land tenure and agrarian social structure in ethiopia, 1636-1900

339 Pages·2011·3.72 MB·English

LAND TENURE AND AGRARIAN SOCIAL STRUCTURE IN ETHIOPIA, 1636-1900

BY

HABTAMU MENGISTIE TEGEGNE

DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History
in the Graduate College of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011

Urbana, Illinois

Doctoral Committee:

Professor Emeritus Donald Crummey, Chair
Associate Professor Carol Symes
Professor Emeritus Charles Stewart
Assistant Professor James Brennan
Associate Professor Kenneth Cuno
Abstract
Most scholars have viewed property in pre-modern Ethiopia in ―feudal‖ terms analogous to
medieval Europe. According to them, Ethiopia‘s past property arrangement had been in every
respect archaic implying less than complete property rights, for, unlike in modern liberal
societies, it vested no ownership or ―absolute‖ rights in a single individual over a material object.
By draining any notions of ownership right, historians therefore characterized the forms of
property through which the Ethiopian elites supported themselves as ―fief-holding‖ or rights of
lordship, which merely entitled them to collect tribute from the subject peasantry. By using land
registers, surveys, charters, and private property transactions, which I collected from Ethiopian
churches and monasteries, this dissertation challenges this conception of property in premodern
Ethiopia by arguing that Ethiopian elites did exercise ownership rights over the land, thus
providing them a means by which to control the peasantry. Through the concepts of rim (a form
of private property in land exclusively held by social elites) and zéga (a hitherto unrecognized
serf-like laborers), I explore the economic and social relationship between rulers and ruled that
defined political culture in premodern Ethiopia. As a norm rim derived from confiscated peasant
property and it mediated or exposed the social dependence of the zéga class on the ruling class.
Rim together with zéga emphasize that the peasants were far less independent and secure in their
property rights than conventional portrayals, while indicating the ability of rulers to create a
sharply defined social distance for the maintenance of a land tenure system that supported harsh
exploitation and domination.
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Preface
The basis for my dissertation was laid down in my earlier work on property and its
myriad intersection with issues of power, labor, exploitation and social structure in eighteenth
and nineteenth century East Gojjam, a northwestern province of Ethiopia. By utilizing property
documents and manuscripts housed in Ethiopian churches and monasteries, I investigated how
the idea of power and privilege projected onto the land system generated local customs that
foreclosed rural cultivators from their ancestral property and reduced them into farmhands. The
search for methodological support of a hypothesis which I discerned in my work on East Gojjam
turned me toward the study of Gondärine Ethiopia. My doctoral field work extended the
geographical range of my previous study and yielded a prodigious amount of unseen materials—
which is discussed in the introduction. Most valuably, my dissertation brought back to life a
whole category of people overlooked by scholars called zéga or serfs. As the result, my concern
in this dissertation has been to highlight the zéga class as crucial social element in premodern
Ethiopia and to identify its central features. By bringing the neglected zéga to the limelight, my
research opens new ways of thinking about Ethiopian history and cuts through the assumptions
of deeply ingrained theories and analytical trends and revamps these to resonate more closely
with lived experiences.
In the course of my graduate study, I have owed gratitude and debts to many institutions
and individuals. My fieldwork in Ethiopia was covered by a Department of History Dissertation
Research Fellowship and the Graduate College Dissertation Research Travel grants at the
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. In addition, I have received financial assistance for
my field research from the School of Graduate Studies at Addis Ababa University and Centre
National de Recherche Scientifique at the Centre d‘Études des mondes africains at the University
of Paris in France. The Centre Français des Études Éthiopiennes at Addis Ababa also allowed me
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to use its office facilities and equipment during my field work. I record my sincere gratitude to
these institutions for the support they extended to me. A predoctoral fellowship from the
Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University
Rochester enabled me to finish the writing of the dissertation. I thank the Institute‘s welcoming
and helpful staff and faculty. My special thank is to Elias Mandala, Ghislaine Radegonde-Eison
and Jesse Moore for their much willing help and warmth during my fellowship tenure.
I also want to use this opportunity to express my appreciation to the inspiring, highly
educated and unusually intelligent faculty at the History Department at Urbana-Champaign. The
History Department is truly a center of excellence and its faculty members are the model of
university professors. I owe special gratitude to my dissertation committee for their support,
encouragement and insights. Donald Crummey extended me his unreserved support and
guidance in all stages of my graduate study. He patiently and carefully read and reread the
chapter revisions. My dissertation builds on his magisterial and pioneering work of Land and
Society, which has broken new conceptual ground in Ethiopian studies. No one suspected the
existence of the kind of society in historic Ethiopia before Crummey exposed it. My heartfelt
thank to Crummey for his guidance. His respected and enduring contribution to Ethiopian studies
inspired me.
Carol Symes, Kenneth Cuno and Charles Stewart enriched my dissertation through their
unstinting support, insights and sustained interest in my research project design since my arrival
at Urbana-Champaign in 2004. My sincere thank to them for supporting my research. The
reading and graduate seminar courses I took with Symes and Cuno were eye opening experiences
and exposed me to the literature in their respective fields I knew little about. I also would like to
thank James Brennan for serving on my dissertation committee and sharpening my
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understanding of African history through his remarkable lectures on African history in a course
he gave in 2009. The comments and criticisms from the committee have been very helpful in
revising the chapters. I am solely responsible for whatever error is in the dissertation.
While working as teaching assistant, I learned a lot from the enjoyable global history and
western civilization courses taught by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi and Dana Rabin and Clare
Crowston and Carol Symes respectively. Also I am deeply grateful to Dana for her consistent
interest in my work and career, rich conversation and invaluable advice in many respects. I am
grateful to the hardworking staff members of the History Department at the University of
Illinois, who walked me through the many paper works and application forms with patience and
understanding throughout my graduate study. The late Judy Patterson, Elaine Sampson, Jan
Langendorf and Thom Bedwell offered me help beyond their normal duty on many occasions. I
thank them for their generosity and assistance. Thank you to Brian Yates and Cynthia Exum for
making my transition to Urbana easier. I am deeply indebted to Cynthia for her friendship and
the assistance offered me especially during my first year in Urbana. Also I have had the good
fortune to have a bright and pleasant friend, Jeffery Ahlman, who read my papers and gave me
useful feedback. I express my sincere gratitude to Jeffrey. Thank you also to my Ethiopian
friends at Illinois for the games, dances, outings and laughter, making graduate study pleasant
and memorable. My special thank is to Bezza Tesfaw. I always turned to Bezza for help and
advice when I stumbled into computer problems and spent holidays together with his joyous and
beautiful family. I owe Bezza deep gratitude for his friendship, computer skill, hospitality, good
food and pool games.
I also contracted debts of gratitude during my fieldwork in Ethiopia. I visited several
churches in Gojjam and Gondär with Laury Belrose and Margaux Herman from the University of
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Sorbonne, Anaïs Wion from the Centre d'Etude des Mondes Africains, Claire Bosc-Tiessé from
Centre Français des d‘Études Ethiopiennes (CFEE), and Emmanuel Fritsch, a liturgist and
associate researcher at CFEE. I thank all of them for their assistance, wonderful conversation and
humor which helped me to carry through the difficult fieldwork in Ethiopia. I owe Kindeneh
Endeg, a fine young man and a very good friend since my days at Addis Ababa University, for
friendship and enlightening me about the intricate Christological debates of the Ethiopian
Orthodox clergy. I also would like to thank Daniel Dejene, Malkamu Tamrie, Sisay Sahle and
Ayele Tarekegn for hosting me at various times during the field work and for helping identify
informants. Tesema Bekele prepared the maps in this dissertation. Finally, I want to record my
gratitude to all my informants and the countless good people I met in northern Ethiopia.
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Contents
Chapter One: Introduction .............................................................................................................. 2
Chapter Two: Rim and Zéga: Antecedents and Early Developments .......................................... 52
Chapter Three: Rim as Ecclesiastical Property: the Formative Period, c. 1630s-1769 ................ 96
Chapter Four: Rim Grants in Gojjam: Articulation and Consolidation, c. 1760s-1900 ............. 140
Chapter Five: Lords and Zégoch: The Ethiopian Serfdom, c.1700-1900 ................................... 181
Chapter Six: Rim Grants in Tegray and Wällo, c.1750s-1930s .................................................. 216
Chapter Seven: Rim and the Commercialization of Land .......................................................... 258
Chapter Eight: Conclusion: Rim and Zéga ................................................................................. 315
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 319

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1
Chapter One: Introduction
This study is about the interrelations between land, labor and social structure in Ethiopia
between 1636 and 1900. Two categories are at the center of the study. One pertains to rights
associated with landed property called rim held by the ruling class (lay and clerical), the other to
a social group known in Amhäric as zéga (pl. zegoch), landless agricultural laborers. The holders
of rim lands exercised rights on zéga similar to landlords in countries such as Russia over serfs,
but the two systems are hardly carbon copies of each other. The bulk of the primary sources
examined are property documents stored in church archives of northern Ethiopia.
Ethiopian history as a field of study has gained inspiration from and become a subject of
wider interest since the second half of the twentieth century. One reason is the opening and
growth during the 1960s of the History Department at the then Häylä-Sellasé I University, later
renamed Addis Ababa University.1Another reason is a change in focus from historically oriented
Semitic philology to an in-depth reading and analysis by scholars of translations of texts of
antiquity such as chronicles and hagiographies from earlier centuries pertaining to Ethiopian
civilization. Indeed, numerous scholarly studies since 1960 treat Ethiopia‘s political system, its
class structure, and religious institutions. The now classic work of Taddesse Tamrat on the
development of church and state during Ethiopian medieval history covering the crucial period
between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries owes a great deal to historically oriented Semitic
philology and a corpus of unseen hagiographies alike. The late Merid Wolde-Aregay continued
where Taddesse left off, writing the period between 1508 and 1706. He, too, exploited chronicles
and Portuguese sources for his analysis of the military, political and administrative
transformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We owe so much of our knowledge

1 Donald Crummey, ―Society, State, and Ethnicity in the Recent Historiography of Ethiopia,‖ Journal of African
History 31, no.1 (1990): 103-19.
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of Ethiopian political and religious history before the eighteenth century to edited chronicles and
hagiographies and the analytical works based on these texts by Merid, Taddesse and others.2
Historical inquiry into economic issues also helped to broaden the historiographical
agenda. Economic history of the period preceding the twentieth century focused on the role of
trade in the maintenance of state power. Throughout history, Ethiopian rulers have had a keen
interest in trade. The ancient Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum, for example, derived its power from
commerce in the Red Sea region along with the exploitation of local agricultural production.
From King Yekuno-Amlak (r.1270-1285) to Menilek II (r.1889-1913) many rulers tapped into
regional and local markets and some actively traded in their own right. Aksumite Ethiopia, which
flourished during the first six centuries of the Common Era, minted coins showing the
importance of commerce for the state.3 The expansion of the Ethiopian kingdom into new
territories later in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was repeatedly impelled by the desire to
control trade. Yet after the fall of the kingdom of Aksum in the eighth century, the country
lacked its own medium of exchange. For much of its history Ethiopia primarily used bullion and
salt bars as medium of exchange. From the late eighteenth onward into the twentieth century, the
country relied on a foreign currency, the Austrian silver coin, the Maria Theresa thalers. 4 The
Ethiopian state became progressively dependent on local agricultural production and
landownership in the period after the fall of Aksum.
The historiography of the eighteenth and that of the first half of nineteenth centuries is
sparse, to put it mildly. Strangely, the sources that survived from this period are dense, varied

2 Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270-1527 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); and Merid Wolde-
Aregay, ―Southern Ethiopia and the Christian Kingdom, 1508-1708, With Special Reference to the Galla Migrations
and their Consequences‖ (Ph.D. diss., University of London).
3 Richard Pankhurst, An Introduction to the Economic History of Ethiopia from early times to 1800 (London:
Lalibela House, 1961), pp.16-41; idem, Economic History of Ethiopia (Addis Ababa: Haile-Selassie I University
Press, 1968); and Taddesse, Church and State, pp.13-18 and 21-22.
4 Donald Crummey, Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth
Century (Urbana: University of Illinois, 200), p.5.
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