Category: Intellectual history

By Yuval Givon

2022 marked the 300^th anniversary of the return of John Bell of Antermony (1691–1780) to Scotland after a four-year journey to China. As a physician of Scottish descent, Bell settled in Saint Petersburg and participated in a number of Russian delegations across Eurasia. Despite his remarkable career, Bell has received little attention in modern Sinology. However, in the eyes of his contemporaries, Bell was a celebrated writer. In 1763 he published a travelogue that became a bestseller, recounting his Eurasian voyages, especially the overland journey to China via Siberia that he had made in his youth as part of a Russian diplomatic embassy from 1719 to 1722, which had been led by the Russian general Lev Vasilievich Izmaylov (1685–1738). Tracing Bell’s account of China and his unique perspective as a British travel writer enables us to rethink the changing attitudes of Europeans towards China during the eighteenth century.

Although its political goals were only partially achieved, the Izmaylov embassy was well received at the court of the Kangxi emperor (1654–1722), which had allowed Bell to record a detailed firsthand account of Beijing and the Qing’s imperial court in his now-lost diaries. While he stayed in the city for some three months, Bell attended several audiences with the emperor and participated in the Chinese New Year celebrations, the imperial hunt, and many other events within the Forbidden City and beyond. After years of work in the service of tsar Peter the Great (1672–1725) and a short business career in Constantinople, Bell returned to his family estate in Milton of Campsie (see Fig. 1), Scotland, where he led a life of leisure and engaged mainly in philanthropic activities and the writing of his book. Bell had never intended to publish his memoirs. The book was born of gentlemen’s conversations during which Bell entertained his friends with engaging stories from his youth, as he recalls:

About four years ago, spending some days at the house of a Right Honorable, and most honored friend, the subject of my travels took up a great part of our conversation; during which, upon his enquiring occasionally, whether I had taken any notes of the places, &c. through which I had passed in my several journies, and, upon my answering in the affirmative, he was pleased to take some pains to engage me to promise that I would collect my notes and observations, and form them into journals, as complete as the time elapsed would admit, and communicate them to the world.

There is an interval of some forty years between Bell’s journey and the publication of his travel narrative, the Travels from St Petersburg in Russia to Diverse Parts of Asia (1763). This raises some questions in terms of factual accuracy, which could explain why the book has received little attention in modern Sinology. Although many of Bell’s descriptions are highly detailed and balanced (and therefore attest to the quality of his original notes), it is also clear that the narrative is influenced by Bell’s sentimental longing for China and the adventures he enjoyed in his youth. In spite of these limitations, I argue that Bell’s narrative is an essential historical source for the study of European writing about China in the eighteenth century.

The time gap between John Bell’s journey as a young man in 1719 and the publication of his travel narrative four decades later in 1763 opens a unique prism that allows us to rethink the change in European (and particularly British) attitudes toward China. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, a shift from admiration to disparagement occurred, which is referred to as the ‘Sinophilia/Sinophobia paradigm’ in modern scholarship. Simply put, Bell recorded his impressions during times of great intellectual appreciation of Chinese civilization, but his book was released into an environment which already became highly skeptical. British travel literature in particular, which eighteenth-century readers saw as both empirical and objective, cast China in the most negative manner, emphasizing the weakness, stasis, and immorality of its inhabitants.

The first signs of British skepticism towards China appeared already in the early decades of the eighteenth century. In the Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), whose novels were inspired by his career as a merchant, belittled the Chinese culture and economy by comparing them to Europe. He also dismissed the Great Wall – the eminent symbol of Chinese culture – as “this mighty nothing, called a wall.” His protagonist, Robinson Crusoe, describes the Chinese people as a “contemptible herd or crowd of ignorant, sordid slaves.” Although he never visited China in person, Defoe’s imagination “almost set the tone of the eighteenth-century English criticism of China,” as Qian Zhongshu notes.

Defoe’s negative depictions were reinforced by a growing number of eyewitness accounts of British travelers, who severely criticized China. They contradict the positive impressions that had been conveyed to Europe by Jesuit missionaries during the seventeenth century. Through these travelers’ accounts, the Chinese people were presented not only as less talented than the Europeans, but also as manipulative and deceitful. The editor of Commodore George Anson’s (1697–1762) widely-circulated travel account, A Voyage Round the World (1749), remarked that it was “endless to recount all the artifices, extortions and frauds which were practiced on the Commodore and his people, by this interested race.”

Besides reflecting the experience of individual British travelers, these voices disclose some of the profound transformations in British culture and the emergence of a new national sentiment in the middle of the eighteenth century. The rise of Britain as a global trade empire during the period mirrored its criticism of China’s refusal of commercial cooperation, as research has shown, while Britain’s early industrial growth raised debates about China’s technological inferiority. The shift in British attitudes towards China has therefore more to do with internal changes in British culture than with the objective situation in China. Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins and Robert Markley suggest that “the changing attitudes towards China after 1750 reflect a shift from Restoration and early eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism to Victorian orientalism.” In this new context, the rise of ‘progress’ as a fundamental ideal in the eighteenth century inspired a new view of China as stagnant and unwilling to collaborate with the rest of the world.

However, this new sentiment is all but missing in Bell’s Travels. Compared to the writing of Daniel Defoe and George Anson, Bell’s account is surprisingly positive. He provides a vivid and humane description of China as seen through the eyes of a young British gentleman. His writing displays a keen interest in nature, art, architecture, and technology. He has a personal eye for human encounters both at the imperial court and in everyday Beijing. Some of Bell’s impressions might seem optimistic, but they contrast remarkably with the xenophobic views of China by other British writers. Bell describes the Chinese, for instance, as “a civilized and hospitable people complaisant to strangers, and to one another; very regular in their manners and behaviour, and respectful to their superiors.” After passing through the Great Wall on his way to Beijing, Bell praised it – in contrast to Defoe – as a magnificent cultural achievement, which mirrors the virtues of the people who created it:

I am of opinion, that no nation in the world was able for such an undertaking, except the Chinese. For, though some other kingdom might have furnished a sufficient number of workmen, for such an enterprise, none but the ingenious, sober, and parsimonious Chinese could have preserved order amidst such multitudes, or patiently submitted to the hardships attending such a labour.

It is tempting to dismiss Bell as a textual fossil, who represents outdated concepts that did not reflect the British mainstream attitudes towards China during the later decades of the century. However, Bell’s account is too complex to be labeled a Sinophile text. Like other travelers he is skeptical of certain aspects of Chinese everyday life, such as religious beliefs and irrational explanations of natural phenomena, which he dismisses as superstitious and ludicrous, and, as he claims, “too absurd to be inserted” into his Travels.

Yet surprisingly, Bell’s positive account of China became popular among his contemporaries. The book was mentioned and praised by well-known intellectuals, such as the English historian Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), the politician George Thomas Staunton (1781–1859), and even Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790). Scottish biographer James Boswell (1740–1795) recalls that in a discussion about Russia and China, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) recommended he read Bell’s Travels. The list of subscribers at the beginning of Bell’s book also includes prominent scholars and writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, such as William Robertson (1721–1793), Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) and Adam Smith (1723–1790), who relied on Bell’s account in his Wealth of Nations (1776).

Despite its optimism towards China, Bell’s Travels became a bestseller in its time. This tells us something fundamental about its British readership and British views of China in the mid-eighteenth century. It reveals the inadequacy of the modern Sinophilia/Sinophobia dichotomy to represent the wide range of attitudes towards China during that era. Some aspects of Bell’s narrative were appealing to his contemporaries, who despite their skepticism towards China accepted his positive narrative. In conclusion, I will highlight two of these aspects: firstly, the fact that Bell’s Travels represent the first British eyewitness account of Beijing; and secondly, the unique perspective of Bell as a physician of the Russian embassy.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most European accounts of inland China were written by Catholic – primarily Jesuit – missionaries, since they were the only Europeans allowed into the Ming and later the Qing empire. The arrival of diplomatic delegations from Europe inspired a few accounts by authors other than Jesuits, but none of those were written by British eyewitnesses. With the rise of a self-assured and distinctive British national sentiment, Bell’s identity as a British author received new significance for his readers. For many of them, Bell’s national identity made his account more reliable. Indeed various readers used to refer to him as “honest John Bell.”

Throughout the book, Bell’s ‘Britishness’ is expressed in diverse ways that create a sense of familiarity for his readers. His measurements were taken in English miles, for instance, while his fascination with Rhubarb reflected the contemporary British obsession with the plant. His views of governance, religion, and court culture were rooted in British cultural values. When describing the Chinese practice of kowtowing before the emperor (see Fig. 2), Bell noted that “it seemed somewhat strange to a Briton, to see some thousands of people upon their knees, and bowing their heads to the ground, in most humble posture, to a mortal like themselves.”

British descriptions of China certainly existed before Bell’s Travels were published. However, they were usually written by merchants, who had been restricted to China’s coastline regions. The narratives of these writers, whose encounters with Chinese culture were mainly mediated through the framework of trade, differed substantially from Bell’s experiences in Beijing. As the Russian embassy’s physician, Bell’s experience was almost touristic. On the one hand, his position enabled him access to virtually all of the imperial audiences, banquets, and privileges, like the other “gentlemen of the embassy.” On the other hand, unlike most of these gentlemen, Bell did not have any political obligations during his stay in Beijing. This allowed him to spend time in recreational activities and explore the city at his leisure while recording “the details of daily life,” as Jonathan Spence argued (see Fig. 3).

Bell’s observations span from politics to technology, food, history, art, music, and family life. As a young man, he was captivated by Chinese women, whom he describes as having “many good qualities besides their beauty.” The carefree position of Bell probably contributed to his ability to observe people humanely, which is evident in all social interactions, from the court to everyday life. What impresses him most about the Kangxi emperor is the “good nature and affability of this ancient monarch, on all occasions.” Bell acknowledges a similar affability in casual meetings with Chinese people of all ranks of society both in the streets and on visits to the homes of “Chinese friends.”

The uniquely personal and gentle perspective of Bell’s Travels attracted audiences in Britain and beyond even in times of skepticism towards China. Its reception thus casts doubt on the Sinophilia/Sinophobia dichotomy in modern scholarship, as it reveals that even what could arguably be called a ‘Sinophile’ text was well-received in eighteenth-century British culture for a series of reasons. One of these reasons was the narrative’s ‘Britishness,’ which probably raised feelings of familiarity, trust, and national pride among its readers. In addition, Bell’s unique perspective as the embassy’s physician created an almost touristic narrative. The text implies a relationship between nationalism and tourism during that period. Bell provided his audience with an account of China as a foreign place as seen through the eyes of a sensitive yet self-assured British gentleman. Accordingly, the fact that the book is missing from modern research has less to do with its reception in the eighteenth century, than with its incompatibility with recent historiography. It would be worth a serious reconsideration by historians.

I would like to warmly thank Philippe Schmid for his valuable comments and suggestions for this piece.

Yuval Givon holds a PhD from Tel Aviv University and is currently a Fulbright postdoctoral associate at the Department of History, Harvard University. Givon is a historian of the early modern period, specializing in Eurasian long-distance exchanges and particularly in the Society of Jesus and the role it played in the establishment of travel and communication networks between Western Europe and China during the seventeenth century.

Edited by Philippe Schmid

Featured image: A folding map of Bell’s route to China (2 v. front. [fold. map] 25 x 20 cm.) in John Bell, Travels from St. Petersburg, in Russia, to diverse parts of Asia (Glasgow: Foulis, 1763). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

By Jonathon Catlin

On April 23, 2023, one of the pioneers of German conceptual history, Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006), would have turned one hundred years old. Born in Görlitz, in Eastern Germany, Koselleck became one of the leading German historians of his generation and a founder of historical studies at the University of Bielefeld, where he taught for most of his career and trained a generation of conceptual historians who continue to carry on his legacy at universities around the world.

Between 1972 and 1997, Koselleck co-edited, together with Werner Conze and Otto Brunner, the eight-volume Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Basic Concepts in History: A Historical Dictionary of Political and Social Language in Germany). The irony is that while Koselleck is perhaps best known for his central role as the theoretical force behind this massive undertaking, by the time it was underway, he already began to cast doubt on some of the premises on which it had been initiated. Amidst the heyday of the linguistic turn and deconstruction’s critique of logocentrism, it became increasingly apparent that traditional Begriffsgeschichte, with its top-down focus on elite political expression, inherently obscured other aspects of social reality. Koselleck soon turned his attention to formerly overlooked stockpiles of historical meaning, including visual and material culture, “political iconology,” and “political sensuality” involving the body and the senses, especially as regards memorials, monuments, and the “political cult of the dead.”

The early Koselleck of his dissertation book Critique and Crisis (1959), a work indebted to his mentor Carl Schmitt (Suhrkamp published their correspondence, edited by Jan Eike Dunkhase, in 2019), studied the high political discourse of the philosophes and Jacobins leading up to the French Revolution. He found in their moralization of history and their utopian and ideological prognostication the roots of the violent totalitarian ideologies of his own time, namely Nazism and Stalinism. In his 1960 review of the book in Merkur, Jürgen Habermas was sharply critical of Koselleck’s proximity to the disgraced Nazi legal theorist Schmitt in privileging of the power of the absolute state over critical social rationality; Habermas’s review also previews the thesis of his 1962 habilitation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, with its argument that the “private views” Koselleck had criticized as inappropriate moralizing about politics are fundamentally “changed in their substance by being mediated into public opinion through the public sphere” (471). Koselleck, for his part, continued to pander to Schmitt, writing to him in 1961 of the “revolutionary awakening of 1933” which “was gambled away” (191). Both of Koselleck’s co-editors on the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe were formerly committed Nazis, and their sometimes apologetic politics are visible in places like Ernst Nolte’s entry on “Fascism.”

Koselleck’s mature work explored more metaphorical and sensual aspects of historical experience, developing such pioneering concepts and theories as “the non-simultaneity of the simultaneous” and modernity as characterized by acceleration and the widening gap between the “space of experience and the “horizon of expectations,” “futures past,” “repetition structures” and “possible histories,” “layers/sediments of time,” and the absurdity or meaninglessness of history. Koselleck died in 2006, but interest in his work has been renewed in recent years by the unveiling of his 30,000-object (largely digitized) photograph archive at Marburg and the opening of his papers and personal library at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.

As Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman shows in his 2017 article, “Koselleck in America,” Koselleck also enjoyed considerable success in the Anglophone world, taking up guest positions at the University of Chicago (where he rubbed elbows with François Furet and Michael Geyer) and the New School for Social Research. Thanks to the efforts of the New York historian of political thought Melvin Richter, Koselleck’s approach to conceptual history was put into dialogue with the approaches of such luminaries as J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner. As Richter observes, the editors of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe’s critiques of the old history of ideas and their turn instead to studying concepts as repositories of embedded social experience resonates with Skinner’s claim that “there can be no histories of concepts; there can only be histories of their uses in argument” (quoted in Richter, 135). While Richter observes that “Pocock and Skinner have seldom ventured beyond the late eighteenth century,” the period of the emergence of modernity and the Sattelzeit with which Koselleck’s work began, in a more theoretical register, “the title of Pocock’s collection, Politics, Language, and Time, could have served as the title for the English translation of Reinhart Koselleck’s Vergangene Zukunft [Futures Past]” (125).

In his later years, Koselleck contributed to German public debates about the memory and memorialization of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. He argued that Germans had a moral duty to remember all victims of the regime, including still forgotten groups such as the more than three million Soviet prisoners of war murdered by the Nazis; he thus opposed the “hierarchy of victims” with Jews at the top established by official national memory and the central memorial in Berlin designed by Peter Eisenman. In this work, he drew upon his own “lava” (untransmissible) memories of his time as a Wehrmacht soldier on the Eastern Front who was captured and sent to Auschwitz and the interior of the Soviet Union as a prisoner of war from 1945–46. In 2005, on the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, Koselleck reflected that he “built up [his] entire studies through the experience of the war.” However, he also emphasized the individuality of his experience, claiming that “each person has the right to their own memory.” In his case, May 8, 1945 was not a day of “liberation” (as Weizsäcker famously proclaimed in 1985) but rather marked the beginning of his “slavery.” Koselleck did not identify as a liberated “victim” of the regime because he fought to the end; “we Germans were also perpetrators in a very clear sense, whether as concentration camp guards or as soldiers.” After the war, his “re-education” officer was none other than the young British historian Eric Hobsbawm, of whom Koselleck also published a caricature in Vorbilder – Bilder (1983).

Niklas Olsen’s indispensable 2012 intellectual biography of Koselleck centers on the basic thesis on which all of his work rests: the inescapable plurality and plurivocity of historical experience and, therefore, of historical writing, which makes historical memory and historiography sites of perpetual reinterpretation and conflict. This lends Koselleck’s writing admirable humility, longevity, and contemporary resonance.

Over the years, the JHI Blog has published pieces on Koselleck’s work from a variety of angles, ranging from his early work on the notion of crisis, to his late work on war memorials, to his photographs. We are glad to feature these pieces here on Koselleck’s centennial:

“Back in the Sattel(zeit) again” by John Raimo, 2015.

“Koselleck and the Image” (review of the Bielefeld exhibition) by Jonathon Catlin, 2018.

“Reinhart Koselleck on Modernity, Memorials, and the Meaninglessness of History” by Ella Myer, 2019.

“Crisisⁿ or, Rebooting Conceptual History for the Twenty-First Century” by Alex Langstaff, 2019.

“Begriffsgeschichte’s History: Between Historicization of Concepts and Conceptual Politics” interview with Falko Schmieder by Jonas Knatz, 2019.

“Begriffsgeschichte’s Methodological Neighbors and the Scientification of Concepts” part two of Jonas Knatz’s interview with Falko Schmieder, 2019.


To celebrate the anniversary, a conference is planned at the University of Bielefeld on Koselleck’s birthday, April 23, at which a number of new projects will be presented. These include a forthcoming volume, Vom Ding und Unding der Geschichte (Transcript, 2023), edited by Lisa Regazzoni, on Koselleck’s collection of hundreds of figurines (especially of soldiers and horses). There is also a new anniversary blog entitled Komposita, whose name evokes the composite metaphors and meanings Koselleck employed in his studies of historical semantics. Komposita is hosted by the existing blog Theory of History at Work. On January 24, Komposita began publishing entries, in multiple languages, on new and old concepts related to Koselleck’s work or conceptual history, with the aim to build a new lexicon or glossary of conceptual history from a younger and more international generation of scholars. Komposita continues to invite contributions on concepts not yet covered by the blog, which can be classics of Koselleck’s work (crisis, progress, futures past) or entirely novel and non-European concepts whose study his work can inform (see Margrit Pernau’s reflection on jinns). In the spirit of international exchange and to expand this project to an English-speaking audience, the JHI Blog will cross-publish a small number of Komposita entries in the coming weeks and months.

In October 2023, the Bielefeld event will be followed by the conference “Mit Koselleck über Koselleck hinaus: Perspektiven zu einer Begriffsgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts” at Berlin’s Leibniz-Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, home to the ongoing project on an interdisciplinary conceptual history of the twentieth century in Germany. This project’s leaders, Falko Schmieder and Ernst Müller, have together authored two important works on conceptual history. First, the 2016 Begriffsgeschichte und historische Semantik, which historicizes the project of Begriffsgeschichte amongst other related methodologies, from Frankfurt School critical theory, to Foucauldian genealogy, to Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology, and about which the JHI Blog’s Jonas Knatz conducted a trenchant two-part interview with Schmieder in 2019. Second, in 2020, a new introduction to Begriffsgeschichte. As Schmieder emphasized at the History of Concepts conference in Berlin in the spring of 2022, Begriffsgeschichte for the twentieth century has to look—in a word—a lot more postmodern. Picking up where the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe left off, and coming after the linguistic and global turn, Schmieder and his collaboratorshave more distance between themselves and the twentieth century than Koselleck did, but they nevertheless confront an era in which meaning became increasingly fragmented, mediatized, and democratized, and in which the somewhat bounded national linguistic communities of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe mixed, transformed, and eroded.

No doubt these new commemorations and reinterpretations of Koselleck’s rich and wide-ranging corpus will continue to reinvigorate conceptual history for a younger, more international cohort of scholars no longer beholden to the original aims and methods of Koselleck and his generation. To give just one recent example, Jennifer L. Allen’s history of “utopia” in Germany since the 1980s looks not to high political rhetoric, where this lofty and totalizing concept was indeed predictably faltering amidst the collapse of real existing socialism, but rather to thriving “sustainable” and grassroots notions of utopia that were embedded in everyday social practices and activism. (Koselleck, for his part, claimed that his “basic attitude was skepticism as the minimum condition for reducing utopian excess—including the utopian excess of 1968.”) In our time of unrelenting pandemic, ongoing climate catastrophe, and the end of the end of history following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, terms like “permacrisis” and “polycrisis” have entered critical and political discourse in force. At such moments, Koselleck’s canonical attempts to historicize such fundamental modern concepts as “crisis” and “progress,” “revolution” and “history” may seem particularly timely. In contemporary deployments of modern “semantic stockpiles” such as these, we see, in Anson Rabinbach’s words, that “not only are concepts capable of synthesis, they’re also capable of explosion and they create shockwaves that keep reproducing themselves” (470). But, following Schmieder and Müller’s suggestion, we must also historicize Koselleck himself, thinking with him in order to ultimately think beyond him.

Jonathon Catlin is a Fellow in the Berlin Program at Freie Universität Berlin and a PhD Candidate in History and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University, where he is writing a dissertation on the concept of catastrophe in twentieth-century European thought. He has contributed to the JHI Blog since 2016 and served as a contributing editor since 2018. He is also an editor of Komposita, the Koselleck anniversary blog based at the University of Bielefeld. He tweets @planetdenken.

Edited by Tom Furse

Featured Image: Cover and complete collection of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.). Picture by Mika Federley, published on the website of the University of Helsinki, 2017. Wikimedia.

By Adam Simmons

‘Ethiopia’ is an ancient toponym that dates to at least the twelfth century BCE. However, it did not refer to the region of the modern-day country until many centuries later. This think piece will look at how modern Ethiopia came to call itself ʾItyoṗya (ኢትዮጵያ). This development was a process that occurred over three millennia but which only began in Ethiopia about c.1300 and was only finally cemented on the global scene during the reign of Menelik II, 600 years later. Yet, it remains to be commonly found in scholarship that appearances to the toponym ‘Ethiopia’ in sources dating to before the fourteenth century refer to the earlier, particularly Christian, kingdoms which inhabited modern Ethiopia and Eritrea, namely ʾAksum (c.100 BCE-c.900 CE; the rulers of ʾAksum converted to Christianity by the mid-fourth century) and Bǝg^wǝna (the kingdom ruled by the so-called Zag^we dynasty, c.900-1270). By taking a less conflated approach to the toponym, a much more nuanced history of north-east Africa can be relayed.  

The history of the toponym of ‘Ethiopia’ has two distinct discourses: a pre-Christian and a Christian one. The pre-Christian ‘Ethiopia,’ which appears in Greek and Latin texts, is most commonly referred to as a large, yet vague, region, usually north-east Africa, the Sahara, or even the Indian subcontinent. While it could be associated with the kingdom(s) in modern Sudan, this association was made much more explicit, specifically in biblical texts. The third-century BCE Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible – the 70-book Septuagint, which makes up the Old Testament – opted to directly translate the Hebrew toponym Kūš into Aithiopia in Greek. ‘Kush’ had long been the toponym for Sudan, both by those resident in Sudan and elsewhere, such as Egypt and Mesopotamia. The kingdom(s) of Sudan (successors Kerma, Napata, and Meroë) then became the kingdom(s) of ‘Ethiopia.’ Importantly, this did not refer to the successor kingdoms of modern Eritrea and Ethiopia, namely Dʿmt and ʾAksum. Sudanese Ethiopia gained prominence in biblical lines such as Psalm 67(68:31) and was reaffirmed in Acts 8:26-39 regarding the baptism of the eunuch of the Sudanese queen of Meroë, known in the Bible as Queen Candace, by the apostle Philip in the first century CE. These lines would later gain great importance in Solomonic Ethiopia. Still, ʾAksum, the Eritrean/Ethiopian kingdom, did not claim an association with either Kush or Ethiopia even after its official Christian conversion in the fourth century. In fact, ʾAksumite sources associate Kush/Ethiopia with its neighbor in Sudan and not itself.

The decline of ʾAksum, seemingly over by sometime in the tenth century, remains obscure. Its successor, the Kingdom of Bǝg^wǝna, which was centered on the region of Lasta in the north of modern-day country Ethiopia, also did not claim an association with Ethiopia as far as the current evidence suggests. Meanwhile, in Sudan, the Sudanese kingdoms of Nobadia, Makuria, and Alwa, which had been officially Christian since the mid-sixth century, united as Dotawo around c.1100. Nubian sources are too fragmentary to trace how it associated itself with Kush/Ethiopia, but it is clear that external writers maintained this belief. It was for precisely this reason that the toponym ‘Abyssinia’ appears in European texts from the twelfth century – a misunderstanding of al-Ḥabaša in Arabic as well as other comparative toponyms, such as Ḥabašat (Gǝʿǝz) and Ḥabaš (Hebrew and Syriac) – to clarify it from Ethiopia (Nubia). Still, no evidence points to either Ethiopians or external observers associating the kingdom that would become Ethiopia with ‘Ethiopia’ by the twelfth century.

The Solomonic dynasty’s rise to power in 1270 coincided with a period of turmoil within Nubia, particularly brought by the Mamlūks of Egypt but also likely by inconsistent Nile floods and repeated outbreaks of plague. The Mamlūks had seized power in Egypt in 1250 and reigned until 1517 before themselves being conquered by the Ottomans. Before this period, the ruler of Nubia, the ourou, had long been viewed as the regional protector of north-east African Christians by Eastern Christians, including by those of Ethiopia. However, one of the early claims Solomonic Ethiopian rulers made is to position themselves as the new regional protector of north-east African Christians. This was despite evidence suggesting that Dotawo remained a regional power until the early seventeenth century – though its last known ruler, Joel, only reigned up until the 1480s. Yet, after c.1300 Dotawo could not prevent its position in Christian discourse from being replaced by Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, its new Ethiopian identity was cemented by the translation of the Kəbrä nägäśt into Gǝʿǝz from Arabic during the reign of ʿÄmdä Ṣǝyon (r. 1314-44). This text told the foundation narrative of the Solomonic dynasty and its lineage from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba via their son, Menelik, the first king of Ethiopia (importantly given as ʾItyoṗya in the text as it was following the example of ʿÄmdä Ṣǝyon that subsequent rulers fashioned themselves as rulers of ʾItyoṗya, the first to do so which can be accurately dated). Indeed, the Kəbrä nägäśt was explicit in tying Solomonic descent to the rule of Ethiopia, not least in the line:

ወከመዝ፡ሢመቱ፡ለንጉሠ፡ኢትዮጵያ፡ሎቱ፡ወለዘርኡ፡እስከ፡ለዓለም።

“For so is Ethiopia the land of the nǝguś and his descendants forever” (Kəbrä nägäśt, Ch. 92).

It was also during the reign of ʿÄmdä Ṣǝyon that the first period of expansion under its Solomonic nägäśt for the kingdom began, particularly in the north, south, and east, further gaining regional prominence in the process which his successors across the centuries built on. His exploits were also enshrined in the earliest example of a surviving chronicle written about a ruler and their reign in the Gǝʿǝz corpus. This legacy would last for the remainder of the dynasty, as can be seen in the below coat of arms employed by Emperor Menelik II (r. 1889-1913); it embodies all that the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia portrayed itself to be, among other things, the conquering lion of Judah in front of the throne of Solomon and its association with Psalm 67(68):31: ‘Ethiopia will reach out its hands to God’, displaying Ethiopia as among the earliest followers of the Christian God.

From the early fourteenth century, Ethiopia was ʾItyoṗya, adopting multiple aspects of Sudanese history into its identity. For example, Ethiopians expressed how their ruler was of Ethiopia, not Abyssinia, and that the biblical Queen Candace had resided at ʾAksum despite historically residing at Meroë in Sudan. The narrative of continuation was being clearly refined in both Ethiopia and particularly to those in Europe, who would come to forget about Nubia in favor of Ethiopia via increased engagement with Ethiopia, notably between 1402 and 1633. This period witnessed embassies and other interactions being exchanged between Ethiopia and various European kingdoms – namely, Portugal, Aragon (in Spain), France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Italian city-states (particularly Venice and Rome) – ultimately resulting in a Portuguese-led Jesuit patriarchate being established in Ethiopia from 1555 until their expulsion in 1633. This came at a similar time as Portuguese and Italian Jesuits travelled across the world to the Americas, China, India, and Japan.    

Following the fourteenth century, Ethiopia and Europe remained united in Ethiopia’s name, though Europeans also continued to refer to the kingdom as ‘Abyssinia.’ However, as ‘Abyssinia’ remained the principal toponym for Ethiopia in Western Europe, al-Ḥabaša, Habeş, Ḥabaš remained in Arabic, Turkish, and Hebrew sources, such as on maps, until the nineteenth century. Not everywhere knew Ethiopia as ‘Ethiopia.’ Indeed, even within Ethiopia the language employed designated the toponym used. For example, the seal of Tēwodros II (r. 1855-68) refers to him as ruler of ʾItyoṗya (ኢትዮጵያ) in Gǝʿǝz, but ruler of al-Ḥabaša (الخبسة) in the accompanying Arabic.

It was only after the reign of Emperor Menelik II that we find the introduction of ʾĀthyūbīā, Etiyopya, and ʾEtiyowpiyah in Arabic, Turkish, and Hebrew respectively globally. Menelik’s victory over Italy at the Battle of Adwa in 1896 cemented Ethiopia’s regional sovereignty and ability to influence global intellectualism following Italy’s failed attempts to expand its influence beyond Italian Eritrea. Italy’s interest in the region began officially following the government takeover of the port of Assab in 1882, after the Italian shipping company, Rubattino Shipping, purchased it from local rulers. The occupation of Massawa, a key Eritrean port, in 1885 was the precursor which led to the Battle of Adwa between Italy and the Ethiopian Empire the following year. It was not for a further three years, however, until the Treaty of Wuchale was signed between these countries in 1889 that the Italian colony of Eritrea was established. The colony was integrated into Italian East Africa in 1936 before its loss in World War II to Ethiopian and British forces in 1941 ended Italian colonialism in the region. Tracking when exactly the whole world universally adopted the toponym ‘Ethiopia’ for the modern country is difficult to pinpoint. Still it is clear that it only happens following the nineteenth century. Yet, the history of the toponym has a much longer and more varied history than that.

Adam Simmons is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Nottingham Trent University who specialises in the history of Africa, particularly North-East Africa, between the fourth and fifteenth centuries. He is author of Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Crusading World, 1095-1402 (Routledge, 2022).

Edited by Tom Furse

Featured Image: The Church of St. George at Lalibela (Wiki Commons).

By the Primary Editors

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What is Ethiopia and where is Ethiopia? At first glance, these questions seem simple enough. However, as our forum “Intellectual Histories of Ethiopia” shows, there have been centuries of complex contestation over the meanings and geographies of Ethiopia. Despite its ancient history and turbulent present, Ethiopia’s contributions to global intellectual histories are still mostly overlooked. Historians of ideas have begun to address the inherent Eurocentrism within the broader field of intellectual history. Recent works have drawn our attention to the extra-European world as a vibrant space of conceptual production. Though much of the work remains to be done, our forum takes a step in that direction by showcasing new research on the history of ideas in and from Ethiopia. We seek to contribute to the ongoing decolonization of the field of intellectual history and thus, opening it up to include non-white and non-male actors as agents in their histories. We hope that this project will instigate new interest in Ethiopia and its diverse and rich traditions of intellectual histories. It is a growing work in progress; if you would like to contribute a piece on Ethiopia (broadly defined) and decolonization, please do get in touch with us here.

Although many sources on Ethiopia are fragmentary, texts in multiple languages play a significant role in all of our pieces. Gə’əz has been the dominant literary language for much of Ethiopia’s long history. As our three opening pieces demonstrate, scholars of Ethiopian history of ideas need to be versed in multiple languages, such as those from Omotic and Cushite families, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Turkish, Portuguese, and Italian. A daunting prospective for any aspiring scholar, but one that is rewarded by the richness and transcultural interconnectedness of intellectual life in this region.

The geographical range of these languages attests to the breadth of Ethiopia’s intellectual history, and so does the influence of religion. In the area now known as Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, many religions exchanged, jostled and fought. This forum’s pieces show, as some recent books have done, that Ethiopia is a key player in the emergence of monotheistic faith. Christianity, for instance, while regarded as the cornerstone of European civilization with roots in Latin, Greek or Slavonic traditions, has to be resituated as having an influential historical tradition in the Horn of Africa. And as so with language, scholars of Ethiopia encounter multiple religions across its history.

This forum has three forthcoming pieces across this week and next. The first is Adam Simmons‘ piece which excavates the history of the toponym of ‘Ethiopia,’ which has two distinct aspects: a pre-Christian and a Christian one. The former exists in Greek, Latin and the Hebrew Bible and outlines a large, vague region in north east Africa. The latter is rooted in the Solomonic dynasty and their rulership of the region from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

Where are the most important Ethiopian philosophical manuscripts in the world? Jonathan Egid tells us the story of how Saint John’s University in rural Minnesota came to be the home of these texts and a titan of Ethiopian scholarship, Getatchew Haile. This piece invites to think about translations of Greek texts in the region, and specifically, Hatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob, the topic of Egid’s doctoral research: the ‘jewel of Ethiopian literature’ or a forgery (or both)?

In his think piece, Fasil Merawi presents three contesting responses by Ethiopian intellectuals to modernity. The first group were adherents to Western instrument rationality and thereby argued that Ethiopia was in a backward state. The second group was more nationalist in temperament who found that ancient Ethiopia could rival the greatest civilizations of the world, and the third group were more accommodationist between Western social sciences and Ethiopian cultural distinctiveness.

Featured Image: Diptych with Mary and Her Son Flanked by Archangels, Apostles and a Saint. AXIA ART Ltd., London [date and mode of acquisition unknown]; Robert and Nancy Nooter Collection, Washington, D.C., October 1992, by purchase; Walters Art Museum, 2001, by purchase [Creative Commons]