Harold Golden Marcus (April 8, 1936 – January 15, 2003) was an American historian and Africanist specializing in the history of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. He taught at Haile Selassie I University and Howard University before joining Michigan State University (MSU) in 1968, where he spent the remainder of his academic career and became Distinguished Professor of History.Michigan State University Archives and Historical Collections, Harold G. Marcus Papers, UA.17.309, Biographical Note and collection inventory.
Marcus was particularly known for his studies of the Ethiopian emperors Menelik II and Haile Selassie. His principal works included The Life and Times of Menelik II: Ethiopia, 1844–1913 (1975), Ethiopia, Great Britain, and the United States, 1941–1974: The Politics of Empire (1983), Haile Sellassie I: The Formative Years, 1892–1936 (1987), and the general survey A History of Ethiopia (1994; updated edition 2002).
Beyond his publications, Marcus played a prominent institutional role in the development of Ethiopian and African studies in the United States. He founded and edited the journal Northeast African Studies for more than two decades, helped establish the electronic scholarly network H-Africa, served on the governing council of H-Net, organized Ethiopian-studies conferences at Michigan State, and was convenor of the Twelfth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies in 1994.JSTOR, Northeast African Studies, journal title history and description.Mark Lawrence Kornbluh, "In Memory of Harold Golden Marcus", H-Africa, H-Net, 2003.
Early life and education
Marcus was born on April 8, 1936, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He attended Clark University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1958. He then studied at Boston University, where he received his Master of Arts degree in 1959 and later his doctorate in 1964.
At Boston University, Marcus studied under anthropologist and African historian Daniel F. McCall. His graduate studies increasingly focused on Africa and particularly on Ethiopia, which subsequently became the principal subject of his academic career.
In 1961–1962, while affiliated with Boston University, Marcus received a U.S. government grant to work at University College Addis Ababa, later incorporated into Addis Ababa University. The Fulbright Scholar Program records him as working in history and African studies at University College Addis Ababa during the 1961–1962 academic year.Fulbright Scholar Program, U.S. Grantees database, "University College Addis Ababa", entry for Harold Marcus, academic year 1961–1962. A contemporary Fulbright directory listed Marcus as a Program Fellow in African Studies at Boston University and described his field as African studies and Western history.
The visit marked his first sustained period of research in Ethiopia. His surviving papers include an Amharic study notebook covering 1961–1963, as well as research materials from his early work in the country.
Marcus's doctoral dissertation, completed at Boston University in 1964, was entitled Britain and Ethiopia, 1896 to 1914: A Study of Diplomatic Relations. It examined British policy toward Ethiopia in the period following the Ethiopian victory at the Battle of Adwa, including British concerns over the Nile basin, French influence, European rivalry at the Ethiopian court, and the foreign policy of Menelik II.
His early research in Ethiopia provided the basis for a series of articles on Anglo-Ethiopian diplomacy, the borders of the Ethiopian state, the Rodd Mission, the Tripartite Treaty of 1906, and Menelik II's foreign policy.
Academic career
Marcus began his teaching career as a visiting assistant professor of history at Haile Selassie I University, now Addis Ababa University. From 1963 until 1968 he was assistant professor of history at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
In 1968 he was recruited by Michigan State University. He remained at MSU for the rest of his career, teaching African and Ethiopian history for approximately thirty-five years and ultimately holding the rank of Distinguished Professor of History.
Marcus was closely involved with African studies at Michigan State. His archival papers contain extensive records of the university's African Studies Center from 1968 onward, the Ethiopian Studies Committee, university cooperation with Haile Selassie I University, the Mid-West Universities Consortium for International Activities, and projects involving Ethiopian academic institutions. In his obituary for Marcus, historian Gérard Prunier described the African Studies Center at Michigan State as a center Marcus had run effectively.
Marcus also held visiting appointments at the University of Khartoum in Sudan and Osaka Gaidai University in Japan, and lectured at numerous universities and colleges internationally.
During the 1985–1986 academic year he was a fellow at the National Humanities Center.National Humanities Center, fellow record for Harold G. Marcus, NHC Fellow 1985–86. His archival papers also document participation in the National Humanities Center's 1992 History Summer Institute.
In 1996 Marcus was nominated for a distinguished professorship at Michigan State, according to his university papers.
Return to Ethiopia and second Fulbright
Marcus returned to Ethiopia as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in 1999–2000. Based at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies of Addis Ababa University, his research project was entitled The Last 15 Years of the Life and Times of Haile Sellassie I of Ethiopia.Fulbright Scholars Directory, 1999–2000, entry for Harold G. Marcus; Fulbright Scholar Program, Addis Ababa University Institute of Ethiopian Studies, U.S. Grantees database.
The project was connected to Marcus's long-running attempt to complete the second part of his biography of Haile Selassie, which was intended to continue his earlier volume from the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935–1936 through the emperor's overthrow and death in the 1970s.
Thus Marcus's direct academic association with Ethiopia extended from his first research period in 1961–1962 until another major research stay nearly four decades later in 1999–2000.
Scholarship
Marcus's research concentrated primarily on the political, diplomatic and international history of modern Ethiopia, although he also wrote about African history more broadly and about the development and decline of European colonialism in Africa.
His research made extensive use of multinational archival collections. His surviving research papers contain material from Ethiopian archives as well as the British Foreign Office, the United States Department of State, French diplomatic archives and the Italian Foreign Ministry archives. They include records extending from the nineteenth century through the Cold War, as well as translations of Ethiopian documents and field notes.
Early diplomatic history
Marcus's first major field of research was the diplomatic history of Ethiopia under Menelik II. During the 1960s he published studies of British involvement in Ethiopia, Ethiopian-British boundary negotiations, the Rodd Mission, the Anglo-French-Italian Tripartite Treaty of 1906, Menelik's foreign policy and the emperor's final years.
One of his early articles, "Ethio-British Negotiations Concerning the Western Border with Sudan, 1896–1902", appeared in The Journal of African History in 1963. The research had been supported by a United States government Smith–Mundt grant and drew partly on archival material assembled in Ethiopia.
His early work increasingly expanded from diplomatic history into the political formation and territorial consolidation of the modern Ethiopian state.
Bibliography of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa
In 1972 Marcus published The Modern History of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa: A Select and Annotated Bibliography through the Hoover Institution Press. The bibliography assembled and annotated scholarship and primary accounts relating to modern Ethiopia and neighboring regions, with particular strength in nineteenth-century travel literature.
Marcus's papers preserve the card catalogue used in compiling the bibliography.
Menelik II
Marcus developed much of his earlier research into a political biography of Menelik II. The Life and Times of Menelik II: Ethiopia, 1844–1913 was published by Clarendon Press in 1975 as part of the Oxford Studies in African Affairs series.
The book followed Menelik from his early career as ruler of Shewa through his accession as emperor, the expansion and consolidation of the Ethiopian state, diplomatic relations with European powers, the conflict with Italy and victory at the Battle of Adwa, and the final years of his reign.
Marcus also published a number of related studies on Menelik's palace, administration, diplomacy, foreign policy and territorial expansion.
The Life and Times of Menelik II was reissued by the Red Sea Press in 1995.
Ethiopia, Britain and the United States
Marcus later extended his diplomatic research into the twentieth century. In 1983 the University of California Press published Ethiopia, Great Britain, and the United States, 1941–1974: The Politics of Empire.
The book examined Ethiopia's international position from the restoration of Haile Selassie following the Italian occupation through the fall of the monarchy in 1974. Particular attention was given to the decline of British influence, Ethiopia's increasingly important relationship with the United States, Cold War strategy in the Horn of Africa, and Haile Selassie's efforts to preserve Ethiopian autonomy within an international system dominated by larger powers.
The book was reviewed by political scientist John Markakis in The Journal of African History.
Haile Selassie
Marcus subsequently turned to a large-scale biography of Haile Selassie. The first volume, Haile Sellassie I: The Formative Years, 1892–1936, was published by the University of California Press in 1987.
The biography traced Tafari Makonnen from his childhood and early political career through his emergence as regent, his accession to the throne as Haile Selassie I, his domestic and foreign policies and the beginning of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.
The work was reviewed in The Journal of African History by historian Alessandro Triulzi.
Marcus intended the 1987 work to be followed by another volume covering the remainder of Haile Selassie's life and reign. He continued working on the project throughout the 1990s and into the final years of his life, including during his Fulbright research period at Addis Ababa University in 1999–2000.
His archive identifies the planned second biography under the title Man Out of Time, covering the years 1936–1975. Drafts of chapters one, two and four survive from around 2001, while another file dated 2002 contains drafts of chapters one through nine described in the archive catalogue as a complete text apart from its introduction.
Contemporary memorials indicated that a continuation of his Haile Selassie biography was expected to appear after his death, but it was never issued as a published second volume.
Haile Selassie's autobiography
Marcus was also involved in the publication of the second volume of Haile Selassie's autobiography, My Life and Ethiopia's Progress. The English edition was published by Michigan State University Press in 1994 as part of the African Historical Sources series.
The volume was edited and annotated by Marcus with Ezekiel Gebissa and Tibebe Eshete, with Gebissa serving as the principal translator from Amharic.
Marcus also published an article in History in Africa discussing the problems involved in translating the emperor's account.
A History of Ethiopia
Marcus's broadest synthetic work was A History of Ethiopia, first published by the University of California Press in 1994.