Ploughing New Ground by Getnet Bekele explores long-term changes and transformations in agricultural production and the environment in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ethiopia. It investigates the complex ways in which social, economic, political, and climatic factors intersected with each other to bring about these transformations. In its regional purview, Bekele's study focuses on the lake region of Ethiopia, especially the districts around the modern towns of Debre Zeit, Awasa, Nazareth, and Buta Jera. In its analytical frame, Bekele considers issues of food, farming, and landscape change. Bekele has found a remarkable way to combine the seemingly entirely worked-over subfield of agrarian history with new approaches of analysis pioneered by economic and human geographers. In Bekele's account, the concept of ‘spatiality’ becomes a particularly revealing lens through which to view contestations over ideas about land and its resources in modern Ethiopia.
Bekele's book is remarkable for its boldly revisionist approach, which sheds light on several important historiographic issues. Bekele offers an important corrective to histories of Ethiopian agriculture and environment that have omitted meaningful discussions of food production, distribution, and consumption. While there has been considerable scholarship on agriculture and environmental change, these studies have focused almost exclusively on export-oriented cash crop production, food shortages, and the causes of famines. Bekele's work, by contrast, redirects our attention to the deep political implications of food and farming. Food production inflected Ethiopian politics and policies from the time the city of Addis Ababa was founded and occupied, starting with Emperor Menilek II (r.1889–1913) and continuing through the present. Indeed, Bekele's most important contribution lies in identifying and analyzing how farming and food served as a central framework of state policy for most of the modern era. While cash crop production and exports have grown in importance since the late nineteenth century, Bekele notes that grain accounted for the largest percentage of Ethiopia's export earnings until at least the 1950s (Introduction, Chapter Three).
Bekele proves that the agricultural sector adapted to new conditions more easily and rapidly than historians have generally realized. The existing scholarship still tends to present Ethiopian farmers as passive, distrustful, and fearful of change. Bekele shows that this interpretation is a historiographical myth. Bekele recognizes the agency of farmers in the modern era, and shows how they act as active participants in this period's events and developments. The farmers’ efforts to adjust production outputs, adopt new technologies in line with their economic interests, and make other strategic decisions highlight this point nicely. Other examples also reveal this dynamic. Farmers manipulated state laws and policies affecting the terms of access to land and land use to their own advantage, and utilized legal and other means to stake their claims to various spaces. Courts offered a venue for farmers to contest new terms of land ownership that the state imposed upon them, and farmers successfully adopted new crops and they furthermore exhibited a remarkable sensitivity to market fluctuations. As such, Bekele shows us that twentieth century transformations in agricultural production in the lake region of Ethiopia emerged as much from the experiences and actions of ordinary farmers as they did from state intervention and policies, or from changes in the local environment (Chapters One through Five).
Bekele's study also recognizes the critical role of livestock production in the agrarian history of Ethiopia. Intriguingly, Bekele shows that the lake region of Ethiopia, which is more well-known for crop cultivation, also supplied the domestic and international market with livestock and livestock products. Despite the rapid expansion of food crop cultivation, people continued to raise livestock in the lake region. In fact, as Bekele shows, a close analysis of the relevant sources reveals the ‘co-existence and coevolution’ of livestock production and crop cultivation (177). Bekele thus recovers an underexplored dimension within Ethiopian agrarian and environmental history. No other scholar, as far as I know, has illuminated the dynamic relationship of livestock production to agrarian and landscape change in this area (Chapter One).
From Bekele's study, it is evident that the political economy of food production in the modern era was far from capitalist. The agricultural crops that supplied the domestic and international market were grown and procured through networks of small-scale farmers. Bekele also makes an intriguing, and to my mind quite convincing, argument that state-sponsored land grants to individuals did not facilitate capitalist agricultural production, but rather fostered the development of small-scale farms and rent-seeking behavior. At the same time, however, Bekele finds that in the 1960s and 1970s, new, bold, commercial farming did make inroads to the region. Three factors drove this change. First, the demand for agricultural commodities grew. Second, commercially viable and underdeveloped agricultural land under state ownership was readily available for use by farmers. Finally, the influx of capital — both national and international — into rural Ethiopia helped to finance these commercial farms. These combined factors, Bekele argues, pushed commercial companies and private individuals to develop large-scale farms in the last decade of the imperial regime (Chapter Six).
To be sure, the book has some errors and left some topics and issues underdeveloped. How representative is the lake region of larger patterns of Ethiopian agrarian development and long-term landscape change in the modern era? How was the market for livestock and livestock products organized? And I presume that there is much more that could be said about the particularities of agricultural production on church domains, such as in the Debre Zeit and Nazareth areas. To document long-term changes in agriculture and environment and the ordinary and extraordinary contours of farmers’ experiences, Bekele uses archival research and informant interviews coupled with travel records. Yet, his use of oral histories is a partial success at best. The book draws very heavily on written evidence and the oral accounts are presented as useful correctives of official, written sources, and as reflections of local perspectives, but not so much as fundamental sources of information and insight in their own right. Bekele neither quotes oral informants nor does he directly discuss their perspectives as much as he could. Strangely, court records, which could have enabled Bekele to hear the voices of ordinary people and their lives into the narrative of the book, were not consulted.
The bibliography contains some errors. Bekele has misattributed my book Lord, Zèga and Peasant (2004) to a person called Habtamu Wondimu. Tekalign Wolde Mariam's unpublished doctoral dissertation is listed under published sources. These irritants, however, do not detract from the great value of the text itself. Bekele's book combines rigor, imagination, and critical sophistication in a very admirable way. The wide range of issues and historical literatures that Bekele engages is impressive; his book will be of interest to scholars in many fields.
