Book excerpt: Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia offers an original perspective on how the rulers of Ethiopia - one of the great subcenters of agricultural innovation and development - used land to support their dominion. Crummey draws on all the surviving documents pertaining to the holding and granting of agricultural land in the Ethiopian highlands from the thirteenth to the twentieth century. By examining how social relations affected the conditions for economic production and how people of power drew on the wealth created by society's basic producers, he provides new insight into how ordinary farming and herding folk were incorporated into and affected by the institutions that ruled them.