SERFS, SLAVES AND SHEFTA: MODES OF PRODUCTION IN SOUTHERN ETHIOPIA FROM THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO 1941 (AFRICA)

This thesis focuses on the interaction of land, state and society in southern Ethiopia between the 1870s and 1941. This period was crucial in the political and economic history of the region because the period after 1870 witnessed the southward expansion of the Ethiopian state under Emperor Menilek and the conquest in the southwest of centralised states and in the south and southeast of diverse acephalous societies. In the wake of conquest the Ethiopian state expropriated the land of southern indigenes and redistributed it among a new settler elite. By the 1920s and 1930s the settler regime imposed on the south had itself evolved, initially to meet the needs of increased immigration from northern Ethiopia and later under the as yet limited impact of capital penetration, a process which accelerated after the Italians invaded in 1935.;Although several excellent regional studies of southern Ethiopia exist, few scholars have tried to draw together available data for analysis of social and economic structures in the region from broad thematic and theoretical perspectives. The thesis examines three specific themes: first, the utility of concepts of feudalism for analysis of southern Ethiopia; secondly, the question of Ethiopian slavery; and finally, the nature and characteristics of banditry in the south. Conceptually, the primary analytical tool is the notion of a mode of production, derived from concepts of historical materialism. Through application of these concepts the thesis characterises the social formation in southern Ethiopia after Manilek's conquests as feudal and also asserts that in southwest Ethiopia feudal societies existed prior to incorporation into the Ethiopian state. The thesis also identifies subordinate slave modes of production in the southwest before Ethiopian conquest and examines the correlation between changes in the institution of slavery and the volume of the slave trade on the one hand and changes in the predominant feudal production mode on the other. The final section demonstrates that increases in the incidence of banditry or sheftenat correspond to changes in classic modes of economic production.