ABSTRACT
Colonialism in Africa is somewhat automatically related to the European domination that was marked by the Scramble for Africa. At the end of the nineteenth century, almost the whole continent was divided between European powers such as Great Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Belgium. This chapter focuses on the so-called colonial discourse in regard to modern history of Ethiopia and shows how this discourse changes and perhaps complicates our understanding of the Ethiopian past. It also shows how the past is influencing the present in academic debates over the Ethiopian history. While the end of the nineteenth century was marked by enormous territorial expansion, the first decades of the twentieth century saw Ethiopia in the modernization period. The process of state-building and nation-building in Ethiopia has been characterized by different context and settings than in the rest of Africa influenced by European colonial rule.
