Dynastic periodization has traditionally structured the chronological ordering of China’s history. The period from 900 to 1350 encompasses two major dynasties, Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1279–1367). Historians in China and elsewhere typically saw the Song as culturally vibrant and militarily weak, and the Yuan as a conquest dynasty that briefly interrupted the narrative flow of Chinese history until the restoration of “native” rule in the following Ming (1368–1644). Twentieth-century national politics recast China’s history along a linear (ancient, medieval, modern) timeline rather than a dynastic cyclical one, placing the Song and Yuan in a medieval-to-modern transition. The high degree of commercialization and monetization of the Song economy led scholars to view the Song as experiencing an economic transformation that fostered dramatic changes in Song society. Recent interest in cultural diversity as well as political concerns with the role of minority peoples – in both the People’s Republic of China and elsewhere – have drawn new attention to the Khitan Liao, Tangut Xi Xia, and Jurchen Jin empires that rose on the Song borders, as well as the Mongol conquest and rule of China as the Yuan dynasty. Middle-period China encompasses processes of political unification, social and economic transformations, and profound cultural achievements.

In a hereditary monarchy, kinship mattered; yet, royal family members are too often relegated to the background in contemporary scholarship on the princely states. This chapter shows that royal family members could muster significant social, political, cultural, and economic capital in support of their various personal and political projects, and often figured prominently in the records as the Resident’s greatest allies, or greatest foes. Residents developed a range of strategies for co-opting or side-lining younger brothers, uncles, and nephews, who, despite being useful informants, were also destabilizing forces in regional politics, and a drain on the Company’s time and resources. Women played an even more important role at court, one that has been obscured in previous accounts of the Residencies. This chapter shows not only how the Resident sought to mobilize royal women for his purposes, but also how royal women themselves laid a claim on the Resident’s services through the idiom of kinship and protection, often with significant consequences for the Resident’s political strategy at court. Rather than simplifying their job, the Residents need to work through royal families in fact introduced significant complications.

This scene-setting chapter charts out the challenges Europe’s monarchies had to face in the wake of the French Revolution and the key means they employed to achieve their survival – among them an alliance with nationalism and imperialism, constitutional development and public relations techniques. It also introduces royal heirs as individual agents – and the process of succession more widely – as an essential part of this political arsenal. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the main contexts within which the lives and functions of a nineteenth-century heir had to unfold: the constitution, the royal family, the public sphere and the court.

This chapter focuses on the crucial importance of familial relationships within the ruling dynasties – both in terms of securing a successful transition from one generation of rulers to the next and with regard to the individual wellbeing of the royal heirs. Two key relationships are identified and explored through selected case studies: the relationship between the monarch and his or her successor (through the prism of the relationships between Queen Victoria, Emperor Wilhelm I and Emperor Franz Joseph and their oldest sons) and the relationship between the royal heir and his wife – through an analysis of the marriages of Prince Umberto of Savoy, Prince Wilhelm of Württemberg and Prince Friedrich August of Saxony.

This chapter introduces the volume, stating the central objective of the book – namely, tracing the rise, consolidation, and fall of Iran’s last two dynasties – and the political, social, and economic changes that each of the two dynasties, the Qajars and the Pahlavis, effected in Iran.

Contextualising conflict provides further testimony of children’s legitimacy as rulers between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. This chapter turns to narrative accounts of dynastic challenge, opportunistic conflict and kidnap to address the problematic association between child kingship and magnate violence. Evidence for the appearance and escalation of conflict while a boy was king has often been accepted without sufficient critical scrutiny. The chapter shows that attempts to remove children from their royal positions were rare, and that conflict often upheld their legitimacy to rule rather than undermining it. Applying the arbitrary label of violent opportunism to all instances of conflict when a child was king oversimplifies the complex range of reasons for magnate disputes. Instead, conflict could be, among other things, a legitimate response to royal succession, a habitual aspect of the negotiation of disputed property and rights, or a product of recurring quarrels over hierarchy and prominence. The child king’s presence and active participation could, once again, convey a significant and authoritative weight.

This chapter compares different temporal regimes developed by the Seleucids and Ptolemies. Kosmin suggests that the Seleucids created a new “historical field” when Seleucus proclaimed a new epoch of Babylonian history and called the year of his conquest of Babylon year 1. The Babylonian historian and priest Berossus, despite writing a history of pre-Seleucid Babylonia, situated himself in the new world of the Seleucids. Yet in Egypt the Ptolemies continued reckoning with traditional regnal years, showing their subordination to traditional uses of historical time. But there were changes, too. Greek regnal years started with the anniversary of the king’s accession, oaths were sworn by the divinized royal members and Demotic dating formulae used the eponymous priests of the royal cult. All this established the Ptolemaic dynasty as a unit and a method of structuring time in its own way. Manetho and Berossus took over dynastic history, creating thirty dynasties up to the Macedonian conquest. The Ptolemies created a neue Zeit, but the Seleucids were more revolutionary. In both empires the local elites and populations participated in shaping the new politics of time.

This chapter argues that client kings played a significant, even leading role in disseminating the images associated with the princeps and the imperium Romanum at the outskirts of the empire. Dependent rulers faced a unique challenge, as they had to pay homage to the emperor as the superior authority while maintaining and communicating their own royal prestige and local legitimacy. In the context of these intricate dynamics, client kings developed a mode of representation that reflected their authority as well as the superiority of the emperor. To this end, they adopted and adapted models from the centre of the empire for their own purposes, turning modes of imperial representation into a shared idiom of power. However, the hierarchy between emperor and dependent ruler always remained clear and was reinforced through the imperial cult. Instead of undercutting the local legitimacy of client kings, the reverence of an even higher authority, elevated beyond mortality, was used to strengthen the position of dependent rulers whose power relied on the centre’s approval.

Although the inscriptions contain bountiful self-representations of royal performances, personas, and encounters, they by no means present an exegesis on the political system as such. To build a view of five centuries and more of societal success we must look beyond these individual expressions to the way that they synergise with other sources, revealing patterns that can only be appreciated in the assemblage. This chapter therefore moves to draw together the different themes examined in Part II so as to offer a synthetic interpretation of Classic Maya political culture, both as it was constituted in the specific unit and the interactive whole.

Chapter 5 explored the self-definition of the Classic Maya elite within a range of statuses, offices, ranks, and roles – marks of authority and entitlement that centred upon and radiated from a “holy” ruler. We now need to turn to how this collective noblesse went about constituting and maintaining a political community. Politics can never be reduced to a state of being since it always implies active, substantive acts that establish, maintain, and extend power relations. These acts are guided by formal and informal norms, rules, and protocols that express the structural properties of the system. To recover even an outline appreciation of these properties we must first take the textual record on offer, recognising its idealised, retrospective, and highly selective character, and then look beyond to what these tightly controlled narratives refer to only obliquely, or reveal only through statistical analysis. Very often it is the exceptions that demonstrate the rules, the anomalies and deviations that illuminate where orthodoxy gives way to exigency in a contingent world.

Classically, the Ottoman Empire was considered as a polity that broke aristocracies by raising armies and bureaucracies of slaves beholden only to the sultan and an ideology both of equality and subjugation. In this interpretation, conflict between the ‘state’ and kinship characterized the empire. In fact, the empire contained numerous kinship-based elites, both formally recognized and informal. The empire’s longevity and several of its main conflicts can be understood by studying the charismatic power and legitimacy of its most central kinship group: the Ottoman dynasty. However, kinship-based elites were (a) mostly informal, (b) kept isolated by the imperial centre and (c) dealt with in an improvised ad hoc manner rather than through institutionalized procedures and organizations. Kinship elites were central to the empire and to its legitimacy but they remained without a legitimizing framework. Thus, the most successful Islamic polity collaborated with its many kinship-based elites.

This chapter compares the diversity regimes of the Qing Empire and twentieth-century Chinese republics to argue that evocations of 'traditional' Chinese diversity regime and interpolity relations frequent in the literature are based on a mistaken model of the Chinese past, one involving the 'tributary system' and 'Confucian peace' or tianxia concepts, largely derived from John King Fairbank’s descriptions of the 'traditional Chinese world order.'After critiquing the Fairbankian model, the chapter introduces the findings of more recent scholarship on the Qing period which reveal the flexible Qing approach to domestic diversity and interpolity relations, here called 'imperial pluralism.' The formal diversity regime of the People’s Republic of China towards its 56 minzu (nationalities, ethnicities) echoes Qing imperial pluralism as well as the nationalities system of the Soviet Union. Since the 2010s, however, the PRC has shifted from centralized pluralism towards a Han assimilationist approach. The author cautiously suggests that aspects of Chinese centralized pluralism – and not a vain quest for a homogeneous national population – would provide a more successful model, while remaining true to Chinese traditions.

Chapter 3 follows a clerical chronicler through a typical service at the twelfth-century Monastery of the Caves in Kiev, from the moment he hears the call to prayer to the priest’s final blessing from the ambo. Over the course of the narrative, I name and describe every church book that the chronicler takes up in his hands, and every sort of hymn, prayer, and reading that leaves his lips. In so doing, I attempt to provide a modern academic audience with a glimpse into how the liturgy was lived and experienced, day after day, by the men responsible for writing history in early Rus. I further argue that church books were not simply texts or sources like any other. I suggest, rather, they are the surviving artefacts of a Roman storytelling technology that enveloped its participants in a very special kind of narrative world. In my view, the worship of God, and the ritual retelling of his saving acts, was also a covert form of Byzantine political indoctrination. The liturgical rites inculcated an explicitly eastern Roman social arrangement between ruler and ruled, and they embedded this construct in a series of sacred narratives about the conversion and salvation of the Byzantine Empire.