By David Yeh
Eritrea did not emerge from the Second World War economically empty. It was emptied by the British. When British forces defeated Fascist Italy at Keren in 1941, they inherited an Eritrea possessing an unusually concentrated network of infrastructure for a territory of its size: two major Red Sea ports, an extensive railway system, one of the longest aerial ropeways in the world, repair facilities, power installations, oil-storage depots, factories, mines, salt and potash works, telecommunications, airfields, workshops, hospitals, warehouses, and a substantial skilled urban labor force.
Britain entered Eritrea as a temporary military administrator. It was not acquiring a colony whose assets it was free to consume. Eritrea’s ultimate political status had yet to be determined, and the elementary obligation of an interim authority was therefore to preserve, rather than prejudge, the economic inheritance of the territory. Yet preservation is not what followed. Factories were dismantled. Machinery disappeared. Railway equipment was sold. Port installations were demolished. Oil tanks were destroyed. The celebrated Asmara–Massawa aerial ropeway was dismantled. Equipment and materials were shipped to British possessions and other destinations across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Buildings that had taken enormous resources to construct were reduced to scrap.
The significance of this destruction becomes still more troubling when placed beside Britain’s preferred political solution for Eritrea. London opposed the emergence of an independent Eritrean state and advocated partition: the western lowlands and northern Eritrea were to be attached to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, while the remainder was to be joined to Ethiopia.
Economic viability therefore was not an abstract academic question. It was inseparable from the political struggle over whether Eritrea should continue to exist as a territorial unit at all.
That creates a disturbing historical sequence. Britain administered Eritrea. Britain stripped away substantial portions of its productive capital. British officials then questioned whether the diminished territory possessed the economic resources necessary for independent statehood. And Britain simultaneously advanced a plan that would have dismembered Eritrea, transferring territory in the west and north toward the Sudan under British influence. The contradiction deserves to be stated plainly:
An occupying power cannot dismantle a country’s economy and then cite the resulting weakness as evidence that the country is incapable of standing on its own. That is not a neutral assessment of economic viability. It is the manufacture of the conditions upon which a predetermined political argument can conveniently rest.
From Military Occupation to Economic Liquidation
British explanations generally presented the removals as legitimate disposal of Italian enemy property, military surplus, or installations lacking sufficient “present or future economic value.” Some proceeds were justified as necessary to meet occupation expenses.
But the physical record makes that defense increasingly difficult to sustain. What military necessity explains the destruction of a hospital What strategic calculation made a cement factory economically worthless? What enemy threat was posed by salt works, potash production, railway wagons, oil-storage tanks, refrigeration equipment, repair workshops, commercial port facilities, housing, or machinery capable of supporting a peacetime economy?
And what justification can be offered for demolitions at Zula, Assab, Otumlo, Marsa Fatma and elsewhere, far beyond what could reasonably be characterized as the disposal of a single obsolete naval establishment?
The argument that some materials recovered from demolished structures were reused to repair buildings or construct schools and medical facilities does not resolve the central issue. Destroying a costly, serviceable installation in order to recover a fraction of its value as scrap is not economic development. It is liquidation.
A scrap dealer may profit by tearing apart a machine worth thousands in order to sell its metal for hundreds. A government responsible for the long-term welfare of the territory cannot call the same transaction sound economic stewardship—particularly when the people who inherit the territory must eventually pay to replace what was destroyed.
If salvaged materials were indeed redirected toward Eritrean schools and medical centers on a meaningful scale, the proposition should be demonstrable through inventories, construction records, valuations, and accounts showing what was removed, what was reused, where it was reused, and at what value. Assertions of beneficial recycling cannot substitute for an accounting of the vastly greater productive capital that disappeared. The crucial question is therefore not whether Britain recovered useful scrap from Eritrea. It is why so much of Eritrea had to become scrap in the first place.
A Country Dismantled Piece by Piece
The destruction was neither isolated nor trivial. It extended across transportation, industry, maritime infrastructure, energy, mining, communications, housing, and public facilities.
Massawa suffered especially heavily. Installations associated with the naval complex were demolished, including scores of buildings and supporting facilities. Among the losses described by contemporary critics was a modern hospital complex. Floating docks, cranes, dredging equipment and other maritime assets were dismantled or removed. Hundreds of oil-storage reservoirs in the Massawa area were reportedly destroyed.
At nearby Otumlo, approximately 500 oil reservoirs were demolished. At Marsa Fatma, potash installations were dismantled. At Zula, hundreds of substantial houses originally constructed for Italian personnel were destroyed rather than preserved for civilian use. On Nacura, machinery installed for oil extraction was removed.
Eritrea’s industrial base suffered similar losses. Cement production, salt works, mining machinery, refrigeration equipment, workshops and other productive assets were dismantled, liquidated, exported, or rendered unusable. Equipment reportedly found its way to destinations including Sudan, Aden, Kenya, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Malta and elsewhere within or connected to Britain’s imperial logistical system.
Transportation infrastructure was another major casualty. The approximately seventy-five-kilometer Asmara–Massawa aerial ropeway, one of the outstanding engineering achievements of its period and capable of transporting heavy freight between the Red Sea coast and the Eritrean highlands, was dismantled and sold. Whatever argument might be made about its operating costs, its removal eliminated an existing transportation asset connecting Eritrea’s principal port with its capital and industrial center.
Railway assets were likewise disposed of. Hundreds of wagons, track, points, turntables, motors, spare materials and other equipment disappeared from Eritrea. Materials reportedly intended for railway expansion toward the western interior and Ethiopia were sold or exported.
The economic logic is difficult to reconcile with the subsequent characterization of Eritrea as a territory suffering from inadequate resources and limited development potential. A country cannot be criticized for possessing insufficient transportation infrastructure after existing transportation infrastructure has been dismantled by the authority administering it.
Assab provides perhaps an even more revealing example. Extensive demolition reportedly reduced the capacity of Eritrea’s second major port dramatically. Yet commercial traffic through Assab subsequently expanded as Ethiopian foreign trade increased.
That fact alone exposes the weakness of the claim that such infrastructure possessed little “present or future economic value.” If trade expanded even after capacity had been severely reduced, then the destroyed capacity plainly had potential economic usefulness.
The same principle applies elsewhere. Hospitals treat civilians. Cement factories build cities. Salt works produce commodities. Potash plants process resources. Oil tanks store fuel. Railways move freight. Workshops repair machinery. Ports facilitate commerce.
These were not abstract entries in an Italian military ledger. They were the physical foundations from which a postwar Eritrean economy could have been built.
The Machinery of Dispossession
The scale and organization of the removals also matter because they distinguish systematic liquidation from spontaneous wartime looting. Disposal proceeded through British military and administrative structures. Assets were inspected, inventoried, valued, catalogued, dismantled and sold. The East Africa Disposals Board in Nairobi played a central role in handling surplus property throughout the region. Engineers and technical personnel could dismantle heavy machinery and infrastructure that ordinary looters could never have removed.
Steel was unbolted. Motors were extracted. Machinery was disassembled. Railway equipment was loaded for transport. Copper, structural iron and reusable industrial components were collected and shipped through imperial logistical networks. The process converted Eritrea’s fixed capital into somebody else’s movable property. That distinction is fundamental.
A factory located in Eritrea employed workers in Eritrea, processed goods in Eritrea, generated economic activity in Eritrea and represented capital available to Eritrea’s future government. Once dismantled and shipped abroad, it ceased to perform any of those functions. The proceeds of disposal could appear as credits in British administrative accounts. But Eritrea inherited the missing factory. Britain received liquidity. Eritrea inherited the hole where the asset had stood.
Sylvia Pankhurst: Witness to the Destruction
Among the most persistent contemporary critics was the British suffragist, anti-fascist campaigner, unrepentant ethiophile and journalist E. Sylvia Pankhurst. Through New Times and Ethiopia News, her pamphlet Why Are We Destroying the Eritrean Ports?, and later “Eritrea on the Eve“, Pankhurst documented and publicized the dismantling of Eritrean infrastructure. Her reports challenged British claims that the removals represented harmless disposal of surplus military property.
Her central moral question was devastatingly simple: how could Britain justify destroying expensive productive installations in an African territory whose inhabitants had not consented to their removal and whose political future had not even been decided? Her criticism irritated British officials sufficiently that internal correspondence expressed extraordinary hostility toward her campaigning. Yet Pankhurst’s political position contained a profound contradiction from an Eritrean perspective. She fiercely opposed British destruction of Eritrea’s economic assets while simultaneously advocating incorporation of Eritrea into Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia. She defended the integrity of Eritrea’s factories while denying the political argument for an independent Eritrean state.
Her evidence concerning British dismantling therefore remains important, but her preferred solution to Eritrea’s political future must be separated from her documentation of British conduct.
Destroy the Economy, Question the Nation
The most consequential issue is the relationship between economic dismantling and Britain’s proposed political settlement. Britain eventually advocated partitioning Eritrea. Under the Bevin–Sforza approach and related British thinking, western Eritrea was envisaged for attachment to the Sudan, while other portions would be incorporated into Ethiopia. Such proposals would have erased Eritrea as a political unit.
The western lowlands and northern Eritrea were particularly significant because they bordered Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Transfer of those territories would have enlarged the Sudanese sphere under British authority, give it mineral rich areas and fundamentally altered Eritrea’s territorial inheritance. Against that background, arguments about Eritrea’s supposed economic weakness cannot be treated as politically innocent.
The stripping of infrastructure weakened employment, industrial production, transportation capacity, public revenues and the prospects for domestic capital accumulation. The closure or dismantling of productive facilities displaced workers and deprived local entrepreneurs of opportunities. The destruction of transport infrastructure increased the difficulty and cost of moving commodities between Eritrea’s highlands, lowlands and ports. Then came the political question: Could such a territory survive independently?
But which Eritrea was being evaluated—the Eritrea Britain encountered in 1941, with its accumulated infrastructure intact, or the Eritrea that remained after years of dismantling and disposal? That distinction changes everything. Economic “non-viability” was not simply discovered. To a significant degree, the conditions used to sustain that argument had been aggravated by British policy itself.
One need not claim that every dismantled machine was removed pursuant to a single secret master plan to recognize the larger convergence of policy. Britain had financial incentives to liquidate former Italian assets. Its imperial system could absorb useful machinery elsewhere. It had strategic interests in Sudan. And its preferred diplomatic solution rejected Eritrean independence in favor of partition.
Economic liquidation and political partition therefore moved in the same direction: both weakened the material and territorial foundations of an independent Eritrean state. That convergence is the indictment.
The Human Cost of Turning Factories into Scrap
Infrastructure does not exist separately from people. Every dismantled factory meant jobs lost. Every workshop removed meant mechanics without work. Every transportation asset destroyed meant higher costs for merchants and farmers. Every industrial machine shipped abroad represented productive capacity unavailable to Eritrean entrepreneurs.
Massawa was particularly vulnerable. Port workers, artisans, mechanics, railway employees, factory workers and tradesmen depended upon the industrial economy surrounding the port. Dismantling those installations therefore dismantled livelihoods.
The destruction of the aerial ropeway imposed another long-term cost. Freight that could have moved mechanically between Massawa and Asmara increasingly depended upon road transport, requiring vehicles, imported fuel, tires, spare parts and maintenance.
The broader effect was cumulative. Remove a factory and industrial employment falls. Remove transportation infrastructure and production becomes more expensive. Remove port equipment and trade capacity contracts. Remove mining machinery and mineral production declines. Remove workshops and maintaining the remaining machinery becomes harder. Then point to unemployment, weak production, limited revenue and inadequate infrastructure as evidence of economic backwardness. That is how economic destruction can become political evidence against its victim.
The Archives and the Unfinished Accounting
One of the ironies of Britain’s administration is that an empire famous for recordkeeping preserved much of the documentary trail necessary to investigate its own conduct.
Relevant materials survive in Britain’s National Archives at Kew, including War Office, Foreign Office, Admiralty and occupation-administration files. Disposal records, correspondence, inventories, policy memoranda, financial accounts and shipping documentation provide the means for a far more systematic accounting than has yet entered popular discussion. These records deserve rigorous examination.
Every major installation should be traced: its condition in 1941, its estimated value, the authority ordering its disposal, the stated justification, the purchaser or recipient, the sale price, the destination of the machinery, and the ultimate disposition of the proceeds. Such an audit would move the discussion beyond rhetoric. It would answer the most basic questions: What did Britain find in Eritrea? What did Britain destroy? What did Britain remove? Who received it? How much money was obtained? And what was left for Eritreans when Britain departed? Only after those questions are answered can the full economic cost of the BMA period be calculated.
If the archival record substantiates the scale of losses described by contemporary observers, then the question of restitution cannot simply be dismissed as historical grievance. It becomes a question of identifiable property, measurable economic loss, and the obligations of a temporary administrator toward a territory whose future it had no unilateral right to impoverish.
Britain Did Not Discover an Economically Weak Eritrea—It Helped Create One
The history of British rule in Eritrea between 1941 and 1952 cannot be reduced to the benign language of “disposal,” “salvage,” and “surplus enemy property.” Behind those bureaucratic words stood factories dismantled, machinery exported, railway equipment removed, oil reservoirs demolished, port facilities gutted, industrial installations liquidated, transportation systems broken apart, workers displaced, and productive capital converted into cash or transferred elsewhere. Britain entered Eritrea as a temporary administrator. It behaved too often like a liquidator. And therein lies the central historical indictment.
Britain did not merely preside over an economically weakened Eritrea and then conclude, with detached imperial wisdom, that the territory might be incapable of independent existence. British policy itself contributed materially to that weakness. The same power that dismantled significant elements of Eritrea’s economic infrastructure subsequently participated in international deliberations over whether the diminished territory was economically viable—and advocated a political settlement that would have partitioned it, attaching western areas to Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and other portions to Ethiopia. The sequence cannot simply be ignored.
First came the dismantling. Then came the diagnosis of weakness. Then came the prescription of partition.
Whether every act of liquidation was individually ordered for the explicit purpose of destroying Eritrean viability is a question that must be established document by document. But the broader historical contradiction is already unmistakable: Britain helped diminish the economic capacity of a territory whose alleged economic insufficiency was then invoked in arguments against its independent future.
Eritrea was effectively placed before the international community after part of its economic foundation had already been carried away. A country stripped of machinery was described as underdeveloped. A territory deprived of productive assets was questioned for lacking sufficient revenue. A transportation network that had been dismantled became evidence of inadequate infrastructure. And a weakened economy became an argument for denying the very sovereignty through which Eritreans might have rebuilt it.
That was more than poor administration. It was an extraordinary inversion of responsibility: the damage inflicted upon Eritrea was transformed into evidence against Eritrea.
The surviving British archives therefore deserve not merely scholarly attention but a comprehensive historical audit. Britain should open the relevant record fully, account for the assets destroyed, sold and transferred, acknowledge the economic consequences of its administration, and confront legitimate claims for restitution where the evidence establishes loss.
For Eritrea, the issue is larger than compensation. It is about correcting a historical narrative that too often begins with the poverty left behind while forgetting the productive assets that existed before they were dismantled.
The ruins were real. The ships carrying machinery away were real. The factories that disappeared were real. The unemployment that followed was real. And the partition proposals were real.
What must no longer be accepted as self-evident is the conclusion subsequently drawn from those ruins—that Eritrea had somehow proved itself economically incapable of independence. A nation cannot fairly be declared non-viable by the power that helped dismantle the means by which it might have demonstrated its viability.
Britain’s administration of Eritrea should therefore be remembered not simply for what it governed between 1941 and 1952, but for what disappeared under its watch—and for the political future that Britain proposed after so much had disappeared. The ultimate indictment is devastatingly simple: Britain helped strip Eritrea of its economic inheritance, pointed to the resulting weakness as evidence of non-viability, and then proposed solving the problem by erasing Eritrea from the map.
Here are a sample of the destruction from Sylvia Pankhurst‘s “Eritrea on the Eve“
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