Menelik II's conquests

Menelik II's conquests, also known as the Agar Maqnat (Amharic: አገር ማቅናት, romanized: ʾägär maqnat, lit. 'Colonization, Cultivation and Christianization of Land'), were a series of late 19th-century military campaigns led by Emperor Menelik II of Shewa to expand the territory of the Ethiopian Empire.

Emerging from a fragmented Abyssinian highland polity, Menelik—who had ascended to power in 1866—began, a decade later, to capitalize on growing centralization efforts, an increasing militarized state apparatus, and substantial arms imports from European powers to launch a wave of expansive and often violent annexations across the south, west, and east of the Horn of Africa beginning in the early 1880s. These campaigns, conducted largely by Amhara forces from Shewa, mirrored European colonial practices—such as indirect rule, settler militarism, and land dispossession—and were frequently justified by Menelik as part of a Christianizing civilizing mission. Central to the imperial structure in many southern regions was the neftenya-gabbar system, a settler-colonial arrangement that established Amhara dominance over newly incorporated regions through land grants, taxation, and forced labor.

Menelik's expansionist drive transformed Ethiopia into one of the few African empires participating in the Scramble for Africa. While it preserved its sovereignty against European colonization—most notably through victory in the First Italo-Ethiopian War—the empire's growth was achieved through serious violence and repression that many historians today characterize as genocidal.

The dramatic increase in Ethiopia’s size and helped establish Menelik's legacy as the architect of the modern Ethiopian state. The enduring social, political, and cultural legacies of these conquests have had a profound effect on Ethiopian state formation and interethnic relations, with consequences that continue to shape the country's internal conflicts into the present day.