A Modern History of the Somali by I. M. Lewis (1965 to 2002): editions and debate

The author

Ioan Myrddin Lewis (1930 to 2014) was a British social anthropologist at the London School of Economics. He did fieldwork among the pastoral Somali of the British Somaliland Protectorate in the 1950s and published on Somali society for more than fifty years (I. M. Lewis, Wikipedia; Peoples of the Horn of Africa, Internet Archive; A Pastoral Democracy, Internet Archive). His other main books are listed on Books about Somalis, 1960 to 1990.

The editions

• 1965: The Modern History of Somaliland: From Nation to State (Internet Archive).
• 1980: a revised edition, A Modern History of Somalia: Nation and State in the Horn of Africa.
• 2002: the fourth edition, A Modern History of the Somali: Nation and State in the Horn of Africa, published by James Currey (Oxford), Btec Books (Hargeysa) and Ohio University Press (Journal of African History review, Cambridge).

What it covers

The book runs from the Somali people's origins and the spread of Islam, through the coastal sultanates and the 19th-century scramble for the Horn, the Dervish movement, Italian and British rule and the nationalist movement, to independence in 1960, the civilian governments, the military government of 1969 to 1991, and, in later editions, the collapse of the state and the rise of Somaliland (Powell's, publisher description). Throughout, Lewis explains politics through the system of clan families and lineages that he had studied in the field.

How it was received

• Praise. The historian Said Samatar wrote in African Studies Review that Lewis "writes authoritatively, magisterially and often brilliantly" (Powell's).
• Reviews of the 2002 edition. It was reviewed in the Journal of African History in 2004 under the title "Clan and State" (Cambridge), and in the Netherlands by Erasmus University scholars (Erasmus University, review record). One bookseller's summary of the 2002 edition notes that Lewis maintains his reading that the civil wars reflect the divisions of the traditional clan system (Goodreads).
• The clan debate. Abdi Samatar's article "Destruction of State and Society in Somalia: Beyond the Tribal Convention" (Journal of Modern African Studies, 1992) argued against explaining the crisis through clan alone and pointed to the state, class and history (Cambridge Core). A 1994 article in the refugee journal Refuge summed up this view as going beyond scholarship that reduces the causes to "Somali segmentary clanism" (Refuge, York University). The essays in Ali Jimale Ahmed's The Invention of Somalia (1995) made related arguments about the place of southern and farming communities.

Where to read it

• 1965 edition: Internet Archive
• 2002 edition in a library: WorldCat

Related pages

• Books about Somalis, 1960 to 1990
• Clans and lineage
• Books about Somalis: every era