Eritrea on the Eve

Essex: New Times and Ethiopia News" Books, 1952. First edition. Very Good/Good +. Publisher's red cloth titled in black. Octavo. 72, [4] pp. With photographic frontispiece and fourteen double-sided photographic plates and three maps. Some foxing to cloth and to leaves, mostly at preliminaries. Some marginal toning. Original dust jacket with some foxing and some chipping to edges, with a couple amateur tape repairs to inside of jacket. A Very Good copy, in the Good+ dust jacket, of a scarce later Pankhurst title that commemorates her deep activist ties to Ethiopia.

Eritrea on the Eve: The past and future of Italy's "first-born" Colony, Ethiopia's (truncated) ancient Sea Province was published as Eritrea exited a period of British occupation and preceding colonization by Italy (1868 - 1941), which included five years under fascist rule. In 1850, Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia, against the wishes of many Eritreans who sought independence. Eritrea on the Eve reviews the history of Eritrea under fascist rule and British occupation, recounts the United Nations resolution that federated Ethiopia and Eritrea, and explains the problems facing Eritreans moving forward (including disease, deforestation, poverty, and lack of educational infrastructure). E. Sylvia Pankhurst (1882 - 1960), a longtime ally of Ethopia, also used the work to express her support for Ethopian imperial control over the territory. Eritrea on the Eve was the penultimate book Pankhurst published in her lifetime, followed only by Ethiopia: A Cultural History (1955).

Pankhurst was a militant suffragist and antifascist organizer born into a family that included Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, co-founders of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). After a decades of leading suffragist and labor organizing efforts in England with the WSPU and the Women’s Suffrage Federation (later the Workers’ Socialist Federation), the cause of Ethiopian independence became central to Pankhurst's activist career. In 1936, following the invasion of Ethiopia by Italian fascists, Pankhurst started a periodical, the New Times and Ethiopian News. She edited the periodical for twenty years and also published books, like the present work and The Ethiopian People: Their Rights and Progress (1946), under its auspices. She moved to Ethiopia permanently in 1956, at the invitation of the emperor, and lived there until her death. Pankhurst was given a state funeral, which was attended by the emperor and his family, and buried outside the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa in an area reserved for the nation's heroes.

"The author of this book, Sylvia Pankhurst, famous suffragette, had the same feeling for liberty in relation to Ethiopia and the ex-Italian Colonies as she had for the women of Britain and those depressed workers in whose interests she toiled for twelve years in the East End of London" (from the dust jacket). Very Good in Good + dust jacket. (Inventory #: 7287)