`We saw last week that the British Government, after several years’ inaction, had agreed to Emperor Tewodros’s request to obtain craftsmen for him, but that his renewed detention of the Europeans at his court had led, in the autumn of 1866, to a hardening of the British attitude. The Emperor’s attempt to pressurise the British Government by imprisoning its functionaries, though up to then surprisingly successful, had miscarried. British policy was now reversed. Rassam’s imprisonment, wrote Merewether on 25 September,…

We saw last week how Emperor Tewodros, recalling the treaty which Britain had signed with his predecessor, Ras Ali, wrote to Queen Victoria, on 29 October 1862. The British Government, apparently not wishing to become embroiled in Ethiopia’s relations with the Ottoman Empire, however, filed his letter, with the result that no reply of course arrived. A Letter Unanswered As time passed and his letter remained unanswered, Tewodros, whose pride in his royal status had earlier been noted by Consul…

We saw last week that Tewodros, from the very inception of his reign, sought the military unification of the Ethiopian empire. Being, as we saw, in a difficult position to import fire-arms, he soon conceived the ambitious plan of having them cast in Ethiopia itself. With a view to improving his military equipment he accepted an offer by Samuel Gobat, the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, in 1855 to send him a group of young craftsmen from the Chrischona missionary institute…

The rise of Kasa, the future Emperor Tewodros II, marked the opening of a new, and, in the light of later events, crucially important, era of Ethiopian history. Most of his attempted reforms were never achieved, but nonetheless charted the course taken in the decades which followed. Kasa, who was born around 1818, was the son of a chief of Qwara on the western frontier. A distant member of the royal family (rather than a self-made man, as some authorities…