The Shewan Fiscal-Territorial State

Abstract

As the two restorationist emperors, Tewodros II and Yohannes IV, reached the limits of what can be done to reclaim the supreme authority of the post-Gondarine Crown, the regional kings of Shewa and Gojam, with ambitions to claim the emperorship, launched aggressive territorial expansions in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. By 1900, the central province of Shewa won the competition to become the seat of a much larger Ethiopian state under a remarkably restorationist Emperor Menelik II.