The author looks closely at the impact of the British period on Eritrean society. The attempts of the Eritrean Moslem League to defend and maintain the federation were frustrated by internal contradictions, by the Unionist party, and by misconstrued perceptions of the division of powers between Eritrea and Ethiopia. The UN-imposed federation, together with its accompanying constitution, were doomed to fail, as these were foreign to Eritrean and Ethiopian conceptions of political power. Negash maintains that the federation was abolished by Eritrean social and political forces rather than by Ethiopia. Based primarily on archival sources at the Public Record Office in London, Eritrea and Ethiopia argues that no other group in the region has repeatedly succeeded in shaping its political destiny as the Tigreans of Eritrea have. The work includes a short account of the war between Eritrean nationalist forces and the Ethiopian government, which led up to the emergence of Eritrea as a sovereign state. This central theme is placed in context by a reconstruction of Eritrean political organizations during the crucial postwar years. The primary objective of this book is to examine the rise and the fall of the federation in the nght of present-day realities. The Ethiopian-Eritrean federation, a product of a United Nations resolution, came into existence in 1952 and was abolished ten years later.
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