Land tenure reform and socioeconomic structures in Dabra Marqos (Gojjam), Ethiopia : c1901-1974

Abstract

In this doctoral thesis I advance a new interpretation of the social and economic history of Ethiopia beginning with the turn of the twentieth century and ending with the third decade of that century. One of my achievements in this study is the careful utilization of property documents in the reconstruction of the modern social history of Ethiopia, more precisely Däbrä Marqos (Gojjam) in northwestern Ethiopia. Besides original use of property documents in my study, I have used new and less conventional genre of sources, viz., courtroom observation, images, biblical references, private documents, and old sayings. Combining these genre of sources and oral data helped me to provide a plausible story and advance a new interpretation of the property system and the socioeconomic and power relations arising from modern Däbrä Marqos (Gojjam). I emphasize the continued relevance of tax appropriation in contemporary Däbrä Marqos (Gojjam). This is to counter an adverse claim to tribute in kind and services as well as the resilience of old practices relating to land use, political power, exploitation, social domination, landholding and violence. All these served as the background to impede changes, in the course of progress of the imperial policy, mostly, between liberation in 1941 and revolution in 1974. As the main argument embedded in my study is that despite the attempt of the imperial state to figure out what the content of land tenure and surplus appropriation in Däbrä Marqos (Gojjam) was like, in actual fact what the effort produced was the people's multiple reaction. New measures relating to property reform which the imperial state tried to codify and fix failed to achieve stability and order, precipitated a revolution leading to the end of the imperial rule with broadly similar historical trajectory to what many scholars viewed on the subject.