The few existing works on Jigjiga town’s history have detailed regional political-economic change and documented Jigjiga’s growth and social transformation. In the twentieth century’s early decades, Ethiopian and British empire-building intersected in one town that was squarely in Ethiopian territory but became an administrative and trading center for both Ethiopian and British regimes, simultaneously. In the eastern borderlands such challenges were compounded by British efforts to extend their “informal empire” of trade inland from the British Somaliland Protectorate 2 – in part by claiming sovereignty over Somalis and other Muslim merchants in Ethiopia. 1 Ethiopian efforts to territorialize sovereignty faced resistance from (largely nomadic) Somalis and other peripheral populations. The region was soon a testing ground for state-building as the territorially fluid “Abyssinian Empire” (characterized by Amhara and Christian cultural dominance) became the Ethiopian empire, with its fixed cartography and territorially-defined subject population. Two very different imperial systems converged during the 1890s on the Somali-inhabited plains that became Ethiopia’s eastern borderlands. 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. 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. ![]() Competition to capture borderlands commerce focused on Jigjiga town as a site where Ethiopian rule and British-backed trade mixed. 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. ![]() 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.
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