How ‘Dynasty’ Became a Modern Global Concept: Intellectual Histories of Sovereignty and Property

Abstract

This essay argues that the concept of 'dynasty' -nowadays associated especially with 'premodern' and non-Western societies -does not offer a value-neutral description for political forms. Rather, the modern concept of 'dynasty' has been a politically-motivated and highly ideologically-charged modern intellectual invention. This article focuses on select discourses from France, Germany, Britain, India, and Japan to explore how the concept, in its modern form, got globalized. For many advocates of a strong sovereign nation-state across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, 'dynasty' offered a pillar for imagining the 'national' past: the 'dynastic' past as a prehistory and/or backbone for national sovereignty. 'Dynasty' was used to imagine the nation-state as a primordial entity sealed by the continuity of birth and blood, indeed by the perpetuity of sovereignty. G. W. F. Hegel's references to 'dynasty', as well as Karl Marx's critique of Hegel, when juxtaposed with other modern discourses, show how 'dynasty' encoded a major point of 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' further reveal the contiguity between ideologies of national sovereignty and patriarchal authority, sharing the obsession with founding fathers and bloodlines. European colonialism helped globalize the concept of 'dynasty' in the non-European world, while building modern forms of sovereign statehood, maximising fiscal exploitation, and coercively 'pacifying' militant and rebellious populations. Colonial India offers an exemplar of ensuing debates, even pitting certain British administrator-scholars against the empire's monarchizing and dynasticizing programmes. By exploring these case studies, I argue that the globalization of the abstraction of 'dynasty' was ultimately bound to the globalization of capitalist-colonial infrastructures of production, circulation, and exploitation. Meanwhile, Indian peasant and 'tribal' populations brought to play alternate precolonial Indian-origin concepts of collective regality and lineage selfhood, expressed through terms like 'rajavamshi' and 'Kshatriya'. These concepts destabilized colonial and elitist constructions of sovereignty, and helped produce new notions and practices of democracy in modern India. The paper concludes that global intellectual history optics can help us problematize the constructions of power which underlie the processes of conceptual abstraction and globalization through which radically different political systems are coercively straitjacketed and rendered commensurable through a monolithic concept (like 'dynasty'). Global intellectual histories can expand radical political thought today by provincializing and deconstructing regnant Eurocentric political vocabularies and by recuperating subaltern imaginaries of collective and polyarchic power.