16 research outputs found
How 'dynasty' became a modern global concept : intellectual histories of sovereignty and property
The modern concept of âdynastyâ is a politically-motivated modern intellectual invention. For many advocates of a strong sovereign nation-state across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in France, Germany, and Japan, the concept helped in visualizing the nation-state as a primordial entity sealed by the continuity of birth and blood, indeed by the perpetuity of sovereignty. Hegelâs references to âdynastyâ, read with Marxâs critique, further show how âdynastyâ encoded the intersection of sovereignty and big property, indeed the coming into self-consciousness of their mutual identification-in-difference in the age of capitalism. Imaginaries about âdynastyâ also connected national sovereignty with patriarchal authority. European colonialism helped globalize the concept in the non-European world; British India offers an exemplar of ensuing debates. The globalization of the abstraction of âdynastyâ was ultimately bound to the globalization of capitalist-colonial infrastructures of production, circulation, violence, and exploitation. Simultaneously, colonized actors, like Indian peasant/âtribalâ populations, brought to play alternate precolonial Indian-origin concepts of collective regality, expressed through terms like ârajavamshiâ and âKshatriyaâ. These concepts nourished new forms of democracy in modern India. Global intellectual histories can thus expand political thought today by provincializing and deconstructing Eurocentric political vocabularies and by recuperating subaltern models of collective and polyarchic power.PostprintPeer reviewe