Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia: From the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century FROM THE PUBLISHER
Donald Crummey's monumental work is the first extended history of Ethiopia to focus on the system of taxation and tribute, called gult, that underpinned the region's social and political structure for some six centuries.
By making imaginative use of previously overlooked records, particularlyproperty documents that were written in the margins and fly leaves of Ethiopian manuscripts, Crummey provides new insight into how ordinary farming and herding folk were incorporated into and affected by the institutions that ruled them. The persistence over six centuries of a continuing pattern of social inequality, Crummey concludes, can only be explained by the social character of gult as a foundation of enduring relations between thetribute payer and the tribute receiver.
About the Author:
Donald Crummey, a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the author of Priests and Politicians: Protestant and Catholic Missions in Orthodox Ethiopia.
FROM THE CRITICS
Christopher Clapham - The Times Literary Supplement
This book is a rare event in modern academic publishing, the culmination of a lifetime's scholarship.... Crummey shows how statehood, religion and land rights... defined the relations between production and authority in highland Ethiopia over a period of some seven centuries. This is a book for which to be grateful.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
This is one of the most important works to have been written in recent years on the political and social history of Ethiopia. It is based on a rich corpus of documentary material and it demonstrates a masterful handling of the pertinent Ethiopianist as well as general African scholarship. With the publication of this work, Ethiopianist historiography has made one major step forward. — (Bahru Zewde, author of A Modern History of Ethiopia)
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