Capital mobility and institutional inertia: Ethiopia’s two millennia of spatial statecraft

Abstract

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.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of Urban Affairs, 2026 · DOI ↗