Alula, ‘The Son of Qubi’: a ‘King's Man’ in Ethiopia, 1875–1897

Abstract

Ras Alula played a significant role in the political history of northern Ethiopia during the period between the Egyptian invasion in 1875 and the Italian defeat at Adwa in 1896. Alula became well-known in Ethiopia and Europe for his role in shaping his country's relations with its African neighbours and with European powers. But his role in the internal history of Ethiopia was no less significant. This son of a peasant managed to avoid the restricted local agrarian social ladder by becoming the best general of the Tigrean emperor Yohannes IV (1872–89). As the ‘king's man’, Alula's power was based on his position in the court and on the province (Eritrea) over which he was appointed. But the leading Tigrean families rejected him. When Yohannes died and Eritrea was lost to the Italians, Alula became the most powerful champion of Tigrean independence from the new Shoan emperor, Menilek II. A Tigrean court seemed to be his only opportunity to maintain his position of a ‘king's man’, without which he would have to return to the local agrarian social ladder. After four years of resistance to the new Shoan hegemony, Alula submitted to Menilek and was rewarded with the long-desired position of ‘the king's man’. His recognition of Menilek may be regarded as a fatal blow to Tigrean independence.

Holographic description of total hadronic cross sections at high energies

“…The effective description by the Pomeron exchange is realized also in holographic QCD which is an effective approach constructed based on the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence (or gauge/string correspondence in general) [4]. This effective method in QCD has gathered a lot of theoretical interests [5][6][7][8][9][10], and focusing mainly on DIS, many related studies have been done so far [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. In holographic QCD, the Pomeron in the usual Minkowski space is identified as the Reggeized graviton in the higher dimensional curved space, and one of the most successful descriptions of the holographic Pomeron was proposed by Brower-Polchinski-Strassler-Tan (BPST) [13].…”

“…Hence, besides the nucleon-nucleon case, we also consider the pion-nucleon and pion-pion cases as examples in this work. Similar to the nucleon case, the required density distribution of the pion in the AdS space can be obtained from the bottom-up AdS/QCD model of mesons [9,28]. Although there is no available data for the pion involved processes in the considered kinematic region, we find that our prediction for the total cross section ratio σ πN tot /σ NN tot agrees with that extracted from the well-known work with the soft Pomeron exchange done by Donnachie and Landshoff [3].…”

“…The recent TOTEM data [25,29] and other pp [30] andpp [31] data are plotted with error bars. gravitational form factors of those hadrons, using the classical actions of the AdS/QCD models of the nucleon [26] and mesons [9], we utilize their results in this study. Those results were also applied to the analysis of the structure functions of the nucleon and the pion in DIS at small x in the previous studies [22].…”