The chapter’s locally emplaced focus on Menelik’s conquest “from below” fills important gaps in Ethiopian history that enable us to get a more complete picture of a crucial time period. Detailing the violent campaigns, it provides insights on how it was experienced in local contexts and discusses the deep impacts it had on the Arsi Oromo. The involuntary incorporation into the Ethiopian Kingdom meant that they had to submit to an alien and hegemonic regime focused on extracting as many resources as it could from its new territories. The chapter underscores that the Arsi Oromo saw the arrival of Menelik’s soldiers as an intrusion and that the new realities entailed subjugation and loss of autonomy. It moreover discusses the Arsi Oromo’s acts of resistance from the early days of the conquest into the twentieth century. It concludes that it is far from clear that the Arsi Oromo at the time viewed the conquest as part of a larger program of internal colonization – as it has later been interpreted – and that detailed micro-studies of the conquest serve to nuance the unproductive dichotomy of viewing it either as a process of national unification or as acts of illegitimate colonialization.

The chapter explores the role of Christianity in the Ethiopian national narrative and in state policies. The first part analyzes the Ethiopian national narrative as embodied in a semi-divine imperial genealogy and tied to a territorial state viewed as demarcated by God. The chapter subsequently discusses the notion of Amhara peoplehood, underscoring its religious (Christian) dimension. This serves as the basis for understanding the Amhara’s expansionist ideology and encounters with different ethnic and non-Christian groups, and the chapter discusses how the state’s expansionist endeavors were accompanied by the Amhara notion of exceptionalism that paved the way for civilizational policies, in turn leading to the demarcation of rigid boundaries and asymmetric relationships with non-Amhara groups. The latter part of the chapter focuses on how this paved the way for a policy of withdrawal as well as resistance from Muslim groups. It underscores how the Muslims viewed the state as a Christian opposite and the negative treatment of the Muslims as religiously based. It moreover discusses how this reciprocally led to the strengthening of the religious dimension of peoplehood among Muslims from different localities and also became a powerful force for mobilizing action against the Ethiopian state.