Refashioning the Ethiopian monarchy in the twentieth century: An intellectual history

Marzagora, Sara

Abstract

This article traces the shift in the Ethiopian monarchical ideology from lineage as symbolic Christian filiation to dynasty as a political genealogy of sovereign power. From the end of the nineteenth century, and more prominently under Haylä Səllase, Ethiopian state sources started qualifying the Ethiopian ruling dynasty as ‘unbroken’ in history. A record of ‘uninterrupted’ power allowed the Ethiopian government to politically appropriate past glories and claim them as ‘ours’, thus compensating for the political weakness of the present with the political greatness of the past. The ideological rebranding of the Ethiopian monarchy in the 1930s brought Ethiopia closer to Japan, and the ‘eternalist clause’ of the Meiji constitution offered a powerful model of how to recodify dynasty in modern legal terms. An intellectual history of dynasty in the Ethiopian context sees the concept simultaneously associated with both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic political projects. The narratives of continuity enabled by the dynastisation of history were successful in invigorating the pro-Ethiopian front during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1936-1941), but served at the same time to reinforce domestic mechanisms of class, political and cultural domination.

Citation

Marzagora, S. (2022). Refashioning the Ethiopian monarchy in the twentieth century: An intellectual history. Global Intellectual History, 7(3), 533-557. https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2020.1796237

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 10, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Jul 29, 2020
• Publication Date: Jul 1, 2022
• Deposit Date: May 20, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: May 20, 2019
• Journal: Global Intellectual History
• Print ISSN: 2380-1883
• Electronic ISSN: 2380-1891
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis Group
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 533-557
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2020.1796237
• Keywords: dynastic nationalism, Ethiopian history, Ethiopian nationalism, Ethiopian monarchy, Solomonic dynasty, Solomonic myth
• Publisher URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23801883.2020.1796237