The Scholarly Equivalent of Foreign Aid

When I asked a colleague who teaches military history why more people don't know about the battle of Adwa, he replied somewhat glibly, "Because the Ethiopians defeated the modern Italians, not the Roman legions." Raymond Jonas, by contrast, is utterly serious about making the case that this 1896 battle was a "world historical event" that is part of our "global heritage." When describing Adwa, Jonas is a master storyteller, but when talking about its significance, he can sometimes sound like a press release written by a savvy marketer. According to Jonas, "Adwa opened a breach that would lead, in the aftermath of world war fifty years later, to the rollback of European rule in Africa. It was an event that determined the color of Africa." The truth of Adwa is somewhere between my colleague's droll jibe and Jonas' understandable exaggerations.