Haile Selassie

Haile Selassie was the last emperor of Ethiopia’s Solomonic dynasty, crowned in 1930 after taking the throne as Ras Tafari. His rule ended in the 1974 revolution, but the change of regime did not break decisively with the extractive order he presided over. Instead, the Derg’s appropriation of his palace and throne became an emblem of how revolutionary leaders could inherit and reproduce the institutions they had promised to overturn.

Emperor and political order

Haile Selassie ruled an absolutist empire in which economic and political institutions concentrated power and privilege. The account describes emperors and nobles as beneficiaries of an extractive system that impoverished much of the population. Its central argument is institutional: when political power is concentrated and weakly constrained, those who control it can shape economic rules to draw resources toward themselves. Economic wealth, in turn, strengthens their political dominance, making the arrangement difficult to dislodge.

The book places this structure in Ethiopia’s longer history. Feudal institutions that developed after the decline of Aksum, and the extractive economic arrangements of the empire, survived into the twentieth century. In the book’s account, absolutism was not merely a feature of Selassie’s personal rule: it helped sustain an institutional order that failed to take advantage of nineteenth-century industrialization and left the mass of Ethiopians poor. The contrast with England is used to underline the consequences of different political institutions, rather than to suggest that prosperity followed simply from better advice or more informed rulers.

The court and the palace

The Grand Palace built by Emperor Menelik II in the late nineteenth century supplied a setting for the visible rituals of Selassie’s authority. He began his day by arriving in its courtyard, where dignitaries gathered, bowed, and sought his attention. He then held court in the Audience Hall, seated on the imperial throne. The formal scene conveyed a political order organized around proximity to the emperor and access to his favor.

A small but telling detail sharpens the image of the court. Selassie was short, and a pillow bearer accompanied him to ensure that a suitable pillow could be placed beneath his feet when he sat on the throne. The bearer maintained a stock of fifty-two pillows for different situations. The account presents this not as an isolated curiosity, but alongside the description of a ruler who treated the country as personal property, distributed patronage, and punished disloyalty. The court’s minutiae and the state’s political structure belong to the same portrait of authority centered on the ruler.

Overthrow and the Derg

The Derg, a group of Marxist army officers, overthrew Selassie in a coup in 1974. Its origins were collective: it initially consisted of 108 representatives from military units across the country. Among them was Major Mengistu Haile Mariam, representing the Third Division in Harar province. On July 4, 1974, the officers declared loyalty to the emperor. They then began arresting government officials, testing the strength of opposition, and, once they judged Selassie’s support to be hollow, arrested him on September 12.

Executions of figures from the old regime followed. By December, the Derg had declared Ethiopia a socialist state; in 1975 it began nationalizing urban and rural land and most forms of private property. Selassie died on August 27, 1975, probably murdered. The account’s sequence shows a rapid transfer of power, but not a transition to pluralistic political institutions: the new government concentrated authority and became increasingly authoritarian. Opposition emerged in Eritrea and Tigray, while the Somali army invaded the Somali-speaking Ogaden. The Derg fractured into factions, and Mengistu eliminated his major rivals by mid-1977, becoming its effective leader. A large influx of Soviet and Cuban weapons and troops later that year helped keep the regime from collapse.

The old throne under new rule

In 1978, the Derg marked the fourth anniversary of Selassie’s overthrow with a national celebration. Mengistu, by then the regime’s unchallenged leader, had chosen Selassie’s former Grand Palace as his residence. At the celebration he watched the parade from a gilded armchair; official functions were again held in the palace, where he sat on the emperor’s old throne. He also began comparing himself to Emperor Tewodros, who had refounded the Solomonic Dynasty in the nineteenth century.

The setting turned the revolution’s claims of rupture into a pointed reversal. In the early days of the regime, its members rejected symbols of the former order: cars and suits were shunned, and even neckties were treated as signs of bourgeois life. By around 1978, as one of Mengistu’s ministers recalled, senior officials had come to embrace luxury, including designer clothes, fine homes, cars, food, and drink. The shift from rejection to privilege accompanied the return to the imperial palace and throne. The new rulers had displaced the emperor, but the forms and benefits of concentrated authority were reappearing around them.

Legacy and institutional continuity

The book describes Selassie as presiding over extractive institutions and a country with little economic development. The Derg abolished older arrangements after the 1974 revolution, but nationalization and a socialist declaration did not, by themselves, establish political constraints or broadly shared power. The narrative therefore treats the revolution as a change in rulers and official ideology whose deeper institutional consequences were more limited.

The contrast between Selassie’s relative indifference to famine and Mengistu’s use of famine as a political tool makes the change especially stark. A famine in Wollo province in 1973, to which Selassie was apparently indifferent, helped solidify opposition to his rule. Under Mengistu, the account says, famine was used to weaken opponents. It calls the resulting repetition both tragic and cruel: the later regime did not simply restore the monarchy, but reproduced aspects of its extractive political order under a new leadership, while imposing further suffering. Ethiopia’s continuing poverty is linked to the persistence of absolutism and the missed opportunities for industrialization, not to an absence of sound economic advice alone.