How ‘Dynasty’ Became a Modern Global Concept

Intellectual Histories of Sovereignty and Property

Bibliographic Data

ID13104357
AuthorsMilinda Banerjee (0000-0001-7657-5626, University of St Andrews, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume7
Issue3
Pages421-452
Publication date2020-07-27
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGlobal Intellectual History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2380-1883 • E-ISSN: 2380-1891
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/23801883.2020.1796232
OpenAlexW3045911068
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited39

The modern concept of ‘dynasty’ 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. Hegel’s references to ‘dynasty’, read with Marx’s critique, further show how ‘dynasty’ 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 ‘dynasty’ 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 ‘dynasty’ was ultimately bound to the globalization of capitalist-colonial infrastructures of production, circulation, violence, and exploitation. Simultaneously, colonized actors, like Indian peasant/‘tribal’ populations, brought to play alternate precolonial Indian-origin concepts of collective regality, expressed through terms like ‘rajavamshi’ and ‘Kshatriya’. 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

Capitalism · Colonialism · Globalization · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sovereign state · Sovereignty · State (computer science · Subaltern · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · History · Law · Political Economy and Marxism