In 1924, Gäbrä Krestos Täklä Haymanot (1892–1932) wrote a history that looked far beyond his home in Addis Ababa. His Aččer yä’aläm tarik bamareña, or Short History of the World in Amharic, concisely surveyed two millennia of human history for the Ethiopian reader, all in a single panoptic narrative. He began with a chapter on ancient history entitled “The People of India” and concluded with the contemporary “Ethiopia of Empress Zäwditu's Time,” attending along the way to such diverse subjects as “The History of Japan,” “The Roman State in the Time of Christ,” “The United States,” “How the French Became a Mob,” “The Vast Wisdom of the Last One Hundred Years,” and “The War of Emperor Menilek and Italy.” As these topics suggest, Gäbrä Krestos made a radical break with the conventions of vernacular historiography. His innovations were threefold. He transgressed the received generic boundaries of royal biography, dynastic history, and universal chronography, disregarding centuries of scholarly precedent. He also reconceptualized the historical subject, moving beyond the Solomonid dynastic drama to consider foreign actors and global processes of change. And perhaps most significantly, he envisioned a new kind of accessible history to instruct Ethiopia's emerging reading public. This was in some respects his boldest innovation: he wrote popular history, not traditionalist scholarship, and he believed it would contribute to Ethiopia's intellectual and national emancipation. The Short History befit the new era.

So did its author. As a historian, Gäbrä Krestos was quite unlike the court historians and church scholars who preceded him. His professional station was entirely new: he was a civil servant, a public intellectual, the manager of a state press, and the editor of Ethiopia's most popular Amharic newspaper. The nature of his literary output was equally novel. His historical writings were neither observational testaments nor elaborations of an inherited tradition, but were instead synthetic attempts to grapple with foreign ideas and the problems of the era's burgeoning culture of reform and modernization. He also embraced a new text medium: unlike most of his predecessors and some of his peers, Gäbrä Krestos was committed to the educational power of print, a technology then transforming intellectual culture throughout the Red Sea region.