1 00:00:01,020 --> 00:00:05,300 Thank you very much, Bill, for that warm invitation. I was so happy to present, you know, 2 00:00:05,300 --> 00:00:10,650 which is obviously one of the most important places to discuss about intellectual history of global intellectual history. 3 00:00:10,650 --> 00:00:18,000 And I'm very happy to see a lot of friends, a lot of scholars admire and many others here really excited about that. 4 00:00:18,000 --> 00:00:22,920 In a way, it's great that this book is coming back to Oxford because this started in Oxford, 5 00:00:22,920 --> 00:00:28,260 so it started with a wonderful conference organised by the Taliban, now a close on dynasty. 6 00:00:28,260 --> 00:00:36,330 I think it was back in 2016 or something like that. And then after the conference is over and I see it has now become one of my closest friends 7 00:00:36,330 --> 00:00:41,730 here that we sat down to discuss about this very interesting and strange term dynasty. 8 00:00:41,730 --> 00:00:46,020 And he was working as part of Natalia's project and was mentioning how the 9 00:00:46,020 --> 00:00:50,340 project was discovering the fact that the word dynasty got its modern sense. 10 00:00:50,340 --> 00:00:54,210 Very neat. It was, I mean, in ancient Greece, the word comes from ancient Greece. 11 00:00:54,210 --> 00:01:03,600 It was used for a variety of things. For example, it Aristotle as a synonym for power and domination as meaning and oligarchy power play. 12 00:01:03,600 --> 00:01:07,320 It was particularly used for rulers of Egypt and then in the Middle Easterners, 13 00:01:07,320 --> 00:01:12,510 also for rulers of China, but was never really very commonly used for rulers of Europe. 14 00:01:12,510 --> 00:01:15,090 And it was not used in the way that we understand it to be, 15 00:01:15,090 --> 00:01:20,610 which is something like a hereditary succession of rulers, particularly true matrilineal succession. 16 00:01:20,610 --> 00:01:28,410 And then I was like, I had done my kids as part of this project in Germany in Heidelberg called Nationalising the Dynasty, 17 00:01:28,410 --> 00:01:33,630 which explored the relation between dynasty and nationalism from the early modern to the modern period. 18 00:01:33,630 --> 00:01:39,210 And the arguments in my in a way was not about nationalising the dynasty, but about dynasty sizing the nation. 19 00:01:39,210 --> 00:01:43,200 How the Indian nation state, particularly the Indian nation state, 20 00:01:43,200 --> 00:01:47,610 but also various kinds of peasant understandings of collective sovereignty and so on, 21 00:01:47,610 --> 00:01:52,890 are imagined through monarchic dynasty categories and the invention of tradition that happens there. 22 00:01:52,890 --> 00:02:00,810 And and to our brainstorming, really, the idea for a new conference came up, which is how does the word dynasty actually get mobilised? 23 00:02:00,810 --> 00:02:07,980 When does it become a global concept? What are the factors driving its globalisation and to our research and to that wonderful conference? 24 00:02:07,980 --> 00:02:12,630 And I can see many of the participants of that conference here today, including fans. 25 00:02:12,630 --> 00:02:20,730 And it has been there are we realised that the world becomes globalised through very complex processes of capitalism, 26 00:02:20,730 --> 00:02:27,690 capitalist primitive accumulation and the spread of empire and nation state models of centralised state sovereignty. 27 00:02:27,690 --> 00:02:33,300 The spread of certain ideas about patriarchy, but also, of course, resistance to these things as well. 28 00:02:33,300 --> 00:02:40,290 And the role that Empire plays that its colonial colonialism plays in the globalisation of this category is of supreme importance. 29 00:02:40,290 --> 00:02:44,760 And in a way, what you realised is to undertake a kind of global concept. 30 00:02:44,760 --> 00:02:52,260 History of global intellectual history of the concept of dynasty is to be naturalised the concept and provincial as the concept. 31 00:02:52,260 --> 00:02:56,910 Because growing up in India, and I'm sure its experience of many others growing up in the global south, 32 00:02:56,910 --> 00:03:00,750 we often use European categories almost without TV. For a second time. 33 00:03:00,750 --> 00:03:02,820 We speak about, I don't know, the Mughal Dynasty, 34 00:03:02,820 --> 00:03:07,800 the more interesting the book that in the Senate classic Indian Nationalist School Textbook would be found. 35 00:03:07,800 --> 00:03:14,940 The history of in India, which has existed through the history of dynasties. One thing self series like the productivity of urban series and so on. 36 00:03:14,940 --> 00:03:21,480 You have the more intimacy the Gupta Dynasty, the Mughal dynasty and the nation states history is written to instil dynasty. 37 00:03:21,480 --> 00:03:25,860 So how does this way of recounting national history as dynasty history come into being? 38 00:03:25,860 --> 00:03:33,300 And what happens if the impact of this kind of elitist history making those with some of the questions that impelled our endeavour? 39 00:03:33,300 --> 00:03:40,410 And after this conference in Birmingham, it came out as a special issue in 2020 in the journal Global Intellectual History. 40 00:03:40,410 --> 00:03:45,480 So I will present here on the bits of it, which is more my own, 41 00:03:45,480 --> 00:03:51,120 but I hope to put that into conversation, especially with you in Iran, with the discoveries by others. 42 00:03:51,120 --> 00:03:53,040 Because one data was presented, for example, 43 00:03:53,040 --> 00:04:01,260 speaks about how the Chinese ideal of domestic cycles and the Korean ideas are replaced by new ideas of the eternal dynasty, 44 00:04:01,260 --> 00:04:04,800 which are brought in from Japan from our ziggurat. 45 00:04:04,800 --> 00:04:10,620 Wonderfully about how Ethiopian conceptions of dynasty were again changed through imposition of European, 46 00:04:10,620 --> 00:04:15,330 as well as Japanese ideas in reaction to the threat of European colonialism. 47 00:04:15,330 --> 00:04:20,580 David Mamet's talk to the special issue about how ideas about karma and karmic rebirth 48 00:04:20,580 --> 00:04:25,020 and what effect would be ideals of rulership are replaced by dynastic ideals. 49 00:04:25,020 --> 00:04:32,000 In the late 19th century, as leaders back in Thailand in style because, again, of the threads of British and French colonial invasions. 50 00:04:32,000 --> 00:04:35,550 So there are lots of really exciting stories to be told today. 51 00:04:35,550 --> 00:04:40,740 I will focus more on Europe and Southeast Asia, but I will also bring in a bit of Japan itself. 52 00:04:40,740 --> 00:04:44,550 So just to give a bit of introduction to what I'm seeing, 53 00:04:44,550 --> 00:04:48,960 this paper argues that far from being a value neutral description for political 54 00:04:48,960 --> 00:04:53,970 forms nowadays associated especially with pre-modern and non-Western societies, 55 00:04:53,970 --> 00:05:00,000 the modern concept of Dynasty has been a politically motivated, modern intellectual invention. 56 00:05:00,000 --> 00:05:07,140 By making this claim, I do not intend to ignore various historical manifestations of heritage through transmission of power. 57 00:05:07,140 --> 00:05:11,490 But I would argue that different societies that possess vastly divergent 58 00:05:11,490 --> 00:05:16,800 structures of organising political authority only relatively recently have these 59 00:05:16,800 --> 00:05:27,360 heterogeneous forms been rendered commenced through the conceptual abstraction of dynasty understood as a line of rulers belonging to the same family. 60 00:05:27,360 --> 00:05:29,940 This essay focuses on the political, 61 00:05:29,940 --> 00:05:36,390 social and economic stakes involved in the spread of the term on a planetary scale across the 19th and 20th centuries. 62 00:05:36,390 --> 00:05:44,590 So how does Dynasty become a global abstraction, a concept that can be used to narrate the past and present of human societies across the world? 63 00:05:44,590 --> 00:05:52,380 And my argument is Dynasty becomes this global abstraction described those signifier or imagining the stable perpetuation of sovereignty, 64 00:05:52,380 --> 00:05:56,880 the constant reproduction of power and property, at least for the ruling classes. 65 00:05:56,880 --> 00:06:04,920 So this keep a very synoptic overview for many advocates of a strong sovereign nation state, whether in France, Germany, India or Japan. 66 00:06:04,920 --> 00:06:11,610 Dynasty offered a pillow for imagining the national past. So unlike what we sometimes think, dynasties replaced by nation. 67 00:06:11,610 --> 00:06:19,980 In fact, if we look at nationalist historiography, the dynasty past often acts as a pre-history and or a backbone for modern national sovereignty. 68 00:06:19,980 --> 00:06:28,470 So we notice in Britain on The Tudors and the Stewarts and all of that in the history of France and the Capuchins and all of that, 69 00:06:28,470 --> 00:06:35,100 of course, same in India or Japan. Dynasty becomes a dialectical police aggression of the nation to come, 70 00:06:35,100 --> 00:06:43,680 as well as a political form to overcome and transcended, but to transfer me to incorporation rather than absolute negation. 71 00:06:43,680 --> 00:06:51,210 Dynasty offers a way to imagine the nation itself as a primordial entity fuelled by the continuity of birth and blood. 72 00:06:51,210 --> 00:06:58,740 Indeed, by the perpetration of sovereignty in the extra European, both British and exemplary colonial administrators, 73 00:06:58,740 --> 00:07:05,730 monarchies and dynasties, nice political systems to create modern sovereign state to maximise fiscal exploitation. 74 00:07:05,730 --> 00:07:16,630 And, of course, they pacify militant and rebellious populations. So my my discussion today basically attempts to expose the. 75 00:07:16,630 --> 00:07:23,590 Mention of Dynasty, the erection and globalisation of the sovereign national under colonial state to subjugation of the ball, 76 00:07:23,590 --> 00:07:28,050 tonight's multitudes construction of dominant racial national identities, 77 00:07:28,050 --> 00:07:35,280 real auditing of regimes of property and economic exploitation, and assertion of problem hypothetical power. 78 00:07:35,280 --> 00:07:51,480 I problem. It's a conventional narrative of world history. We want millennial freeze is. 79 00:07:51,480 --> 00:08:03,600 Ultimately, democracy. I salute you. 80 00:08:03,600 --> 00:08:15,430 It's kind of breaking up. Can you hear me? 81 00:08:15,430 --> 00:08:30,990 Well. OK. 82 00:08:30,990 --> 00:09:34,290 I think he's probably going to. Join again, so we'll just wait for a minute. 83 00:09:34,290 --> 00:09:37,920 Hello. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, yes. 84 00:09:37,920 --> 00:09:42,150 Oh, brilliant. Seemed there was a bit of an internet as it always happens. 85 00:09:42,150 --> 00:09:53,340 If there is an internet, even there has been, it's a disruption. So, so basically, my argument was that the two seemingly antithetical models, 86 00:09:53,340 --> 00:10:01,680 Dynasty and Nation are exposed as possessing a secret inner complicity father and considering peasant voices from India. 87 00:10:01,680 --> 00:10:10,530 I argued that the dynasty to the nation narrative suppresses alternate, more poorly archaic conceptions of power, lineage and solidarity. 88 00:10:10,530 --> 00:10:18,120 However, in India and undoubtedly elsewhere in the extreme European world to these oligarchic conceptions which cannot be reduced either 89 00:10:18,120 --> 00:10:26,430 to dynasty AutoNation retains traction well into the 20th century and of nourished democratic and revolutionary politics. 90 00:10:26,430 --> 00:10:30,420 Ultimately, I conclude that deconstructing the category of dynasty, 91 00:10:30,420 --> 00:10:40,610 how it becomes a global abstraction can ultimately help us excavate more heterogeneous pasts and imagine more egalitarian futures. 92 00:10:40,610 --> 00:10:46,040 So I begin my story with France, particularly in the late 18th century, 93 00:10:46,040 --> 00:10:54,980 and there's a very interesting controversy between Voltaire and as Classicist named Pierre or L'échec. 94 00:10:54,980 --> 00:11:23,410 Well, there's. Look, if this Egypt. 95 00:11:23,410 --> 00:11:38,550 To which a female dynasty and its. Lush, you know. 96 00:11:38,550 --> 00:11:45,720 French. Thought there was a controversy about. 97 00:11:45,720 --> 00:11:54,480 And power and but by the early 19th century, the concept of Dynasty had acquired a more proper, stable and fixed meaning. 98 00:11:54,480 --> 00:12:00,840 Am I oracle or is there still any problems in the connexion? There was a bit of a problem. 99 00:12:00,840 --> 00:12:09,630 Maybe it's now, but if there's a problem, if you could just put in the time box, then I was just, Yeah, OK, brilliant. 100 00:12:09,630 --> 00:12:16,520 Can you hear me again? Yes. Seems probably St Andrew's just has, I don't know, a sea breaking the wind connexion or something. 101 00:12:16,520 --> 00:12:24,900 Some occasionally happens. By the 1830s, the concept of Dynasty required a much more fixed meaning in France, 102 00:12:24,900 --> 00:12:31,230 and a very important historian is somebody who is very familiar to historians judicially select. 103 00:12:31,230 --> 00:12:36,900 In his book Eastward to France, the second volume published in 1833, 104 00:12:36,900 --> 00:12:42,180 John Wesley argued that it was very important for a nation to have a hereditary succession 105 00:12:42,180 --> 00:12:48,000 of rulers because basically his argument was if a nation is to be a stable entity, 106 00:12:48,000 --> 00:12:52,950 there has to be stability of heritage, succession through men and women. 107 00:12:52,950 --> 00:12:58,740 According to him, describe this heritage and connexion, and he speaks about the female element as the mobile element. 108 00:12:58,740 --> 00:13:03,390 Because, of course, in the patrilineal society, women are the ones going to their husband's home, 109 00:13:03,390 --> 00:13:07,860 whereas men are constructed as the fixed element, the stable element. 110 00:13:07,860 --> 00:13:11,520 So he sees the fixative of the dynasty in France. 111 00:13:11,520 --> 00:13:20,070 The dynasty is one of the things that is most contributed to guarantee the unity the personality of our mobile fatherland. 112 00:13:20,070 --> 00:13:26,220 The term he uses is part three and then is that he quotes the Swiss historian Simon B. 113 00:13:26,220 --> 00:13:29,250 Since Monday's book is called It's the Frostier published in Volume, 114 00:13:29,250 --> 00:13:37,840 the Volume five published in 1823 that in order for a state to have indivisible sovereignty over 80 and even these niebler and a national, 115 00:13:37,840 --> 00:13:40,200 it's a national that's, 116 00:13:40,200 --> 00:13:47,250 you know, if succession always this would be guaranteed of succession always happens to the eldest male when this doesn't happen, 117 00:13:47,250 --> 00:13:53,430 as in the case of Spain and Naples, then foreign succession happens and all sorts of problems happen. 118 00:13:53,430 --> 00:14:00,270 Now why in France is this obsession with the personality of the fatherland with indivisible sovereignty and so on? 119 00:14:00,270 --> 00:14:07,260 Now, generations of historians like Lynne Hunt and others have argued that the French Revolution produced a lot of patriarchal discourses, 120 00:14:07,260 --> 00:14:10,860 many of which we find in the opposition. When Marie Antoinette. 121 00:14:10,860 --> 00:14:18,480 Icardi has argued most recently that in the early 19th century, France male nationalists, intellectuals, especially historians, 122 00:14:18,480 --> 00:14:24,630 often rewrote history as the history of men because women were supposed to be confined to the private sphere 123 00:14:24,630 --> 00:14:31,650 of domesticity and the public sphere had to be a national arena in order to construct the Nation-State. 124 00:14:31,650 --> 00:14:36,300 The the construction of sovereignty had to be a patriarchal construction. 125 00:14:36,300 --> 00:14:47,110 It had to be one guaranteed to the succession to men, and patriarchy was the basis of the understanding of nation states in these kinds of discourses. 126 00:14:47,110 --> 00:15:11,970 We find. So I don't know if you can hear me. 127 00:15:11,970 --> 00:15:50,790 I'll put it up, put it in the chart. So are you going? 128 00:15:50,790 --> 00:15:56,430 I mean, ultimately, again, it has to be some extremely interesting northern winds. 129 00:15:56,430 --> 00:16:02,430 So he goes in his outlines of the philosophy of right basically argue was established in 1820. 130 00:16:02,430 --> 00:16:08,790 He argues that one of the most recent developments in modern history has been the development of a monarchical constitution, 131 00:16:08,790 --> 00:16:14,940 with succession to the throne firmly fixed on heritage theory principles in accordance with primogeniture. 132 00:16:14,940 --> 00:16:17,760 And he says, and I quote again, with this development, 133 00:16:17,760 --> 00:16:24,600 monarchy has been brought back to the patriarchal principle in which it had its historical origin. 134 00:16:24,600 --> 00:16:30,480 Now the reason he's saying this is a recent development because he contrast this with mediaeval European cases, 135 00:16:30,480 --> 00:16:34,620 what he calls feudal monarchies, as well as with Islamic monarchies. 136 00:16:34,620 --> 00:16:40,170 So he speaks about the past. So this is probably a reference to the Ottoman Empire, where history is supposed to be history, 137 00:16:40,170 --> 00:16:45,390 not of stability, but of despotism and revolt and tyranny and civil war, 138 00:16:45,390 --> 00:16:50,370 as opposed to the stability of a purely patriarchal, monarchic nation state, 139 00:16:50,370 --> 00:16:55,110 instead of decentralisation of power to feudalism to the Pasha's and so on. 140 00:16:55,110 --> 00:17:02,640 You have this hereditary order. Now why is it so obsessed with having this centralised state and hereditary order? 141 00:17:02,640 --> 00:17:11,940 Because for him in a state, there has to be one sovereign centre, one central locus, and this is the ultimate locus of the decision. 142 00:17:11,940 --> 00:17:21,250 Someone who says it goes German is its will. I will somebody who embodies in short and this is the term will again be found already in June, 143 00:17:21,250 --> 00:17:25,680 Michelin the personality and subjectivity of the state. 144 00:17:25,680 --> 00:17:33,880 So Hegel goes on to say that it is only as a person the monarch that the personality of the state is actual. 145 00:17:33,880 --> 00:17:38,850 So personality piers on this side of the state is embodied in the monarch. 146 00:17:38,850 --> 00:17:46,830 And obviously, therefore, if the state is to be stable, if the state is to have a stable personality, the monarchy has to be stable. 147 00:17:46,830 --> 00:17:56,040 And the only way to do this is to dynasty through history, succession. So he stays in lectures delivered at Heidelberg University in 1817 1818. 148 00:17:56,040 --> 00:18:02,700 The monarch, as the ultimate pinnacle of the subjectivity of certainty, must be made permanent as a result of natural succession. 149 00:18:02,700 --> 00:18:07,740 Now, of course, this can't happen because monarchs die, so that's why you see the dynasty dies out. 150 00:18:07,740 --> 00:18:13,710 The estates of the realm must see to it that a new dynasty ascends to the throne without disturbances. 151 00:18:13,710 --> 00:18:16,800 But this leads Hegel to a bit of a problem now. 152 00:18:16,800 --> 00:18:23,670 He is in a way thinking about sovereignty almost in terms of property, but he doesn't want to admit it. 153 00:18:23,670 --> 00:18:28,200 So he sees that the problem, that thinking that sovereignty resides in a state. 154 00:18:28,200 --> 00:18:34,590 This means as if the state has become the private property of the royal family pre-Vatican two. 155 00:18:34,590 --> 00:18:38,280 But he won't. He doesn't like that idea very much, because if it's private property, 156 00:18:38,280 --> 00:18:42,870 private property is divisible, it can be divided amongst different members of the family. 157 00:18:42,870 --> 00:18:47,790 But those of you from South Asian history would know, for example, the classic problem of Mughal succession, 158 00:18:47,790 --> 00:18:52,530 especially the succession from Babar to my own ego, wants to avoid that kind of a scenario. 159 00:18:52,530 --> 00:19:01,200 So you see, sovereign possession is not the you name of the individual ruler, but is consigned to the dynastic family as a trust. 160 00:19:01,200 --> 00:19:06,510 Therefore, the term he uses is firstly again tomb princely property. 161 00:19:06,510 --> 00:19:15,090 Princely possession no longer denotes a kind of private property revolt against him, but has become state property stocks again, too. 162 00:19:15,090 --> 00:19:20,130 So in a way, its sovereignty is property. Sovereignty is property, but not of a family. 163 00:19:20,130 --> 00:19:26,910 It's a state property. Now he is very concerned with the stability of the state because he takes a number of examples. 164 00:19:26,910 --> 00:19:31,470 It takes the case of the Holy Roman Empire, which did not have a hereditary dynasty succession. 165 00:19:31,470 --> 00:19:38,070 Every monarch, even though it's often passed to the House, does. In the last few centuries, every monarch was theoretically elected every time. 166 00:19:38,070 --> 00:19:44,280 He's afraid of the case of Poland, where also he thinks that the elected monarchy has weakened the state system. 167 00:19:44,280 --> 00:19:51,080 He from a colonial Orientalist perspective. He criticises Arab soldiers and Mongol dynasties. 168 00:19:51,080 --> 00:19:57,450 He uses the term dynasty as a short lived political forms, which could not guarantee peace and stability. 169 00:19:57,450 --> 00:20:01,800 So ultimately, he think that it's the modern European state Prussia of Britain, 170 00:20:01,800 --> 00:20:08,400 these kind of states which have headed the three dynastic succession, which are the best guarantors for sovereignty. 171 00:20:08,400 --> 00:20:15,780 But this is an argument not just made at the level of sovereignty, but also at the level of property legal at the same time, 172 00:20:15,780 --> 00:20:21,030 wants property also to be transported in the same way to hereditary succession. 173 00:20:21,030 --> 00:20:29,970 And in fact, between sovereignty and property. The obvious intrinsic link is what he calls the state of the landed property owners. 174 00:20:29,970 --> 00:20:35,730 So and he sees the estate as summoned and entitled to its political location by but without the 175 00:20:35,730 --> 00:20:41,250 hazards of election while it mirrors in itself the moment the moment of monarchical power. 176 00:20:41,250 --> 00:20:50,670 It also shares the otherwise equal needs and rights of the other extreme that is civil society, and hence it becomes to support at once thrown into. 177 00:20:50,670 --> 00:20:54,840 Now he is also thinking in terms of a reformulation of the family. 178 00:20:54,840 --> 00:21:02,190 He doesn't like big collective kinship groups, somehow steps against these kind of what an India would be called. 179 00:21:02,190 --> 00:21:11,940 You know, the big bombshells are coolers and so on. He once headed the three private succession to the nuclear family got by primogeniture. 180 00:21:11,940 --> 00:21:22,320 Ultimately, my basic argument here is that he shows the kind of very important historical moment when sovereignty is recognised as a form of property, 181 00:21:22,320 --> 00:21:32,070 when the inheritance of property in the age of the globalisation of capitalism and inheritance of sovereignty, the logics are very linked together. 182 00:21:32,070 --> 00:21:39,960 Now what Marx does in perhaps well, what is his earliest, most important kind of big political theory essay? 183 00:21:39,960 --> 00:21:46,200 His critique of Hagos philosophy of right what Marx does is basically to undermine this by critiquing 184 00:21:46,200 --> 00:21:51,900 the idea of what Marx called sovereign private property to reinterpret up again to the Marx's. 185 00:21:51,900 --> 00:21:58,200 That the problem with Hegel is precisely that for Hegel, and he sees more broadly for German political philosophy. 186 00:21:58,200 --> 00:22:06,090 Sovereignty and property have become so intrinsically related that the role of the state becomes basically to protect the property owners. 187 00:22:06,090 --> 00:22:13,170 And we know that this is the basis of Marx's mature critique that ultimately the state is the guarantor of the ruling classes. 188 00:22:13,170 --> 00:22:17,970 But one of the earliest ways in which this comes about is through a critique of Dynasty 189 00:22:17,970 --> 00:22:22,440 of Hugo's conception of the intrinsic relation between sovereignty and property. 190 00:22:22,440 --> 00:22:29,010 Marx uses a lot of irony, so he dismisses Germans as the mistakes of sovereign private property. 191 00:22:29,010 --> 00:22:35,430 People who have completed the two primogeniture becomes from Marx, almost a religion. 192 00:22:35,430 --> 00:22:43,680 He speaks about the sovereign glory. The German word is hellscape, which contains the Godhead Lord and master the sovereign glory of private property. 193 00:22:43,680 --> 00:22:48,740 And basically, Marx wants to deconstruct all of that. Now, 194 00:22:48,740 --> 00:22:53,990 if there's an intrinsic link between state making the transmission of private 195 00:22:53,990 --> 00:22:59,840 property in the age of the rise of global capitalism in the early 19th century, 196 00:22:59,840 --> 00:23:04,220 the question that arises is how does this kind of a categorical confusion, 197 00:23:04,220 --> 00:23:10,370 a kind of unthinkable difference, a non difference between sovereignty and property get globalised. 198 00:23:10,370 --> 00:23:14,210 And in the next section of my work, I focus on India too, 199 00:23:14,210 --> 00:23:19,640 to see how the dynamics and different regions of India of the dynamics of globalisation happens. 200 00:23:19,640 --> 00:23:22,160 So if you think northern India is an example, 201 00:23:22,160 --> 00:23:28,370 we will find that there is no exact words in any of the northern India languages to the best of my knowledge, 202 00:23:28,370 --> 00:23:36,080 which would exactly translate the word dynasty. We one takes the word, for example, Camden, which is the perfect Islamic term. 203 00:23:36,080 --> 00:23:40,580 It was used for a lot of Mughal rulers, as well as for local lineages. Riots? 204 00:23:40,580 --> 00:23:41,450 Well, it's fantastic. 205 00:23:41,450 --> 00:23:49,850 Article in the special issue that I edited basically shows how Camden had very different meanings and it was not in the in the Sikh case, 206 00:23:49,850 --> 00:23:54,020 particularly, she examines. It was not even founded always in blood. 207 00:23:54,020 --> 00:24:02,450 It had many different understandings of kinship, adoption, lineage, female power, etc., which cannot be understood as European kind of matrilineal, 208 00:24:02,450 --> 00:24:10,850 hereditary succession in the way that we can understand it, or if one takes the Sanskrit ActionScript origin but vomit or rather one shot, 209 00:24:10,850 --> 00:24:17,870 one shot in Sanskrit meant originally the bamboo cane or anything and acquired the meaning of the good Monia Williams, 210 00:24:17,870 --> 00:24:23,300 the lion of a pedigree or genealogy from its resemblance to the succession of joints in a bamboo. 211 00:24:23,300 --> 00:24:29,270 But again, I mean, it's very deceptive to translate Bombay as a dynasty. Monty Williams as a classic European oriental. 212 00:24:29,270 --> 00:24:34,190 It struggled how to translate it. He translated it as Lineage Rey's family stock. 213 00:24:34,190 --> 00:24:39,650 Many different things, and all this comes with some colour also used in many northern India languages. 214 00:24:39,650 --> 00:24:43,730 Monty Williams translates as hard to flock assembly its multitude. 215 00:24:43,730 --> 00:24:50,210 Now, my basic argument would be that if one looks at the long delayed political ecology of state formation, 216 00:24:50,210 --> 00:24:57,560 India's river and beds hotbeds of agrarian state formation have for centuries been boarded and crisscrossed by dense forest, 217 00:24:57,560 --> 00:25:05,540 grasslands, deserts, hills and mountains. These hobbit astral nomadic shifting cultivator and forest oriented communities, 218 00:25:05,540 --> 00:25:11,510 which were often only loosely touched by sea power more generally across the subcontinent, 219 00:25:11,510 --> 00:25:16,280 organised faith based and communitarian hierarchies coexisted with plurals and 220 00:25:16,280 --> 00:25:21,410 use of power and pathways of individual and collective autonomy and mobility. 221 00:25:21,410 --> 00:25:31,250 And that's why terms like Raja or bumblebees have never encoded just merely monarchic, meaning they have had much more decentralised implications. 222 00:25:31,250 --> 00:25:37,340 Now, European space, sometimes aware of this. So Voltaire, writing in 1773, speaks about the Maraxus, 223 00:25:37,340 --> 00:25:46,160 and he sees the Jews themselves a chief in friendship whom they do not obey except during war and the obey him very badly. 224 00:25:46,160 --> 00:25:51,560 The Europeans have called him king. This captain of brigands, so much one lavishes this name. 225 00:25:51,560 --> 00:26:00,440 So what I recognise is that in applying the category of king to the as, Europeans are doing a very strange mis recognition. 226 00:26:00,440 --> 00:26:08,420 Another very interesting figure, somebody who in whom I am getting more and more interested because I'm located in Scotland is James Dog, 227 00:26:08,420 --> 00:26:13,700 a Scottish prison officer who served as the British political agent to the West and Rajpoot states. 228 00:26:13,700 --> 00:26:20,090 And recording in Todd's writings is the fact that the British are completely misunderstanding northern Indian politics, 229 00:26:20,090 --> 00:26:22,280 particularly the politics of Rajasthan. 230 00:26:22,280 --> 00:26:30,470 By applying what Todd argues that monarchical principles is that is a term that uses on qualities which were never monarchic in nature, 231 00:26:30,470 --> 00:26:38,570 because rule, because power and authority were distributed amongst prince amongst nobles, amongst broad communities of law and order. 232 00:26:38,570 --> 00:26:42,080 But instead, what the British do is to increase the power of monarchs. 233 00:26:42,080 --> 00:26:46,160 Now, one historical scholarship has shown that this is not just cultural recognition. 234 00:26:46,160 --> 00:26:49,730 This is embedded in the way that colonial capitalism functioned. 235 00:26:49,730 --> 00:26:56,480 For example, to the British opium monopoly, the British wanted to introduce their goods and manufacturing processes into Rajasthan, 236 00:26:56,480 --> 00:27:01,880 and they needed this kind of monarchy's power centres and hereditary understandings of dynasty, 237 00:27:01,880 --> 00:27:06,050 rather than collectivist understandings to perpetuate their dominance. 238 00:27:06,050 --> 00:27:12,860 But doing that, interestingly, does a kind of conceptual transfer from Scotland to India when it drove many uses. 239 00:27:12,860 --> 00:27:14,180 The category of the clan, 240 00:27:14,180 --> 00:27:23,810 which which in the late 18th early 19th century is particularly used in scholarship to refer to Scottish collective group identities. 241 00:27:23,810 --> 00:27:29,690 He compares them to the Rajpoot, so he sees that there are particular within brackets. 242 00:27:29,690 --> 00:27:34,700 This is race or the charitable brotherhood is similar to the Qatar holds. 243 00:27:34,700 --> 00:27:41,990 A German tribes and Caledonian clans even finds Republican simplicity amongst the so-called in his phraseology, 244 00:27:41,990 --> 00:27:47,160 Aboriginal races living in a state of primaeval and almost savage independence. 245 00:27:47,160 --> 00:27:54,380 No paramount power paying, no tribute, unquote. Half century later, Alfred Lion, again, very interesting, 246 00:27:54,380 --> 00:28:00,200 the Scottish origin colonial administrator who becomes the lieutenant governor of the north western provinces. 247 00:28:00,200 --> 00:28:08,030 In his book Asiatic Studies in 1882, he compares the Rajputs Do I quote the pure plan by descent? 248 00:28:08,030 --> 00:28:15,890 And he compares similarly the Rajput chiefs to I quote the remote forefathers of Highland chiefs now become Scottish Dukes unquote. 249 00:28:15,890 --> 00:28:23,980 Now, very much like Todd Lyle, things that found in northern India in Rajput India had been decentralised rather than the dynasty. 250 00:28:23,980 --> 00:28:31,400 What was the clan? So he sees, for example, in Asia has inherited three succession actually means the succession to its vacancy 251 00:28:31,400 --> 00:28:36,350 of the ablest and most popular of them of the ruling dynasty or tribal family. 252 00:28:36,350 --> 00:28:41,570 The tribal sovereignty stands on a much broader foundation because the choice is marines. 253 00:28:41,570 --> 00:28:46,280 About half a dozen families at the time of finding a fit man is proportionately greater. 254 00:28:46,280 --> 00:28:54,650 So dynastic vacancy dynasty collapse happens, but sovereignty ultimately resides in the clan or the tribe and barely criticises the British, 255 00:28:54,650 --> 00:29:01,880 very ironically putting themselves for British history better for strengthening the sovereign against the nobles and the again, 256 00:29:01,880 --> 00:29:07,250 just for international comparisons with the way that the Polish are who are very similar, supposedly to the Rajputs. 257 00:29:07,250 --> 00:29:12,780 The Polish polity had been destroyed by Russian and Austrian intervention. 258 00:29:12,780 --> 00:29:18,630 So my argument here, in short, is that the British are like Todd and Lyle, 259 00:29:18,630 --> 00:29:23,850 or French observers like Voltaire, who wrote on India, were aware that monarchical principle, 260 00:29:23,850 --> 00:29:24,930 dynastic sovereignty, 261 00:29:24,930 --> 00:29:33,870 these are relatively new concepts being deliberately introduced into India by Britain in order to subvert the indigenous political systems. 262 00:29:33,870 --> 00:29:40,740 Now, as part and parcel of this are the colonial debates and so on with this kind of discourse gets perpetuated. 263 00:29:40,740 --> 00:29:47,760 So, for example, in the famous 1877 Darbar, which is used to proclaim Victoria as the Queen Empress of India, 264 00:29:47,760 --> 00:29:55,710 Litton uses the category of dynasty to talk about how the British ruled in a way inherits the mantle of early dynasties. 265 00:29:55,710 --> 00:29:59,370 Similarly, Lord Carson uses the term dynasty as well. 266 00:29:59,370 --> 00:30:04,530 Historians like Winston Smith speaks about why Dynasty should lie at the heart of Indian historiography, 267 00:30:04,530 --> 00:30:11,640 and here's the quote from Winston Smith A sound framework optimistic adults must be provided before the story of Indian religion. 268 00:30:11,640 --> 00:30:14,910 The present art can be told. All right. 269 00:30:14,910 --> 00:30:22,920 The dominant dynasty he speaks about again, I call it the dominant dynasties, which from time to time have aspired to or attain paramount power. 270 00:30:22,920 --> 00:30:31,410 So the way in which we understand dynasty today as as kind of quasi natural we don't even think about it is not a primordial fact. 271 00:30:31,410 --> 00:30:38,280 It's a colonial construction. Now, does this mean that this kind of construction does not meet with resistance? 272 00:30:38,280 --> 00:30:42,750 And of course it does. And I'll take two examples of this. 273 00:30:42,750 --> 00:30:52,830 One is the case of Tripura, which was a princely polity in northeastern India, in the hilly region, and there have been the British vote. 274 00:30:52,830 --> 00:30:57,180 They're very concerned about the fact that these Highlander populations who mostly live 275 00:30:57,180 --> 00:31:02,730 through through kind of mobile agriculture to what is called shifting cultivation. 276 00:31:02,730 --> 00:31:06,630 They are not at all amenable to statehood. They don't want to pay taxes to the British. 277 00:31:06,630 --> 00:31:12,300 They don't want to pay taxes to the indigenous princes. They frequently revolt during the rebellion of 1857. 278 00:31:12,300 --> 00:31:17,430 They rise up en masse against the British and the British absolutely fed up with them. 279 00:31:17,430 --> 00:31:22,140 They think that the rulers are incompetent. They are unable to subdue these indigenous Highlanders. 280 00:31:22,140 --> 00:31:26,430 They are unable to take taxes and a series of colonial interventions. 281 00:31:26,430 --> 00:31:32,250 Brutal military ones follows, as well as the introduction of a rule of male primogeniture. 282 00:31:32,250 --> 00:31:36,900 And this again cousin is thought to be important times here. 283 00:31:36,900 --> 00:31:44,370 Now, the reason male primogeniture was introduced into surprise also because they're very kind of critical of female power. 284 00:31:44,370 --> 00:31:49,770 They know that in manifold, women had often intervened in power political scenarios in a triple rate, 285 00:31:49,770 --> 00:31:56,850 so women had exercised actual royal power in the late 18th early 19th century came from power, and Bush would have none of it. 286 00:31:56,850 --> 00:32:03,340 Again, very ironic given the is on the throne at that time. But ultimately, the British introduced this principle of Salit law, 287 00:32:03,340 --> 00:32:08,610 so they say we need to impose Catholic law on Tripura and create this male domestic system. 288 00:32:08,610 --> 00:32:15,840 And ultimately, what what emerges is a much more monarchist political idea where a bit it's unclear who the ruler would 289 00:32:15,840 --> 00:32:21,600 be would often be better made by bargaining and warfare between different kinds of collective groups. 290 00:32:21,600 --> 00:32:29,100 Now you've got more British oriented idea of sovereignty. But the old order does not quite well, be completely. 291 00:32:29,100 --> 00:32:32,050 Now what the Greeks themselves knew, like colonial lithography, 292 00:32:32,050 --> 00:32:37,350 was like states resilient as well as indigenous intellectuals like Notre Dame and so on. 293 00:32:37,350 --> 00:32:44,110 Is that the concept of long, short odds bombshell, but was not a term you ever use only for the royal family? 294 00:32:44,110 --> 00:32:49,440 It was often used for much bigger indigenous communities of Tripoli. 295 00:32:49,440 --> 00:32:54,660 So, for example, the indigenous communist leader who later became in the early 20th century, 296 00:32:54,660 --> 00:32:59,550 the chief minister to put up a road that separates tribal people would be and 297 00:32:59,550 --> 00:33:05,870 especially the troopers regarded themselves as descendants of the rulers of Tripura. 298 00:33:05,870 --> 00:33:10,530 Three put either be bombshell Shridhar and members of the rulers community, rather that up. 299 00:33:10,530 --> 00:33:17,400 So the idea of who belongs to the bombshell that our job at top of that order is not just the family of the family, 300 00:33:17,400 --> 00:33:24,600 the kind of nuclear narrative and sense, but a much bigger understanding of collective who are imbued with reality. 301 00:33:24,600 --> 00:33:31,920 Now the rulers could, even when the power of the rulers had been radically strengthened by British colonialism, 302 00:33:31,920 --> 00:33:36,600 the rulers would never completely ignore the fact that this idea of legality something collective. 303 00:33:36,600 --> 00:33:44,670 So what they did in the interwar years is they invented a new idiom of Sharia would just be that the indigenous people of Tripura, 304 00:33:44,670 --> 00:33:52,330 our people would shut us up to put up. And they used this to create a kind of quasi constitutionalist, decentralised, 305 00:33:52,330 --> 00:33:58,050 devoid form of government where power is devolved to the indigenous tribes. 306 00:33:58,050 --> 00:34:08,100 What in Tripoli, state language is called apart. What the protest dubbed the hill subjects of the ruler as a way of ensuring that the old, 307 00:34:08,100 --> 00:34:12,420 decentralised, Louis centric Highlander order is not complete. 308 00:34:12,420 --> 00:34:19,410 Destroyed by colonialism because they put this completely destroyed there, the princes realise their own sovereignty would be at a complete jeopardy. 309 00:34:19,410 --> 00:34:24,270 So in order to negotiate that, they decentralise power to these indigenous communities. 310 00:34:24,270 --> 00:34:30,060 By the 1940s, the indigenous communities are more and more getting imbued by communist ideas. 311 00:34:30,060 --> 00:34:35,280 And this leaves the Tribal Settler Organisation, this regal organisation, 312 00:34:35,280 --> 00:34:40,530 by most beautiful irony of history to become the foundation of the Communist Party in Tripura. 313 00:34:40,530 --> 00:34:48,900 Because people like Dr Dave and others use the decentralised language of legality of shot to build up, to push at Villawood to build up this idea, 314 00:34:48,900 --> 00:34:53,040 that sovereignty and superar in fact rests with the indigenous communities and not with the 315 00:34:53,040 --> 00:34:59,040 post-colonial Indian state or the high cost Bengali elite swapping Datsyuk and protected by that state. 316 00:34:59,040 --> 00:35:04,230 And this leads in the long run to the growth and radical Islam stance of communism 317 00:35:04,230 --> 00:35:09,120 in Tripura and the Communist Party rules to pull it off for several decades. 318 00:35:09,120 --> 00:35:14,910 And the indigenous communities of Tripura have today because of Tripura belongs to the Tripura Autonomous District 319 00:35:14,910 --> 00:35:22,230 Council and and the history of this lies in this collective misunderstanding of reality then imbued with communism. 320 00:35:22,230 --> 00:35:27,750 Another example that I would take is that of the radical she's the radical. 321 00:35:27,750 --> 00:35:32,400 She's at the biggest Dalit community in subdermal in West Bengal. 322 00:35:32,400 --> 00:35:37,230 There is a huge peasant community of millions of people in sub in northern Bengal. 323 00:35:37,230 --> 00:35:42,180 The very words Radbourne she relative. She means those belonging to the royal lineage. 324 00:35:42,180 --> 00:35:48,120 And there are also people who have for centuries claimed collective royal lineage, drawing their descent from shiva. 325 00:35:48,120 --> 00:35:52,890 Linking themselves with the cultural family with the could be how princely state and so on. 326 00:35:52,890 --> 00:35:55,140 And here is very, very similar to that. 327 00:35:55,140 --> 00:36:03,810 In the case of the Triple Shastri, you're also a sense of collective reality becomes the basis for their caste, 328 00:36:03,810 --> 00:36:06,180 peasant caste movement and then nature of communism. 329 00:36:06,180 --> 00:36:15,750 Subcontinent Burma, who is the most important interwar leader, says, and I quote sharply itself, is God. 330 00:36:15,750 --> 00:36:22,260 As in God, it's up there with one uses one's own power to create, protect and Lord over the world. 331 00:36:22,260 --> 00:36:31,560 And what does this mean for India's discourse? There are donkeys are peasants till the soil and thereby nourish and nurture human beings. 332 00:36:31,560 --> 00:36:40,140 They are the ones who look after cattle, and this goes into the pastoral imagery of nourishing human non-human relation to nourishing the cattle. 333 00:36:40,140 --> 00:36:42,270 This is a divine and regal function. 334 00:36:42,270 --> 00:36:49,810 They also are soldiers, so through all these functions, they protect society, and therefore they are the true regal sovereigns. 335 00:36:49,810 --> 00:36:56,970 And this becomes their basis for challenging British colonial rule, as well as high cost Hindu rule. 336 00:36:56,970 --> 00:37:02,940 But the challenge of British colonial rule is more indirect. The challenge to high-cost Hindu leadership is more direct. 337 00:37:02,940 --> 00:37:08,130 But there is a lot of very sophisticated discourses again imbued with socialist inspiration 338 00:37:08,130 --> 00:37:12,960 about how draughtsmanship peasants who are actual rulers because they nourish society, 339 00:37:12,960 --> 00:37:16,590 their labour, their back, the value they are generating is being lost. 340 00:37:16,590 --> 00:37:23,490 That there is an idea of the test of value, the value which is created by labour, very similar to the kind of masterly material value. 341 00:37:23,490 --> 00:37:31,650 This is being rubbed off by foreign as well as as well as Indian elites, and they need to rise up against this and to these discourses, 342 00:37:31,650 --> 00:37:37,620 emerge as a powerful peasant movement, both in coastlines as well as in communities lines. 343 00:37:37,620 --> 00:37:43,890 But the movement is very strongly populated by draughtsmanship in post-colonial India. 344 00:37:43,890 --> 00:37:50,640 They still continue to nurture these kind of discourses of collective kingship of collectives. 345 00:37:50,640 --> 00:37:57,840 And this leads them to the formation of a territorial subaltern nationalism where they want a separate territory for themselves, 346 00:37:57,840 --> 00:37:59,520 mostly within the Indian state. 347 00:37:59,520 --> 00:38:07,320 But some argue outside the Indonesian state in the form of this opinion, kind of comfortable and critical to the other movements. 348 00:38:07,320 --> 00:38:16,350 Now going back to the global story that I was talking about why Mr. Bolton resistance is happening at the level of national elites. 349 00:38:16,350 --> 00:38:25,140 However, there is a kind of tendency to think about Nation State as embedded in national sovereignty and dynasty in Japan, 350 00:38:25,140 --> 00:38:32,640 who is a very important figure, who is Japan's first prime minister and the kingmaker of the messy constitution of 1899. 351 00:38:32,640 --> 00:38:37,470 In his commentaries on the Constitution of the Empire of Japan, published in 1889, 352 00:38:37,470 --> 00:38:42,450 Teen Vogue's dynasty as a key category to say that the Empire of Japan shall, 353 00:38:42,450 --> 00:38:48,210 to the end of time, identified some with the Imperial Dynasty unbroken and lineage. 354 00:38:48,210 --> 00:38:53,310 And again, he is somebody who interprets Dynasty as a supreme right of property. 355 00:38:53,310 --> 00:38:58,530 So, he says, in Europe, guiltiest of Holland maintained in a striptease on international law that a 356 00:38:58,530 --> 00:39:02,730 sovereign possesses the supreme right of property in the land under his rule. 357 00:39:02,730 --> 00:39:11,780 So he thinks about property and sovereignty as being very similar. I think the Japanese case, this is sort of used to justify the fact why? 358 00:39:11,780 --> 00:39:16,940 Property rights are transferred from clans back to the state and then to various individuals. 359 00:39:16,940 --> 00:39:20,930 We find it in a range of historic ethnic interventions and we have to remember 360 00:39:20,930 --> 00:39:25,460 that historians in the 19th early 20th century were often very close to monarchs, 361 00:39:25,460 --> 00:39:27,800 as well as the elite landed families. 362 00:39:27,800 --> 00:39:35,900 This is the case with figures like Leopold von Ranka and Alfred for an answer to a close behind the lines and Hapsburg Isola Bakara has shown. 363 00:39:35,900 --> 00:39:44,540 Frank Lawrence Miller has argued about how dynasties near the heart of German historical consciousness in the 19th early 20th century in India. 364 00:39:44,540 --> 00:39:52,160 If one thinks about key figures like Shameless, the first writer of modern history in Hindi Corish, somebody writes on order and others. 365 00:39:52,160 --> 00:39:56,360 They were all close to various kinds of princely families, though do not share. 366 00:39:56,360 --> 00:40:01,190 Khan himself was very close, was using the archives of different elite families as well. 367 00:40:01,190 --> 00:40:06,650 And similar is the case in Britain as well, whether in Scotland or in Wales or in England. 368 00:40:06,650 --> 00:40:12,290 Historiography was often framed as the history of local aristocratic gentry families, 369 00:40:12,290 --> 00:40:18,080 which again shows that there is nothing necessarily antithetical between Dynasty a nation. 370 00:40:18,080 --> 00:40:23,330 Rather, national elites are often very happy to reject themselves as domestic elites. 371 00:40:23,330 --> 00:40:30,650 The real sort of caesura the real conflict happens more at the realm of the difference between elites and subaltern ontologies, 372 00:40:30,650 --> 00:40:41,480 which have been integral. So now I want to get into some of my general conclusions to conclude in the next 10 minutes or so. 373 00:40:41,480 --> 00:40:48,560 First observation the argument that world history can be narrated in terms of a radical transition from centuries, 374 00:40:48,560 --> 00:40:55,010 if not millennia, of dynasty politics to a modern era of nation states and democracies. 375 00:40:55,010 --> 00:41:01,250 This is a simplistic myth now. This is a myth narrated in a range of astrologers accounts Ben Anderson's imagined 376 00:41:01,250 --> 00:41:06,140 communities hearing during Trump's recent book Dynasties A Global History of Power. 377 00:41:06,140 --> 00:41:16,460 All these analysed dynasty analysed history as the transition from dynasty premodern to modernity, which is national modernity. 378 00:41:16,460 --> 00:41:23,480 But in fact, this is not the case because actual history is much more complex. 379 00:41:23,480 --> 00:41:32,210 Many modern states, thinkers, politicians, they have reconfigured ideas of dynasty to buttress the power of elites. 380 00:41:32,210 --> 00:41:39,800 My second observation the history of the world has borne witness to a wide diversity of views of organising and transmitting power. 381 00:41:39,800 --> 00:41:45,920 It is misleading to club all or even most of them under a single conceptual monolith like dynasty. 382 00:41:45,920 --> 00:41:53,810 However, ambitiously, the concept is defined. Many of these political forms in the extreme European world as much as in Europe, 383 00:41:53,810 --> 00:42:01,040 are managed power in polycentric with endowing broad collectives and community with governmental authority. 384 00:42:01,040 --> 00:42:06,380 Many of these political forms have inspired and nourished modern, democratic and socialist politics, 385 00:42:06,380 --> 00:42:12,440 which was my point that one cannot think of modern states as just universally dynastic in nature. 386 00:42:12,440 --> 00:42:18,740 If one thinks about the case of the right committees or the Tipperary's, these were collectivist, Eurocentric centric forms of power. 387 00:42:18,740 --> 00:42:22,250 Their royal power was, I mean, very negligible. 388 00:42:22,250 --> 00:42:31,190 Or I mean, if it was their intention with these collectives and similar things have been argued for many other parts of India equity. 389 00:42:31,190 --> 00:42:38,140 Others argued this for nomadic Rajasthan. My friend delicatessens argued this about Naga Landsberry shows the initial thought. 390 00:42:38,140 --> 00:42:45,200 Now Naga democracy in modern times has been built on the foundation of indigenous Naga Village Republicanism. 391 00:42:45,200 --> 00:42:52,880 So there is nothing really chronological to see that pre-modern politics, but all monarchic in nature. 392 00:42:52,880 --> 00:42:56,750 Now my third observation is I do not deny that there were societies have been 393 00:42:56,750 --> 00:43:00,950 characterised by divergent ways of organising the transmission of territory, 394 00:43:00,950 --> 00:43:08,820 powder poverty and poverty. But I would deny that these societies can all be clubbed under the monolith of domestic politics. 395 00:43:08,820 --> 00:43:13,980 My fourth observation there is epistemological violence involved in trying to fit 396 00:43:13,980 --> 00:43:19,350 non-European concepts and social categories into the European origin notion of dynasty. 397 00:43:19,350 --> 00:43:21,990 I mean, how do we translate it at? 398 00:43:21,990 --> 00:43:29,490 And she discourses on on behavioural diplomacy, on being a the three-body discourses on business about millions of people claim to be at. 399 00:43:29,490 --> 00:43:32,940 She's answered three us as dynastic in nature. 400 00:43:32,940 --> 00:43:40,020 Global intellectual historians should ask what motivates projects of trying to artificially render a cerebral through 401 00:43:40,020 --> 00:43:47,370 the category of dynasty divergent sociopolitical forms behind the epistemological gaze of seeing dynasties everywhere, 402 00:43:47,370 --> 00:43:52,020 like historical projects of transforming political, economic and social structures. 403 00:43:52,020 --> 00:43:54,570 Do we miss colonial domination? 404 00:43:54,570 --> 00:44:02,460 The globalisation of the concept of dynasty is linked to the globalisation of capitalist colonial modes of production, exchange and exploitation. 405 00:44:02,460 --> 00:44:09,480 And here basically my critique is against sort of compatriots historians who argue that different things can be compared as dynasties. 406 00:44:09,480 --> 00:44:13,740 The nature and that question is what is it that makes comparison possible? 407 00:44:13,740 --> 00:44:17,820 Not follow Marx's own argument, for example, in the current reset. 408 00:44:17,820 --> 00:44:24,420 It is really exchange value. It is the fact that everything under capitalism is rendered exchangeable with everything else. 409 00:44:24,420 --> 00:44:25,590 It is exchange value. 410 00:44:25,590 --> 00:44:33,540 It is the value form which allows this kind of comparison to come into place because in which all commodities dissolve themselves, 411 00:44:33,540 --> 00:44:37,500 that with dissolves itself into commodities, the universal equivalent. 412 00:44:37,500 --> 00:44:40,050 So in a way, because the universal equivalent of capitalism, 413 00:44:40,050 --> 00:44:47,650 which allows these multiple ontologies all to be blockages that similar to each other, even if they will, then they are bound to be normal. 414 00:44:47,650 --> 00:44:50,440 And this is also something that has been emphasised by Lydia Liu, 415 00:44:50,440 --> 00:44:57,480 who talks about she talks about recontextualizing electability as a historical event and stole, assimilated, saved. 416 00:44:57,480 --> 00:45:04,050 If stability is not an intrinsic feature of concepts, then one task must be to examine how their stability is achieved. 417 00:45:04,050 --> 00:45:12,000 How unequal things are abstracted into comments or abilities that fuel our confidence in those very concepts that then are relegated as common sense, 418 00:45:12,000 --> 00:45:19,590 unquote. So basically, in order to understand these comments, make me instability makings, 419 00:45:19,590 --> 00:45:25,020 we have to understand the operations of sovereignty, of capital, of patriarchy and so on. 420 00:45:25,020 --> 00:45:32,520 We also need to realise that modern nation states also often contain very headed between outrageously hereditary 421 00:45:32,520 --> 00:45:37,050 ways of transmitting political authority and had to really think about the concept of citizenship in a way, 422 00:45:37,050 --> 00:45:43,020 citizenship that only collectivise is the basic logic of heritage, succession of power, 423 00:45:43,020 --> 00:45:47,280 the difference between insiders and outsiders, those who have the blood and those who don't. 424 00:45:47,280 --> 00:45:53,490 And in South Asia, the way that citizenship is being framed and reframed currently to exclude minorities. 425 00:45:53,490 --> 00:46:01,050 That basically shows that this kind of exclusionary logic of heritage tree power is again not something exclusive to dynasties. 426 00:46:01,050 --> 00:46:09,330 Modern nation states often produce them, and that's what the reader sees when there is a very rightly argues that modern democratic 427 00:46:09,330 --> 00:46:13,950 sovereignty is often to quote him as follows simply follow a pattern of filial, 428 00:46:13,950 --> 00:46:21,060 fraternal ipso centric as the sovereignty of the people. So there was a basic connexion between monarchical sovereignty and nation state sovereignty, 429 00:46:21,060 --> 00:46:25,380 and it speaks about this as the bottom a long cycle of political theology that is 430 00:46:25,380 --> 00:46:29,790 at once paternalistic and patriarchal and thus masculine in affiliation father, 431 00:46:29,790 --> 00:46:37,110 son, brother. And that is why some states often want these imaginary or fantasised about ancestors. 432 00:46:37,110 --> 00:46:41,530 Ancestral sexualities becomes important in heritage or imagination. 433 00:46:41,530 --> 00:46:48,810 Ashoka Agbara Shivaji in India, Emperor Jimo in Japan, Robert the Bruce in Scotland, King Arthur in England. 434 00:46:48,810 --> 00:46:59,700 Recently, a BJP politician said Ralph is the scapegoat of RAM, is the ancestor of the country, and he was admitted as a political man and king. 435 00:46:59,700 --> 00:47:03,840 So ancestors an important again not just in dynastic imagination, 436 00:47:03,840 --> 00:47:08,970 but also in nationalist imagination, in contemporary post-communist China and Vietnam as well. 437 00:47:08,970 --> 00:47:13,400 We see an increasing emphasis on dynastic history. 438 00:47:13,400 --> 00:47:20,810 And above all, of course, all of this ties into the history of property, and my basic argument is that in modern global capitalism, 439 00:47:20,810 --> 00:47:28,520 corporate sovereignty supremely important, the logic of transmitting power through collective body power and property. 440 00:47:28,520 --> 00:47:33,620 This can be to the state. This can be to the company. This can be to a family. 441 00:47:33,620 --> 00:47:35,300 All of these are connected logics, 442 00:47:35,300 --> 00:47:40,640 and this is what Philip Stone talks about when he speaks about corporate sovereignty in the case of the English East India Company. 443 00:47:40,640 --> 00:47:46,160 That's the logic of sovereignty and the logic of corporate transmission of power to the corporation. 444 00:47:46,160 --> 00:47:48,440 I'm not that intrinsically different. 445 00:47:48,440 --> 00:47:56,780 I mean, and of course, in kind of traditional monarchy political theology, the monarch himself or herself is often considered as the corporation. 446 00:47:56,780 --> 00:48:03,200 And this is what we see in going back to Marx's critique of Hegel that in fetishising primogeniture, 447 00:48:03,200 --> 00:48:10,610 what is being fetishised is the personality of property which is supposed to be transmitted to the father to lie in succession. 448 00:48:10,610 --> 00:48:14,780 Now, when Marx is conducting this kind of transmission of property, 449 00:48:14,780 --> 00:48:20,570 this will lead the more mature Marx to talk about the capitalists himself as just the personality, 450 00:48:20,570 --> 00:48:26,030 the subjectivity of capitalism and the argument that had given decades earlier that 451 00:48:26,030 --> 00:48:31,360 the landowner is in fact the embodiment of the subjectivity of landed property. 452 00:48:31,360 --> 00:48:36,310 So whether it's the case of the transmission of business dynasty or whether it's the 453 00:48:36,310 --> 00:48:40,960 pace of the transmission of Russian families or of aristocratic landed estates, 454 00:48:40,960 --> 00:48:49,870 basically for ruling classes used corporate entities, companies landed estates kingship to transmit sovereignty and power as opposed to 455 00:48:49,870 --> 00:48:55,700 support an ontology where sovereignty property are collectively and centrifugal, 456 00:48:55,700 --> 00:49:02,770 he managed. And that is why today often the term dynasties is often used for corporate farms. 457 00:49:02,770 --> 00:49:06,550 And similarly, the British royal family is called the farm by slaves. 458 00:49:06,550 --> 00:49:14,380 He talks about modern Arab monarchies as behaving like corporations in exercising economic power and coercion in northern India. 459 00:49:14,380 --> 00:49:20,170 That's got be very revealing views bought for the seat of kings and for the seat of merchants. 460 00:49:20,170 --> 00:49:26,260 So the perpetuation of sovereign power of ruling classes and the perpetuation of the sovereign power of corporate seats. 461 00:49:26,260 --> 00:49:31,490 These are quite related, and northern Indian merchants often, in fact, speak about having royal ancestors. 462 00:49:31,490 --> 00:49:36,970 King Agra Senior is a much invoked royal ancestor for many months and families. 463 00:49:36,970 --> 00:49:44,890 I'll take five more minutes to sum all of this up. Apologies that I overflowed a bit, probably because of the Connexions. 464 00:49:44,890 --> 00:49:51,580 The modern world of nation states does not embody a radical rupture from its mystic past of headed tree power. 465 00:49:51,580 --> 00:49:56,530 Nation states often greens cried all the forms of headed tree identity and hierarchy 466 00:49:56,530 --> 00:50:01,240 sharing with dynasties the focus on transmission of rights and sovereignty by blood. 467 00:50:01,240 --> 00:50:06,280 The logic of nation states sovereignty is not so far apart from that optimistic sovereignty. 468 00:50:06,280 --> 00:50:12,250 Nation states also secured hereditary political and social authority with their border regimes, 469 00:50:12,250 --> 00:50:18,250 differentiating insiders and outsiders and protecting the power and predation of ruling classes. 470 00:50:18,250 --> 00:50:25,060 The modern capitalist world, however much some scholars, might differentiated from a pre-modern positive headed to true authority. 471 00:50:25,060 --> 00:50:30,450 In fact, continues to be characterised by intergenerational transfer of status, power and property. 472 00:50:30,450 --> 00:50:36,160 Think it is wonderful? Work is just one example which deconstructs that radical headed the theory inequality, 473 00:50:36,160 --> 00:50:42,550 differentiating different classes and geographic regions, and the political influence of property ruling classes. 474 00:50:42,550 --> 00:50:48,790 Modern frameworks of gutless law and order probably even give such headed tree power and property a stability, 475 00:50:48,790 --> 00:50:54,910 security and longevity which they would not have enjoyed in earlier epochs in many parts of the world. 476 00:50:54,910 --> 00:51:02,050 If it is deceptive to think that the modern world is intrinsically democratic and thus stands in sharp contrast to a pre-modern past, 477 00:51:02,050 --> 00:51:08,050 which is intrinsically in egalitarian and undemocratic and assumption that many scholars have, 478 00:51:08,050 --> 00:51:15,070 including Anderson and so on, it is equally deceptive to believe that centuries and social formations distant from us have 479 00:51:15,070 --> 00:51:20,210 been universally dominated by headed to the authority and inequality they have to take. 480 00:51:20,210 --> 00:51:24,880 Power has existed. It has always been in tension with other forms of political action. 481 00:51:24,880 --> 00:51:31,990 Different societies in different parts of the world have often in the historical past, practise various forms of polycentric politics. 482 00:51:31,990 --> 00:51:36,490 Very large spectrum of actors and collectives exercise political power. 483 00:51:36,490 --> 00:51:42,790 India demonstrates how such forms the polycentric and collective politics often survived into the 20th century, 484 00:51:42,790 --> 00:51:49,120 the cases of northern Bengal and Tripura providing the social basis for new forms of democracy. 485 00:51:49,120 --> 00:51:53,830 Intellectual historians have long neglected the study of the social and political formations 486 00:51:53,830 --> 00:51:58,660 where they have done to all the societies in such resources for thinking about democracy. 487 00:51:58,660 --> 00:52:03,850 Classical Greece and Rome have monopolised discussions far more than non-European societies. 488 00:52:03,850 --> 00:52:12,340 This needs to change today if we are to deepen democratic politics globally by forming solidarity with political actors such as 489 00:52:12,340 --> 00:52:22,150 citizens in the non-European world for whom these all the resources of polycentric and collective action continue to have dependence. 490 00:52:22,150 --> 00:52:31,150 Hence, we need to diversify our conceptual lexicon instead of remaining prisoners of hegemonic concepts such as dynasty or even democracy. 491 00:52:31,150 --> 00:52:37,330 Intellectual historians can carry out militancy against euro centrism and elitism in the realm of concepts. 492 00:52:37,330 --> 00:52:41,710 Concepts are not kings. They are embodied dialectics of social relations. 493 00:52:41,710 --> 00:52:47,890 Concepts of practise, ineradicable, be open to revolutionary transformation for global intellectual historians, 494 00:52:47,890 --> 00:52:56,700 the excitement lies in understanding this dialectic by working through a planetary gaze rather than through a methodologically provincial lenses. 495 00:52:56,700 --> 00:53:00,850 Deconstructing concept histories of terms like Dynasty Nation, coal and rods, 496 00:53:00,850 --> 00:53:07,440 I'm sure constitutes a small part of a broader strategy by reading the past against the grain. 497 00:53:07,440 --> 00:53:12,660 We can recover those polycentric and collectivist forms and imaginaries of social organisation, 498 00:53:12,660 --> 00:53:20,220 which can help us today to build new solidarity and to fight against hereditary power, inequality and exploitation. 499 00:53:20,220 --> 00:53:27,540 Democracy is a movement that perpetually opens out that makes autonomy possible by passing through astronomers constraints, 500 00:53:27,540 --> 00:53:35,910 refuses incarceration as or into a singular idea or lineal genealogy, European or otherwise. 501 00:53:35,910 --> 00:53:37,620 It is all the more important, therefore, 502 00:53:37,620 --> 00:53:44,140 for global intellectual historians to recall the multiple sites of revolutionary thought and militancy to write. 503 00:53:44,140 --> 00:53:50,363 The history of the past is a call to arms for the present. Thank you very much.