Extraterritoriality in Imperial Ethiopia

Abstract This chapter attempts to provide an understanding of how the unequal treaties imperial Ethiopia signed with European powers during the first half of the twentieth century secured European extraterritorial privileges as well as influenced major legal reform in Ethiopia. It also highlights the precariousness and roughness of imperial Ethiopia’s semi-colonial trek compared to other prominent semi-colonial polities discussed in this book. It challenges our knowledge about extraterritorial regimes and their impact on legal change in Ethiopia, and argues extraterritoriality was a major marker of the unequal relationship between Western powers and imperial Ethiopia and was more successful after the liberation of Ethiopia from Italian rule.