire.