Between the 1870s and 1900 Menelik II, first as king of Shewa and from 1889 as emperor, conquered the Oromo, Gurage, Wolayta, Sidama, Kafficho, Konso and Somali lands to the south, west and east, roughly doubling the territory of the Ethiopian state and fixing the borders of modern Ethiopia in negotiations with the European colonial powers. Conquered populations were placed under the gabbar system, in which they owed labour, produce and tribute to naftanya soldier-settlers granted rights over their land, and slave-taking and slave trading, though formally restricted by Menelik's edicts, continued on a large scale. Contemporary European observers, including the Russian officer Alexander Bulatovich, described very heavy population loss in the conquered south, and Oromo nationalist historians have argued that the campaigns killed or displaced a large share of the southern peoples; Ethiopian historians such as Bahru Zewde treat the period primarily as state formation comparable to other nineteenth-century expansions and regard the highest claims as unsupportable. The campaigns coincided with the Great Ethiopian Famine of 1888-92, caused by a rinderpest panzootic that destroyed the cattle herds, which independently killed an estimated third of the population of the north. The historical assessment of Menelik's conquests remains one of the most contested questions in Ethiopian politics.
The Shewan and then Ethiopian imperial armies of Menelik II conquered the Oromo, Sidama, Kafficho, Wolayta and other southern polities and imposed tribute, land alienation and servile labour
There was no census in Ethiopia before 1984. McEvedy and Jones put the whole Ethiopian region at roughly 11 million around 1900. Claims that the conquests of 1880-1900 killed or destroyed half the population of the south rest chiefly on the Russian officer Alexander Bulatovich's contemporary impression, repeated in Oromo nationalist historiography; other historians regard the figure as unsupportable. The gabbar system that followed tied conquered cultivators to naftanya settlers across Wollega, Arsi, Sidama, Kaffa and Wolayta, but its extent is documented in land grants rather than in population counts.
No defensible range. Claims that the conquests killed millions come from Oromo nationalist historiography extrapolating from Bulatovich's contemporary impression that the population of the conquered lands had halved; Ethiopian and international historians regard this as unsupportable, and the concurrent rinderpest famine of 1888-92 makes attribution to the campaigns impossible.
Ethiopian imperial administrative practice and contemporary European accounts document the gabbar system of compulsory labour and tribute owed by conquered populations to soldier-settlers.
Ethiopia