Chiesa e Stato nell'Impero etiopico e nell'Africa Orientale Italiana

The essay focuses on the fallout that the fascist conquest of Ethiopia had in the development of an African empire that had defended independence for centuries. Ethiopia, the only country in sub-Saharan Africa with ancient Christian roots not imported from Europe, had embarked on a bold process of modernization, elaborating an authentically African model and not of Western derivation, based on the close relationship between political power and the Ethiopian Church. The fascist occupation interrupts this process of modernization, highlighting the contradictions of a confessional conception of power in the impact with the social and political transformations of the early decades of the twentieth century, while the reform attempts of the Negus against the Ethiopian Church, in the the 1920s, underwent a drastic interruption, with the elimination of the highest ecclesiastical offices and numerous monastic members.