Ethiopia was twice wronged by the League of Nations. The first instance occurred in 1922-23, when the League nearly rejected its application for membership and considered the imposition of a Mandate upon it. The second occurred in 1935-1936, when the League’s response to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia revealed the limits of the internationalist principle of collective security. The second of these crises is the focus of the present work, which is a significant and welcome contribution to the scholarship on Italo-Ethiopian relations and the League. Integrating impressive archival research with a wide range of specialist literatures, it offers a series of new perspectives on the international diplomacy connected to the crisis. Despite a few shortcomings, it is a major contribution that ably rectifies the neglect of Ethiopia in Susan Pederson’s otherwise comprehensive recent study of imperial politics at the League.Footnote 1
The eleven contributors to the volume are mostly specialists in European and Commonwealth international history. Each of their chapters treats the crisis from a different national perspective. Bruce Strang contributes an introduction and two studies: the first of the latter examines the interlocking ideological motivations behind Italy’s Ethiopian ambitions, while the second considers the Roosevelt administration’s neutrality and sanctions policies towards Italy and the escalating Italian anxieties about these. Ian Spears surveys political developments in Ethiopia prior to and during the crisis, focusing on its evolving foreign relations. Gaynor Johnson examines instructive case of British academic and Labour MP Philip Noel-Baker, a liberal internationalist and advocate for a more substantive League response to the crisis, while Steven Morewood explores British strategic thinking on the question of intervention in the Italo-Ethiopian conflict. Martin Thomas offers a perceptive treatment of the French dilemma, considering whether French inaction emboldened Italy, its erstwhile continental ally, and exploring the transformation of French policy towards Africa. Francine McKenzie shows how the crisis gave Canada an opportunity to distinguish its foreign policy from Britain, while Neville Sloane considers the other Dominions’ relationship to British policy in the context of imperial solidarity. Geoffrey Waddington surveys the advantages Germany obtained from the crisis, which Ribbentrop termed “a gift from heaven” (210). Calvitt Clarke’s two chapters, among the most interesting in the volume, look further afield. The first, building upon the author’s most recent book, treats Japanese-Ethiopian relations in the era of the crisis, which saw Japanese nationalist rhetoric celebrating Afro-Asian fraternity yielding to the realpolitik desire for increased Italian ties. His second chapter offers a nuanced treatment of the evolution of Soviet policy towards Italy and Ethiopia, which similarly trumpeted anticolonial solidarity while undermining Ethiopian sovereignty. Nicholas Virtue explores the precarious position of the Vatican and its internal debates about pacifism, neutrality, and relations with the Italian government, and Remco van Diepen outlines the role of Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian states.
As this synopsis suggests, the scope of the collection is impressive. The value of the individual contributions is partially due to the fact that they rest upon expertly-mined archival materials: the breadth of the latter is remarkable, as the editor notes, and for this reason the references in the present work will be an invaluable guide for future researchers. The archive of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is used especially well. No less valuable are the many novel, revisionist, and thought-provoking interpretations advanced by the contributors. Johnson uses Noel-Baker’s activities to provide a useful corrective to the notion that League failure was inevitable, highlighting a countervailing idealist voice. Morewood engages in a provocative counter-factual exercise to suggest that Britain could have easily triumphed in a military intervention on Ethiopia’s behalf, at the cost of hastening the formation of the Axis partnership. Thomas identifies the crisis as a turning point in terms of Africa’s impact on the international system: before the crisis, it was a colonized region subordinated to the strategic needs of metropolitan defence; during and after, it became—once again—an arena of potential conflict for its European colonizers, would-be and actual. A recurring theme is the disjuncture between the bold official rhetoric of sovereignty and the more complex and ambivalent diplomatic calculations, especially in the chapters on Japan, the Soviet Union, and the Vatican. Useful historiographical overviews accompany many of the chapters and contextualize the debates and contributions at hand.
The chief weakness of this volume is that it does not adequately present the Ethiopian perspective on its subject. The chapter on Ethiopia by Spears offers a survey of political developments, but it is constrained by its reliance on Emperor Ḫaylä Śellasé’s autobiography, foreign newspapers, and European travel narratives as primary sources. This is unfortunate given the breadth of the available Ethiopian sources related to the League conflict. These include local newspapers such as Berhanenna sälam and A’emro, which detailed the unfolding crisis and offered editorial and official commentary upon it, as well as autobiographies by key figures, such as Täklä Ḥawaryat Täklä Maryam, the Minister of Finance turned League representative, Aklilu Habtäwäld, the League delegation secretary, and Emmanuel Abraham, the secretary of the Ethiopian Legation in London. An analysis based on these sources and others like them would have greatly enhanced the collection by offering a nuanced look at the impact of the crisis on Ethiopian diplomacy and civil society in the period, which was characterized by heightened political advocacy and engagement at home and abroad. It was in this respect typical of the era.
An additional issue is the numerous minor orthographic and factual errors connected to Ethiopian topics. But such mistakes are perhaps to be expected in a work of this kind, in which a historical subject of international scope requires its analysts to transgress the boundaries of specialist fields and subfields.
Ultimately, this is an important contribution that will be of considerable interest to specialists in Italo-Ethiopian relations, international history, the history of the League, and Africa-related diplomacy at the apex of empire.
