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. ii 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 iii 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 iv 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 v 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. vi Contents Chapter One: Introduction .............................................................................................................. 2 Chapter Two: Rim and Zéga: Antecedents and Early Developments .........................................