Medieval Ethiopian Economies: Subsistence, Global Trade and the Administration of Wealth

Anaïs Wion (1)

1 IMAF - Institut des Mondes Africains

The medieval Ethiopian economy is another challenging subject to treat, for different reasons. Ethiopian economic history is not a new subject: Richard Pankhurst pioneered such work in the 1950s, with a focus on modern Ethiopia, and Donald Crummey did groundbreaking work, for the early modern period, in the 1980s and 1990s. But economic research specifically on the medieval period has developed very little. This chapter is therefore a first, albeit in what would seem to be a “traditional” field. Drawing methodologically and for relevant data on studies dealing with earlier and later periods, highlighting the economic aspects of scholarship on the medieval period, and mining primary sources where studies lack, it provides a synthetic picture of agriculture and animal husbandry as well as trade that encompasses, to the extent possible, Christian, Muslim, and local-religious societies in the variety of their ecological settings.

Mots clés: Ethiopia; Economic History

Mots clés: Éthiopie -- Histoire; Histoire économique

Domaines: Histoire

Anaïs Wion. Medieval Ethiopian Economies: Subsistence, Global Trade and the Administration of Wealth. Samantha Kelly. A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, Brill, 2020, 978-90-04-41943-8. ⟨10.1163/9789004419582⟩. ⟨halshs-02422958⟩