Thank you very much, Bill, for that warm invitation. I was so happy to present, you know,
which is obviously one of the most important places to discuss about intellectual history of global intellectual history.
And I'm very happy to see a lot of friends, a lot of scholars admire and many others here really excited about that.
In a way, it's great that this book is coming back to Oxford because this started in Oxford,
so it started with a wonderful conference organised by the Taliban, now a close on dynasty.
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
here that we sat down to discuss about this very interesting and strange term dynasty.
And he was working as part of Natalia's project and was mentioning how the
project was discovering the fact that the word dynasty got its modern sense.
Very neat. It was, I mean, in ancient Greece, the word comes from ancient Greece.
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.
It was particularly used for rulers of Egypt and then in the Middle Easterners,
also for rulers of China, but was never really very commonly used for rulers of Europe.
And it was not used in the way that we understand it to be,
which is something like a hereditary succession of rulers, particularly true matrilineal succession.
And then I was like, I had done my kids as part of this project in Germany in Heidelberg called Nationalising the Dynasty,
which explored the relation between dynasty and nationalism from the early modern to the modern period.
And the arguments in my in a way was not about nationalising the dynasty, but about dynasty sizing the nation.
How the Indian nation state, particularly the Indian nation state,
but also various kinds of peasant understandings of collective sovereignty and so on,
are imagined through monarchic dynasty categories and the invention of tradition that happens there.
And and to our brainstorming, really, the idea for a new conference came up, which is how does the word dynasty actually get mobilised?
When does it become a global concept? What are the factors driving its globalisation and to our research and to that wonderful conference?
And I can see many of the participants of that conference here today, including fans.
And it has been there are we realised that the world becomes globalised through very complex processes of capitalism,
capitalist primitive accumulation and the spread of empire and nation state models of centralised state sovereignty.
The spread of certain ideas about patriarchy, but also, of course, resistance to these things as well.
And the role that Empire plays that its colonial colonialism plays in the globalisation of this category is of supreme importance.
And in a way, what you realised is to undertake a kind of global concept.
History of global intellectual history of the concept of dynasty is to be naturalised the concept and provincial as the concept.
Because growing up in India, and I'm sure its experience of many others growing up in the global south,
we often use European categories almost without TV. For a second time.
We speak about, I don't know, the Mughal Dynasty,
the more interesting the book that in the Senate classic Indian Nationalist School Textbook would be found.
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.
You have the more intimacy the Gupta Dynasty, the Mughal dynasty and the nation states history is written to instil dynasty.
So how does this way of recounting national history as dynasty history come into being?
And what happens if the impact of this kind of elitist history making those with some of the questions that impelled our endeavour?
And after this conference in Birmingham, it came out as a special issue in 2020 in the journal Global Intellectual History.
So I will present here on the bits of it, which is more my own,
but I hope to put that into conversation, especially with you in Iran, with the discoveries by others.
Because one data was presented, for example,
speaks about how the Chinese ideal of domestic cycles and the Korean ideas are replaced by new ideas of the eternal dynasty,
which are brought in from Japan from our ziggurat.
Wonderfully about how Ethiopian conceptions of dynasty were again changed through imposition of European,
as well as Japanese ideas in reaction to the threat of European colonialism.
David Mamet's talk to the special issue about how ideas about karma and karmic rebirth
and what effect would be ideals of rulership are replaced by dynastic ideals.
In the late 19th century, as leaders back in Thailand in style because, again, of the threads of British and French colonial invasions.
So there are lots of really exciting stories to be told today.
I will focus more on Europe and Southeast Asia, but I will also bring in a bit of Japan itself.
So just to give a bit of introduction to what I'm seeing,
this paper argues that far from being a value neutral description for political
forms nowadays associated especially with pre-modern and non-Western societies,
the modern concept of Dynasty has been a politically motivated, modern intellectual invention.
By making this claim, I do not intend to ignore various historical manifestations of heritage through transmission of power.
But I would argue that different societies that possess vastly divergent
structures of organising political authority only relatively recently have these
heterogeneous forms been rendered commenced through the conceptual abstraction of dynasty understood as a line of rulers belonging to the same family.
This essay focuses on the political,
social and economic stakes involved in the spread of the term on a planetary scale across the 19th and 20th centuries.
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?
And my argument is Dynasty becomes this global abstraction described those signifier or imagining the stable perpetuation of sovereignty,
the constant reproduction of power and property, at least for the ruling classes.
So this keep a very synoptic overview for many advocates of a strong sovereign nation state, whether in France, Germany, India or Japan.
Dynasty offered a pillow for imagining the national past. So unlike what we sometimes think, dynasties replaced by nation.
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.
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,
of course, same in India or Japan. Dynasty becomes a dialectical police aggression of the nation to come,
as well as a political form to overcome and transcended, but to transfer me to incorporation rather than absolute negation.
Dynasty offers a way to imagine the nation itself as a primordial entity fuelled by the continuity of birth and blood.
Indeed, by the perpetration of sovereignty in the extra European, both British and exemplary colonial administrators,
monarchies and dynasties, nice political systems to create modern sovereign state to maximise fiscal exploitation.
And, of course, they pacify militant and rebellious populations. So my my discussion today basically attempts to expose the.
Mention of Dynasty, the erection and globalisation of the sovereign national under colonial state to subjugation of the ball,
tonight's multitudes construction of dominant racial national identities,
real auditing of regimes of property and economic exploitation, and assertion of problem hypothetical power.
I problem. It's a conventional narrative of world history. We want millennial freeze is.
Ultimately, democracy. I salute you.
It's kind of breaking up. Can you hear me?
Well. OK.
I think he's probably going to. Join again, so we'll just wait for a minute.
Hello. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, yes.
Oh, brilliant. Seemed there was a bit of an internet as it always happens.
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,
Dynasty and Nation are exposed as possessing a secret inner complicity father and considering peasant voices from India.
I argued that the dynasty to the nation narrative suppresses alternate, more poorly archaic conceptions of power, lineage and solidarity.
However, in India and undoubtedly elsewhere in the extreme European world to these oligarchic conceptions which cannot be reduced either
to dynasty AutoNation retains traction well into the 20th century and of nourished democratic and revolutionary politics.
Ultimately, I conclude that deconstructing the category of dynasty,
how it becomes a global abstraction can ultimately help us excavate more heterogeneous pasts and imagine more egalitarian futures.
So I begin my story with France, particularly in the late 18th century,
and there's a very interesting controversy between Voltaire and as Classicist named Pierre or L'échec.
Well, there's. Look, if this Egypt.
To which a female dynasty and its. Lush, you know.
French. Thought there was a controversy about.
And power and but by the early 19th century, the concept of Dynasty had acquired a more proper, stable and fixed meaning.
Am I oracle or is there still any problems in the connexion? There was a bit of a problem.
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.
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.
Some occasionally happens. By the 1830s, the concept of Dynasty required a much more fixed meaning in France,
and a very important historian is somebody who is very familiar to historians judicially select.
In his book Eastward to France, the second volume published in 1833,
John Wesley argued that it was very important for a nation to have a hereditary succession
of rulers because basically his argument was if a nation is to be a stable entity,
there has to be stability of heritage, succession through men and women.
According to him, describe this heritage and connexion, and he speaks about the female element as the mobile element.
Because, of course, in the patrilineal society, women are the ones going to their husband's home,
whereas men are constructed as the fixed element, the stable element.
So he sees the fixative of the dynasty in France.
The dynasty is one of the things that is most contributed to guarantee the unity the personality of our mobile fatherland.
The term he uses is part three and then is that he quotes the Swiss historian Simon B.
Since Monday's book is called It's the Frostier published in Volume,
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,
it's a national that's,
you know, if succession always this would be guaranteed of succession always happens to the eldest male when this doesn't happen,
as in the case of Spain and Naples, then foreign succession happens and all sorts of problems happen.
Now why in France is this obsession with the personality of the fatherland with indivisible sovereignty and so on?
Now, generations of historians like Lynne Hunt and others have argued that the French Revolution produced a lot of patriarchal discourses,
many of which we find in the opposition. When Marie Antoinette.
Icardi has argued most recently that in the early 19th century, France male nationalists, intellectuals, especially historians,
often rewrote history as the history of men because women were supposed to be confined to the private sphere
of domesticity and the public sphere had to be a national arena in order to construct the Nation-State.
The the construction of sovereignty had to be a patriarchal construction.
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.
We find. So I don't know if you can hear me.
I'll put it up, put it in the chart. So are you going?
I mean, ultimately, again, it has to be some extremely interesting northern winds.
So he goes in his outlines of the philosophy of right basically argue was established in 1820.
He argues that one of the most recent developments in modern history has been the development of a monarchical constitution,
with succession to the throne firmly fixed on heritage theory principles in accordance with primogeniture.
And he says, and I quote again, with this development,
monarchy has been brought back to the patriarchal principle in which it had its historical origin.
Now the reason he's saying this is a recent development because he contrast this with mediaeval European cases,
what he calls feudal monarchies, as well as with Islamic monarchies.
So he speaks about the past. So this is probably a reference to the Ottoman Empire, where history is supposed to be history,
not of stability, but of despotism and revolt and tyranny and civil war,
as opposed to the stability of a purely patriarchal, monarchic nation state,
instead of decentralisation of power to feudalism to the Pasha's and so on.
You have this hereditary order. Now why is it so obsessed with having this centralised state and hereditary order?
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.
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,
Michelin the personality and subjectivity of the state.
So Hegel goes on to say that it is only as a person the monarch that the personality of the state is actual.
So personality piers on this side of the state is embodied in the monarch.
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.
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.
The monarch, as the ultimate pinnacle of the subjectivity of certainty, must be made permanent as a result of natural succession.
Now, of course, this can't happen because monarchs die, so that's why you see the dynasty dies out.
The estates of the realm must see to it that a new dynasty ascends to the throne without disturbances.
But this leads Hegel to a bit of a problem now.
He is in a way thinking about sovereignty almost in terms of property, but he doesn't want to admit it.
So he sees that the problem, that thinking that sovereignty resides in a state.
This means as if the state has become the private property of the royal family pre-Vatican two.
But he won't. He doesn't like that idea very much, because if it's private property,
private property is divisible, it can be divided amongst different members of the family.
But those of you from South Asian history would know, for example, the classic problem of Mughal succession,
especially the succession from Babar to my own ego, wants to avoid that kind of a scenario.
So you see, sovereign possession is not the you name of the individual ruler, but is consigned to the dynastic family as a trust.
Therefore, the term he uses is firstly again tomb princely property.
Princely possession no longer denotes a kind of private property revolt against him, but has become state property stocks again, too.
So in a way, its sovereignty is property. Sovereignty is property, but not of a family.
It's a state property. Now he is very concerned with the stability of the state because he takes a number of examples.
It takes the case of the Holy Roman Empire, which did not have a hereditary dynasty succession.
Every monarch, even though it's often passed to the House, does. In the last few centuries, every monarch was theoretically elected every time.
He's afraid of the case of Poland, where also he thinks that the elected monarchy has weakened the state system.
He from a colonial Orientalist perspective. He criticises Arab soldiers and Mongol dynasties.
He uses the term dynasty as a short lived political forms, which could not guarantee peace and stability.
So ultimately, he think that it's the modern European state Prussia of Britain,
these kind of states which have headed the three dynastic succession, which are the best guarantors for sovereignty.
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,
wants property also to be transported in the same way to hereditary succession.
And in fact, between sovereignty and property. The obvious intrinsic link is what he calls the state of the landed property owners.
So and he sees the estate as summoned and entitled to its political location by but without the
hazards of election while it mirrors in itself the moment the moment of monarchical power.
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.
Now he is also thinking in terms of a reformulation of the family.
He doesn't like big collective kinship groups, somehow steps against these kind of what an India would be called.
You know, the big bombshells are coolers and so on. He once headed the three private succession to the nuclear family got by primogeniture.
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,
when the inheritance of property in the age of the globalisation of capitalism and inheritance of sovereignty, the logics are very linked together.
Now what Marx does in perhaps well, what is his earliest, most important kind of big political theory essay?
His critique of Hagos philosophy of right what Marx does is basically to undermine this by critiquing
the idea of what Marx called sovereign private property to reinterpret up again to the Marx's.
That the problem with Hegel is precisely that for Hegel, and he sees more broadly for German political philosophy.
Sovereignty and property have become so intrinsically related that the role of the state becomes basically to protect the property owners.
And we know that this is the basis of Marx's mature critique that ultimately the state is the guarantor of the ruling classes.
But one of the earliest ways in which this comes about is through a critique of Dynasty
of Hugo's conception of the intrinsic relation between sovereignty and property.
Marx uses a lot of irony, so he dismisses Germans as the mistakes of sovereign private property.
People who have completed the two primogeniture becomes from Marx, almost a religion.
He speaks about the sovereign glory. The German word is hellscape, which contains the Godhead Lord and master the sovereign glory of private property.
And basically, Marx wants to deconstruct all of that. Now,
if there's an intrinsic link between state making the transmission of private
property in the age of the rise of global capitalism in the early 19th century,
the question that arises is how does this kind of a categorical confusion,
a kind of unthinkable difference, a non difference between sovereignty and property get globalised.
And in the next section of my work, I focus on India too,
to see how the dynamics and different regions of India of the dynamics of globalisation happens.
So if you think northern India is an example,
we will find that there is no exact words in any of the northern India languages to the best of my knowledge,
which would exactly translate the word dynasty. We one takes the word, for example, Camden, which is the perfect Islamic term.
It was used for a lot of Mughal rulers, as well as for local lineages. Riots?
Well, it's fantastic.
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,
particularly, she examines. It was not even founded always in blood.
It had many different understandings of kinship, adoption, lineage, female power, etc., which cannot be understood as European kind of matrilineal,
hereditary succession in the way that we can understand it, or if one takes the Sanskrit ActionScript origin but vomit or rather one shot,
one shot in Sanskrit meant originally the bamboo cane or anything and acquired the meaning of the good Monia Williams,
the lion of a pedigree or genealogy from its resemblance to the succession of joints in a bamboo.
But again, I mean, it's very deceptive to translate Bombay as a dynasty. Monty Williams as a classic European oriental.
It struggled how to translate it. He translated it as Lineage Rey's family stock.
Many different things, and all this comes with some colour also used in many northern India languages.
Monty Williams translates as hard to flock assembly its multitude.
Now, my basic argument would be that if one looks at the long delayed political ecology of state formation,
India's river and beds hotbeds of agrarian state formation have for centuries been boarded and crisscrossed by dense forest,
grasslands, deserts, hills and mountains. These hobbit astral nomadic shifting cultivator and forest oriented communities,
which were often only loosely touched by sea power more generally across the subcontinent,
organised faith based and communitarian hierarchies coexisted with plurals and
use of power and pathways of individual and collective autonomy and mobility.
And that's why terms like Raja or bumblebees have never encoded just merely monarchic, meaning they have had much more decentralised implications.
Now, European space, sometimes aware of this. So Voltaire, writing in 1773, speaks about the Maraxus,
and he sees the Jews themselves a chief in friendship whom they do not obey except during war and the obey him very badly.
The Europeans have called him king. This captain of brigands, so much one lavishes this name.
So what I recognise is that in applying the category of king to the as, Europeans are doing a very strange mis recognition.
Another very interesting figure, somebody who in whom I am getting more and more interested because I'm located in Scotland is James Dog,
a Scottish prison officer who served as the British political agent to the West and Rajpoot states.
And recording in Todd's writings is the fact that the British are completely misunderstanding northern Indian politics,
particularly the politics of Rajasthan.
By applying what Todd argues that monarchical principles is that is a term that uses on qualities which were never monarchic in nature,
because rule, because power and authority were distributed amongst prince amongst nobles, amongst broad communities of law and order.
But instead, what the British do is to increase the power of monarchs.
Now, one historical scholarship has shown that this is not just cultural recognition.
This is embedded in the way that colonial capitalism functioned.
For example, to the British opium monopoly, the British wanted to introduce their goods and manufacturing processes into Rajasthan,
and they needed this kind of monarchy's power centres and hereditary understandings of dynasty,
rather than collectivist understandings to perpetuate their dominance.
But doing that, interestingly, does a kind of conceptual transfer from Scotland to India when it drove many uses.
The category of the clan,
which which in the late 18th early 19th century is particularly used in scholarship to refer to Scottish collective group identities.
He compares them to the Rajpoot, so he sees that there are particular within brackets.
This is race or the charitable brotherhood is similar to the Qatar holds.
A German tribes and Caledonian clans even finds Republican simplicity amongst the so-called in his phraseology,
Aboriginal races living in a state of primaeval and almost savage independence.
No paramount power paying, no tribute, unquote. Half century later, Alfred Lion, again, very interesting,
the Scottish origin colonial administrator who becomes the lieutenant governor of the north western provinces.
In his book Asiatic Studies in 1882, he compares the Rajputs Do I quote the pure plan by descent?
And he compares similarly the Rajput chiefs to I quote the remote forefathers of Highland chiefs now become Scottish Dukes unquote.
Now, very much like Todd Lyle, things that found in northern India in Rajput India had been decentralised rather than the dynasty.
What was the clan? So he sees, for example, in Asia has inherited three succession actually means the succession to its vacancy
of the ablest and most popular of them of the ruling dynasty or tribal family.
The tribal sovereignty stands on a much broader foundation because the choice is marines.
About half a dozen families at the time of finding a fit man is proportionately greater.
So dynastic vacancy dynasty collapse happens, but sovereignty ultimately resides in the clan or the tribe and barely criticises the British,
very ironically putting themselves for British history better for strengthening the sovereign against the nobles and the again,
just for international comparisons with the way that the Polish are who are very similar, supposedly to the Rajputs.
The Polish polity had been destroyed by Russian and Austrian intervention.
So my argument here, in short, is that the British are like Todd and Lyle,
or French observers like Voltaire, who wrote on India, were aware that monarchical principle,
dynastic sovereignty,
these are relatively new concepts being deliberately introduced into India by Britain in order to subvert the indigenous political systems.
Now, as part and parcel of this are the colonial debates and so on with this kind of discourse gets perpetuated.
So, for example, in the famous 1877 Darbar, which is used to proclaim Victoria as the Queen Empress of India,
Litton uses the category of dynasty to talk about how the British ruled in a way inherits the mantle of early dynasties.
Similarly, Lord Carson uses the term dynasty as well.
Historians like Winston Smith speaks about why Dynasty should lie at the heart of Indian historiography,
and here's the quote from Winston Smith A sound framework optimistic adults must be provided before the story of Indian religion.
The present art can be told. All right.
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.
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.
It's a colonial construction. Now, does this mean that this kind of construction does not meet with resistance?
And of course it does. And I'll take two examples of this.
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.
They're very concerned about the fact that these Highlander populations who mostly live
through through kind of mobile agriculture to what is called shifting cultivation.
They are not at all amenable to statehood. They don't want to pay taxes to the British.
They don't want to pay taxes to the indigenous princes. They frequently revolt during the rebellion of 1857.
They rise up en masse against the British and the British absolutely fed up with them.
They think that the rulers are incompetent. They are unable to subdue these indigenous Highlanders.
They are unable to take taxes and a series of colonial interventions.
Brutal military ones follows, as well as the introduction of a rule of male primogeniture.
And this again cousin is thought to be important times here.
Now, the reason male primogeniture was introduced into surprise also because they're very kind of critical of female power.
They know that in manifold, women had often intervened in power political scenarios in a triple rate,
so women had exercised actual royal power in the late 18th early 19th century came from power, and Bush would have none of it.
Again, very ironic given the is on the throne at that time. But ultimately, the British introduced this principle of Salit law,
so they say we need to impose Catholic law on Tripura and create this male domestic system.
And ultimately, what what emerges is a much more monarchist political idea where a bit it's unclear who the ruler would
be would often be better made by bargaining and warfare between different kinds of collective groups.
Now you've got more British oriented idea of sovereignty. But the old order does not quite well, be completely.
Now what the Greeks themselves knew, like colonial lithography,
was like states resilient as well as indigenous intellectuals like Notre Dame and so on.
Is that the concept of long, short odds bombshell, but was not a term you ever use only for the royal family?
It was often used for much bigger indigenous communities of Tripoli.
So, for example, the indigenous communist leader who later became in the early 20th century,
the chief minister to put up a road that separates tribal people would be and
especially the troopers regarded themselves as descendants of the rulers of Tripura.
Three put either be bombshell Shridhar and members of the rulers community, rather that up.
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,
the kind of nuclear narrative and sense, but a much bigger understanding of collective who are imbued with reality.
Now the rulers could, even when the power of the rulers had been radically strengthened by British colonialism,
the rulers would never completely ignore the fact that this idea of legality something collective.
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,
our people would shut us up to put up. And they used this to create a kind of quasi constitutionalist, decentralised,
devoid form of government where power is devolved to the indigenous tribes.
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,
decentralised, Louis centric Highlander order is not complete.
Destroyed by colonialism because they put this completely destroyed there, the princes realise their own sovereignty would be at a complete jeopardy.
So in order to negotiate that, they decentralise power to these indigenous communities.
By the 1940s, the indigenous communities are more and more getting imbued by communist ideas.
And this leaves the Tribal Settler Organisation, this regal organisation,
by most beautiful irony of history to become the foundation of the Communist Party in Tripura.
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,
that sovereignty and superar in fact rests with the indigenous communities and not with the
post-colonial Indian state or the high cost Bengali elite swapping Datsyuk and protected by that state.
And this leads in the long run to the growth and radical Islam stance of communism
in Tripura and the Communist Party rules to pull it off for several decades.
And the indigenous communities of Tripura have today because of Tripura belongs to the Tripura Autonomous District
Council and and the history of this lies in this collective misunderstanding of reality then imbued with communism.
Another example that I would take is that of the radical she's the radical.
She's at the biggest Dalit community in subdermal in West Bengal.
There is a huge peasant community of millions of people in sub in northern Bengal.
The very words Radbourne she relative. She means those belonging to the royal lineage.
And there are also people who have for centuries claimed collective royal lineage, drawing their descent from shiva.
Linking themselves with the cultural family with the could be how princely state and so on.
And here is very, very similar to that.
In the case of the Triple Shastri, you're also a sense of collective reality becomes the basis for their caste,
peasant caste movement and then nature of communism.
Subcontinent Burma, who is the most important interwar leader, says, and I quote sharply itself, is God.
As in God, it's up there with one uses one's own power to create, protect and Lord over the world.
And what does this mean for India's discourse? There are donkeys are peasants till the soil and thereby nourish and nurture human beings.
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.
This is a divine and regal function.
They also are soldiers, so through all these functions, they protect society, and therefore they are the true regal sovereigns.
And this becomes their basis for challenging British colonial rule, as well as high cost Hindu rule.
But the challenge of British colonial rule is more indirect. The challenge to high-cost Hindu leadership is more direct.
But there is a lot of very sophisticated discourses again imbued with socialist inspiration
about how draughtsmanship peasants who are actual rulers because they nourish society,
their labour, their back, the value they are generating is being lost.
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.
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,
emerge as a powerful peasant movement, both in coastlines as well as in communities lines.
But the movement is very strongly populated by draughtsmanship in post-colonial India.
They still continue to nurture these kind of discourses of collective kingship of collectives.
And this leads them to the formation of a territorial subaltern nationalism where they want a separate territory for themselves,
mostly within the Indian state.
But some argue outside the Indonesian state in the form of this opinion, kind of comfortable and critical to the other movements.
Now going back to the global story that I was talking about why Mr. Bolton resistance is happening at the level of national elites.
However, there is a kind of tendency to think about Nation State as embedded in national sovereignty and dynasty in Japan,
who is a very important figure, who is Japan's first prime minister and the kingmaker of the messy constitution of 1899.
In his commentaries on the Constitution of the Empire of Japan, published in 1889,
Teen Vogue's dynasty as a key category to say that the Empire of Japan shall,
to the end of time, identified some with the Imperial Dynasty unbroken and lineage.
And again, he is somebody who interprets Dynasty as a supreme right of property.
So, he says, in Europe, guiltiest of Holland maintained in a striptease on international law that a
sovereign possesses the supreme right of property in the land under his rule.
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?
Property rights are transferred from clans back to the state and then to various individuals.
We find it in a range of historic ethnic interventions and we have to remember
that historians in the 19th early 20th century were often very close to monarchs,
as well as the elite landed families.
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.
Frank Lawrence Miller has argued about how dynasties near the heart of German historical consciousness in the 19th early 20th century in India.
If one thinks about key figures like Shameless, the first writer of modern history in Hindi Corish, somebody writes on order and others.
They were all close to various kinds of princely families, though do not share.
Khan himself was very close, was using the archives of different elite families as well.
And similar is the case in Britain as well, whether in Scotland or in Wales or in England.
Historiography was often framed as the history of local aristocratic gentry families,
which again shows that there is nothing necessarily antithetical between Dynasty a nation.
Rather, national elites are often very happy to reject themselves as domestic elites.
The real sort of caesura the real conflict happens more at the realm of the difference between elites and subaltern ontologies,
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.
First observation the argument that world history can be narrated in terms of a radical transition from centuries,
if not millennia, of dynasty politics to a modern era of nation states and democracies.
This is a simplistic myth now. This is a myth narrated in a range of astrologers accounts Ben Anderson's imagined
communities hearing during Trump's recent book Dynasties A Global History of Power.
All these analysed dynasty analysed history as the transition from dynasty premodern to modernity, which is national modernity.
But in fact, this is not the case because actual history is much more complex.
Many modern states, thinkers, politicians, they have reconfigured ideas of dynasty to buttress the power of elites.
My second observation the history of the world has borne witness to a wide diversity of views of organising and transmitting power.
It is misleading to club all or even most of them under a single conceptual monolith like dynasty.
However, ambitiously, the concept is defined. Many of these political forms in the extreme European world as much as in Europe,
are managed power in polycentric with endowing broad collectives and community with governmental authority.
Many of these political forms have inspired and nourished modern, democratic and socialist politics,
which was my point that one cannot think of modern states as just universally dynastic in nature.
If one thinks about the case of the right committees or the Tipperary's, these were collectivist, Eurocentric centric forms of power.
Their royal power was, I mean, very negligible.
Or I mean, if it was their intention with these collectives and similar things have been argued for many other parts of India equity.
Others argued this for nomadic Rajasthan. My friend delicatessens argued this about Naga Landsberry shows the initial thought.
Now Naga democracy in modern times has been built on the foundation of indigenous Naga Village Republicanism.
So there is nothing really chronological to see that pre-modern politics, but all monarchic in nature.
Now my third observation is I do not deny that there were societies have been
characterised by divergent ways of organising the transmission of territory,
powder poverty and poverty. But I would deny that these societies can all be clubbed under the monolith of domestic politics.
My fourth observation there is epistemological violence involved in trying to fit
non-European concepts and social categories into the European origin notion of dynasty.
I mean, how do we translate it at?
And she discourses on on behavioural diplomacy, on being a the three-body discourses on business about millions of people claim to be at.
She's answered three us as dynastic in nature.
Global intellectual historians should ask what motivates projects of trying to artificially render a cerebral through
the category of dynasty divergent sociopolitical forms behind the epistemological gaze of seeing dynasties everywhere,
like historical projects of transforming political, economic and social structures.
Do we miss colonial domination?
The globalisation of the concept of dynasty is linked to the globalisation of capitalist colonial modes of production, exchange and exploitation.
And here basically my critique is against sort of compatriots historians who argue that different things can be compared as dynasties.
The nature and that question is what is it that makes comparison possible?
Not follow Marx's own argument, for example, in the current reset.
It is really exchange value. It is the fact that everything under capitalism is rendered exchangeable with everything else.
It is exchange value.
It is the value form which allows this kind of comparison to come into place because in which all commodities dissolve themselves,
that with dissolves itself into commodities, the universal equivalent.
So in a way, because the universal equivalent of capitalism,
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.
And this is also something that has been emphasised by Lydia Liu,
who talks about she talks about recontextualizing electability as a historical event and stole, assimilated, saved.
If stability is not an intrinsic feature of concepts, then one task must be to examine how their stability is achieved.
How unequal things are abstracted into comments or abilities that fuel our confidence in those very concepts that then are relegated as common sense,
unquote. So basically, in order to understand these comments, make me instability makings,
we have to understand the operations of sovereignty, of capital, of patriarchy and so on.
We also need to realise that modern nation states also often contain very headed between outrageously hereditary
ways of transmitting political authority and had to really think about the concept of citizenship in a way,
citizenship that only collectivise is the basic logic of heritage, succession of power,
the difference between insiders and outsiders, those who have the blood and those who don't.
And in South Asia, the way that citizenship is being framed and reframed currently to exclude minorities.
That basically shows that this kind of exclusionary logic of heritage tree power is again not something exclusive to dynasties.
Modern nation states often produce them, and that's what the reader sees when there is a very rightly argues that modern democratic
sovereignty is often to quote him as follows simply follow a pattern of filial,
fraternal ipso centric as the sovereignty of the people. So there was a basic connexion between monarchical sovereignty and nation state sovereignty,
and it speaks about this as the bottom a long cycle of political theology that is
at once paternalistic and patriarchal and thus masculine in affiliation father,
son, brother. And that is why some states often want these imaginary or fantasised about ancestors.
Ancestral sexualities becomes important in heritage or imagination.
Ashoka Agbara Shivaji in India, Emperor Jimo in Japan, Robert the Bruce in Scotland, King Arthur in England.
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.
So ancestors an important again not just in dynastic imagination,
but also in nationalist imagination, in contemporary post-communist China and Vietnam as well.
We see an increasing emphasis on dynastic history.
And above all, of course, all of this ties into the history of property, and my basic argument is that in modern global capitalism,
corporate sovereignty supremely important, the logic of transmitting power through collective body power and property.
This can be to the state. This can be to the company. This can be to a family.
All of these are connected logics,
and this is what Philip Stone talks about when he speaks about corporate sovereignty in the case of the English East India Company.
That's the logic of sovereignty and the logic of corporate transmission of power to the corporation.
I'm not that intrinsically different.
I mean, and of course, in kind of traditional monarchy political theology, the monarch himself or herself is often considered as the corporation.
And this is what we see in going back to Marx's critique of Hegel that in fetishising primogeniture,
what is being fetishised is the personality of property which is supposed to be transmitted to the father to lie in succession.
Now, when Marx is conducting this kind of transmission of property,
this will lead the more mature Marx to talk about the capitalists himself as just the personality,
the subjectivity of capitalism and the argument that had given decades earlier that
the landowner is in fact the embodiment of the subjectivity of landed property.
So whether it's the case of the transmission of business dynasty or whether it's the
pace of the transmission of Russian families or of aristocratic landed estates,
basically for ruling classes used corporate entities, companies landed estates kingship to transmit sovereignty and power as opposed to
support an ontology where sovereignty property are collectively and centrifugal,
he managed. And that is why today often the term dynasties is often used for corporate farms.
And similarly, the British royal family is called the farm by slaves.
He talks about modern Arab monarchies as behaving like corporations in exercising economic power and coercion in northern India.
That's got be very revealing views bought for the seat of kings and for the seat of merchants.
So the perpetuation of sovereign power of ruling classes and the perpetuation of the sovereign power of corporate seats.
These are quite related, and northern Indian merchants often, in fact, speak about having royal ancestors.
King Agra Senior is a much invoked royal ancestor for many months and families.
I'll take five more minutes to sum all of this up. Apologies that I overflowed a bit, probably because of the Connexions.
The modern world of nation states does not embody a radical rupture from its mystic past of headed tree power.
Nation states often greens cried all the forms of headed tree identity and hierarchy
sharing with dynasties the focus on transmission of rights and sovereignty by blood.
The logic of nation states sovereignty is not so far apart from that optimistic sovereignty.
Nation states also secured hereditary political and social authority with their border regimes,
differentiating insiders and outsiders and protecting the power and predation of ruling classes.
The modern capitalist world, however much some scholars, might differentiated from a pre-modern positive headed to true authority.
In fact, continues to be characterised by intergenerational transfer of status, power and property.
Think it is wonderful? Work is just one example which deconstructs that radical headed the theory inequality,
differentiating different classes and geographic regions, and the political influence of property ruling classes.
Modern frameworks of gutless law and order probably even give such headed tree power and property a stability,
security and longevity which they would not have enjoyed in earlier epochs in many parts of the world.
If it is deceptive to think that the modern world is intrinsically democratic and thus stands in sharp contrast to a pre-modern past,
which is intrinsically in egalitarian and undemocratic and assumption that many scholars have,
including Anderson and so on, it is equally deceptive to believe that centuries and social formations distant from us have
been universally dominated by headed to the authority and inequality they have to take.
Power has existed. It has always been in tension with other forms of political action.
Different societies in different parts of the world have often in the historical past, practise various forms of polycentric politics.
Very large spectrum of actors and collectives exercise political power.
India demonstrates how such forms the polycentric and collective politics often survived into the 20th century,
the cases of northern Bengal and Tripura providing the social basis for new forms of democracy.
Intellectual historians have long neglected the study of the social and political formations
where they have done to all the societies in such resources for thinking about democracy.
Classical Greece and Rome have monopolised discussions far more than non-European societies.
This needs to change today if we are to deepen democratic politics globally by forming solidarity with political actors such as
citizens in the non-European world for whom these all the resources of polycentric and collective action continue to have dependence.
Hence, we need to diversify our conceptual lexicon instead of remaining prisoners of hegemonic concepts such as dynasty or even democracy.
Intellectual historians can carry out militancy against euro centrism and elitism in the realm of concepts.
Concepts are not kings. They are embodied dialectics of social relations.
Concepts of practise, ineradicable, be open to revolutionary transformation for global intellectual historians,
the excitement lies in understanding this dialectic by working through a planetary gaze rather than through a methodologically provincial lenses.
Deconstructing concept histories of terms like Dynasty Nation, coal and rods,
I'm sure constitutes a small part of a broader strategy by reading the past against the grain.
We can recover those polycentric and collectivist forms and imaginaries of social organisation,
which can help us today to build new solidarity and to fight against hereditary power, inequality and exploitation.
Democracy is a movement that perpetually opens out that makes autonomy possible by passing through astronomers constraints,
refuses incarceration as or into a singular idea or lineal genealogy, European or otherwise.
It is all the more important, therefore,
for global intellectual historians to recall the multiple sites of revolutionary thought and militancy to write.
The history of the past is a call to arms for the present. Thank you very much.