The dawn of the nineteenth century found Ethiopia in a state of political fragmentation. The medieval empire of Amda-Tseyon and Zar'a- Yaeqob had been superseded by a conglomeration of principalities. In the Christian north, doctrinal controversies exacerbated the political divisions. What kept the spirit of unity alive was the imperial throne, which all regional lords sought to control and manipulate. What linked north and south was the long-distance trade routes that traversed the country. It was in such circumstances that the country's second contact - more meaningful and more sustained - with Europe began (the first being the Ethio-Portuguese connection in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). As part of the general European thrust in Africa, missionaries came to ‘save souls’, businessmen to trade, and official envoys to protect both.

These two realities - political fragmentation and European presence - formed the setting for the unfolding history of modern Ethiopia. Successive rulers responded in different styles and with varying degrees of success to the two challenges: the internal and the external. Centralization and unification became the dominant themes of Ethiopia's political history. Tewodros II, Ethiopia's first modern emperor, began the task in a style marked more by vision than by method. Emperor Yohannes IV's policy of controlled regionalism, probably induced by his predecessor's disastrous failure, was hardly any more successful. Of the nineteenth-century rulers, it was Emperor Menilek II who inherited the imperial idea of Tewodros and the tolerance of Yohannes, and whose policy in this regard was crowned with relatively greater success. Not only did he manage to forge the political unity of the core (with the single important exception of the Marab Melash), but he also extended the imperial sway to hitherto unattained limits in the south.

As for the European presence, it represented both a threat and an opportunity to Ethiopia. It was a threat to the cherished independence of the country. Conversely, it generated hopes - bitterly disappointed - of an ally against Egyptian expansionism. At the same 270 time, it opened up new possibilities of introducing western technology, particularly military technology, and of modernizing the country. Thus the attitude of Ethiopia's rulers towards Europeans was marked by ambivalence: they wanted the Europeans’ modern technology, but were apprehensive of their ultimate designs.