In modern times, Ethiopia has suffered three grievous famines, two of which-in 1973-74 and in 1984-85-caught the world's attention. It is often assumed that population increase drove Ethiopia's farmers to overexploit their environment and thus undermine the future of their own livelihoods, part of a larger global process of deforestation. In Farming and Famine, Donald E. Crummey explores and refutes these claims based on his research in Wallo province, an epicenter of both famines. Crummey draws on photographs comparing identical landscapes in 1937 and 1997 as well as interviews with local farmers, among other sources. He reveals that forestation actually increased due to farmers' tree-planting initiatives. More broadly, he shows that, in the face of growing environmental stress, Ethiopian farmers have innovated and adapted. Yet the threat of famine remains because of constricted access to resources and erratic rainfall. To avoid future famines, Crummey suggests, Ethiopia's farmers must transform agricultural productivity, but they cannot achieve that on their own.

A study of gult from the 13th century to 1910 revealing much about the history of highland Christian Ethiopia. Gult, a system of land tenure encompassing both taxation and tribute, is unique to highland Ethiopia. It was through this that Ethiopian states and their rulers affected the lives of ordinary people. US, Canada & rest of world (exc. UK, Commonwealth & Europe) : University of Illinois Press Ethiopia: Addis Ababa University Press

Marks a new stage in African resistance studies. Previous work has tended to place the subject of resistance studies exclusively within an anticolonial context. This collection broadens the concept to include crime and violence.

This work outlines the importance of local knowledge for understanding environmental change. African farmers and herders modify landscapes in far more subtle and unexpected ways than commonly depicted in environment and development debates. This interdisciplinary collection uses collaborative research from the major savanna regions which stretch across Africa to make its case, and covers topics such as land users and landscapes, pastoral ecologies and policy, producers and resources. Environmental thinking about Africa is dominated by narratives of degradation and chaos. The contributors demonstrate that the empirical foundations of such long-held views are shaky at best.

Priests and Politicians was a contribution to a growing literature on Christian missions in Africa. It covered an early phase of nineteenth century activities in a part of the continent, which is still poorly represented in Africanists scholarship. The study rests upon an extensive use of English, French, Swiss and Italian archives. The main thematic emphasis is political inter-action: the central role of missionaries in the genesis of modern Afro-European relations and the apparent motives of Ethiopian leaders in dealing with representatives of an alien society. A variety of missionary strategies is revealed and discussed with particular reference to two areas: attitudes towards the Ethiopian Orthodox Church; and the degree to which missions identified Christianity with European culture. In the process, it casts significant new light on internal Ethiopian developments. * * * "Donald Crummey's Priests and Politicians is a valuable study of the interaction between religion and politics in Ethiopia's renewed contacts with Europe during the nineteenth century. .Ethiopian history is rich in raw material, but it has been very poor in good and standard interpretative works. The value of this book is that it is one of the first to fill in this gap. While Crummey's special concern has been with Ethiopia, he also brings to light the distinctive methods used by protestant and catholic] mission groups in the unique political and religious milieu of Ethiopia. This makes the book a significant addition to the comparative study of Christian missions in Africa in general." Tadesse Tamrat, author of Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270-1527 "The pioneering monograph on nineteenth-century Protestant andCatholic missions in Ethiopia, Priests and Politicians also still affords the most valuable entree that we have into the different positions within Ethiopian Christian theology. While religiously attuned, the author's perspective is explicitly multi-dimensional. Employing a copious range of rare archival sources, Crummey's book depicts insightfully some fascinating lineaments of Ethiopian political history as well as the heroisms and follies of certain European personalities." Donald Levine, author of Greater Ethiopia and Wax and Gold "Priests and Politicians is a model of tight, succinct, reasoned historical scholarship. It is a penetrating study of the role of European missions in the officially Orthodox Christian imperial provinces of Ethiopia. It is a most useful addition in filling an important place in the field of religious history to which only few made significant contribution." Carnelius J. Jaenen, Department of History, University of Ottawa