Preface 
History is made once but interpreted many times and from many perspectives. Those who make it have little opportunity to write it, and they do not need to interpret it. History is exposed to historical interpretations once those who made it are gone. All history, as we study it today, is a historical interpretation. No two interpretations could be the same, even if done by the same body. This work is one form of historical understanding of the making of modern Ethiopia.

I am not a historian by formal training. Please make no mistake; I am not writing the history of modern Ethiopia in the conventional sense. What I am writing here is my understanding and interpretation. My primary focus is on how modern Ethiopia was built from multinational polities in the second half of the 19th century. Even then, it cannot be the whole story. It is limited in scope and constrained by circumstances. It is a synopsis from an interested reader’s note in the emerging tradition on the formation of modern Ethiopia, known as the “colonial thesis.” The thesis claims that modern Ethiopia resulted from settler colonial expansion of the Kingdom of Abyssinia, where it extended its dominion over the territories that constituted about three-fourths of the contemporary state by force. Yet, it is not a historical dissertation on the colonial thesis. It is an interpretation summarising the historical progression from the proto-Aksumite period before the common era to the present Ethiopian Federation.

The synopsis could be controversial and provocative. In as much as the official History of modern Ethiopia is controversial and in as much as historians have been divided both on the unification thesis and the colonial thesis on the formation of modern Ethiopia, this synopsis could be controversial and divided opinions are expected. It could even provoke a counter-interpretation, which I will be pleased to welcome.

Deribie Mekonnen Demmeksa
19 April 2019
Horten, Norway