Capital mobility and institutional inertia
Ethiopia’s two millennia of spatial statecraft
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24214768 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel Kassahun Waktola (0000-0003-2710-8903, Austin Community College) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-18 |
| Publication date | 2026-10-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Urban Affairs (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0735-2166 • E-ISSN: 1467-9906 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/07352166.2026.2729240 |
| OpenAlex | W7216198490 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 24 |
This article draws on Ethiopia’s record of 23 documented capital centers across two millennia to develop a spatial-energetic framework for explaining transitions between mobile and fixed political centers. Capitals accumulate institutional mass that favors persistence, while environmental, geopolitical, and demographic pressures generate countervailing forces; processual conditions determine whether those pressures can be translated into actual movement. The Ethiopian case also challenges a foundational assumption in urban political geography: political centrality does not require permanent built form. Itinerant royal camps concentrated administrative, ceremonial, commercial, and military functions while remaining fully mobile—demonstrating that fixity and centrality are analytically separable properties of political capitals, not necessary complements. A comparative discussion of imperial China, Buganda, Rwanda, and modern planned relocations establishes the framework’s scope and transferability. The revised methodology distinguishes directly coded primary texts from secondary synthetic sources, specifies an outcome-independent ordinal decision rule to reduce post-hoc interpretive bias, and employs four historical territorial reconstructions to assess capital locations against contemporaneous geographic centroids.
Buganda · capital mobility · Ethiopia · imperial China · institutional inertia · Political capital · Political geography · Rwanda · African history and culture analysis · Historical Geography and Geographical Thought · Urban Development and Societal Issues
A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea
An Urban History of China
The Birth of Territory
New State Spaces
Keys to the City
Cities in the International Marketplace
Moderns Abroad
The Global City
Towards a new epistemology of the urban
Ethiopia's Experiment in Accommodating Diversity
The Battle of Adwa
Foundations of an African Civilisation
The Wandering Capitals of Ethiopia
The 21st-Century Metropolis
Provincializing Critical Urban Theory
Rise and Fall of Axum, Ethiopia
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |