Capital of the imperial borderlands: urbanism, markets, and power on the Ethiopia-British Somaliland boundary, ca. 1890–1935

This article analyzes contests among Ethiopian and British imperial agents and their ostensible Somali (and other Muslim) subjects for control over commerce in the Ethiopia-British Somaliland borderlands. British claims of sovereignty over Somalis and other Muslim merchants operating in Ethiopia created a field of hybrid commercial control in which neither Britons nor Ethiopians held complete dominance. Competition to capture borderlands commerce focused on Jigjiga town as a site where Ethiopian rule and British-backed trade mixed. Amidst crises of warfare and famine in the countryside and the growth of a cash economy shaped by this imperial conjuncture, Jigjiga grew in importance as a site of accumulation and (especially for Somalis) of cultural transformations in understandings of commerce and its relation to political authority. Hybrid commercial sovereignty tended to separate the military-administrative authority of the empires on either side of the border from the Muslim-dominated field of trans-border commercial control, shaping links between ethno-religious identity and fields of power.