# Menelik II **Sahle Maryam (17 August 1844 – 12 December 1913)**, King of Shewa from 1866 and Emperor of Ethiopia from his coronation at Mount Entoto on **3 November 1889**. He is the emperor who kept Ethiopia off the colonial map at the [[Battle of Adwa]] and, in the same decades, roughly doubled the territory of the Ethiopian state by conquering the peoples of the south, west and east. Both facts are true, they were produced by the same army, and Ethiopian politics has been arguing about their relationship ever since. ## The modernising state Menelik built the machinery of a centralised state at speed: a **postal system (1893)** and Universal Postal Union membership (1896); the **Menelik thaler** from 1894 and the **Bank of Abyssinia** in March 1905; the **Djibouti railway**, begun 1897; a **smallpox vaccination campaign in 1898** and the Menelik II Hospital in 1910; the **first public school in 1906**; a **Cabinet of Ministers** established 25 October 1907; judicial reorganisation in 1908. **Addis Ababa** was founded around the hot springs at Finfinne — the site formally established in 1886, with **Empress Taytu Betul**'s house built there in 1887 and giving the city its name ("new flower"). Menelik expanded that house into the imperial palace in 1889; it is still the seat of government. ## The southern conquests Between the early 1880s and about 1904, Shewan armies incorporated the **Arsi Oromo**, **Welega**, **Gurage**, **Hadiya**, the **Kingdom of Wolaita**, the **Kingdom of Kaffa**, the **Emirate of Harar** and Somali territories in the **Ogaden**. Dated engagements include **Embabo (1882)**, **Azule (September 1886)**, **Chelenqo (1887)**, **Jebdu Meda (1888)** and **Jigjiga (1900)**. Conquered land in the south was distributed as *gult* — grants of the right to tax and govern cultivators — to loyalists and clergy, converting free cultivators into *gabar* tenants. That tenure structure is the direct ancestor of the land question that destroyed the monarchy eighty years later; see [[Haile Selassie]]. > [!warning] The casualty claims here are contested, politically loaded, and evidentially weak > Frequently cited estimates include Martial de Salviac's claim that the Oromo population fell from **~10 million in 1870 to 5 million in 1900**, Alexander Bulatovich's eyewitness assertion that Menelik's armies "annihilated more than half," and Eshete Gemeda's figure of up to **6 million** deaths. **None of these rest on a census** — Ethiopia's first was in 1924 — and the higher totals often silently absorb the mortality of the **Great Ethiopian Famine of 1888–92**, a rinderpest catastrophe with causes independent of the conquests. Carry the range and the method; do not publish a midpoint. ## The interpretive dispute - **The colonisation-and-genocide reading.** Mohammed Hassen ("Genocidal Conquest, Plunder of Resources and Dehumanization") and Mekuria Bulcha ("Genocidal Violence in the Making of Nation and State") argue the southern campaigns were colonial conquest in every respect but the conquerors' skin colour. Richard Reid: Menelik's empire was "as brutally violent... as European colonial projects." - **The comparative reading.** *Encyclopaedia Aethiopica* holds that Menelik "did no more than other empire-builders of his era" while conceding the empire "proved in some respects to be deeply flawed." This is not a settled historical debate that spilled into politics; it *is* politics. Ethiopian nationalists hold Menelik as founder of the modern state and defender of African independence. Oromo nationalists hold the conquests as colonisation, with Ras Gobana as the archetypal collaborator. The [[Tigray People's Liberation Front]]'s founding manifesto characterised centralised empire formation as "the beginning of national oppression" — which is the intellectual root of the ethnic-federalist constitution of 1995. Statues, street names and the anniversary of Adwa are all live flashpoints. ## Why he matters here **Anti-colonial and imperial at once.** Menelik is the standing rebuttal to the assumption that resistance to European empire implies a different kind of politics at home. He beat the Scramble by playing it — buying modern rifles from the same European powers, expanding into a neighbouring buffer zone, and arriving at Adwa with an army the Italians had helped equip. **The category "victim of empire" and the category "builder of empire" are not mutually exclusive, and treating them as such is how most bad arguments about this period get started.** ## See also [[Ethiopian History Hub]] · [[Battle of Adwa]] · [[Treaty of Wuchale]] · [[Haile Selassie]] · [[Tigray People's Liberation Front]]