Capital of the imperial borderlands: urbanism, markets, and power on the Ethiopia-British Somaliland boundary, ca. 1890–1935

Abstract

This article analyzes contests among Ethiopian and British imperial agents and their ostensible Somali (and other Muslim) subjects for control over commerce in the Ethiopia-British Somaliland borderlands. British claims of sovereignty over Somalis and other Muslim merchants operating in Ethiopia created a field of hybrid commercial control in which neither Britons nor Ethiopians held complete dominance. Competition to capture borderlands commerce focused on Jigjiga town as a site where Ethiopian rule and British-backed trade mixed. Amidst crises of warfare and famine in the countryside and the growth of a cash economy shaped by this imperial conjuncture, Jigjiga grew in importance as a site of accumulation and (especially for Somalis) of cultural transformations in understandings of commerce and its relation to political authority. Hybrid commercial sovereignty tended to separate the military-administrative authority of the empires on either side of the border from the Muslim-dominated field of trans-border commercial control, shaping links between ethno-religious identity and fields of power.