Haile Selassie I

His role approximated Europe's absolutist rulers of the transitional period between feudalism and capitalism. Like his Western counterparts, Haile Sellassie introduced a standing army, a permanent bureaucracy, new forms of taxation, uniform laws, and the mechanisms of a national economy. He also came to control the landed aristocracy, whose authority he redefined and whose functions he redirected to strengthen his increasingly centralized state. The emperor supported his programs through more efficient exploitation of the existing modes of agricultural production, in whose interstices merchant capitalism grew in cooperation with the ruling elites. Even though the Ethiopian absolutist social formation anticipated a more advanced method of production, it contained elements of social organization that characterized earlier centralized empires.