Single Polity Research Articles

An ulus within an ulus: the afterlife of Ariq Böke's appanage in the Mongol Empire (1252–1336)

Abstract In 1206 Chinggis Khan replaced the warring factions of Mongolia with a single polity, the Great Mongol Realm (Yeke Mongqol Ulus). The ulus was ruled by a khan, who allocated pastures, households and revenues to his relatives as shares (qubi). Chinggis granted the first allocation to his brothers and senior sons in 1207 but many more redistributions took place in the coming decades. Many of these appanages grew so large that their holders challenged the khan's dominance and even broke free of his control to form their own polities (uluses). This article will explore the fluidity of the Mongol appanage system by taking the qubi of Chinggis Khan's grandson Ariq Böke (d. 1266) as a case study. The Ariq Bökids established their own secondary ulus in Inner Asia, before fragmenting and lending their support to neighbouring khans in the fourteenth century.

Legacy of the British Mandate: Eliminating The Palestinian Right to Self‐Determination

AbstractIn February 2024, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a plan for the “postwar” Gaza Strip that envisions Israel's military as unilaterally and indefinitely patrolling the enclave while an unnamed third party runs the local government. While even allies like the United States criticized this scheme, Palestine has never enjoyed autonomy as a state, and the institutions and practices of Israel's far‐right government—and even of the Palestinian elite—are rooted in the settler colonialism facilitated by the British mandate, 1922–1948. This period was the first and last time in modern history that Palestinian Arabs and Jews were administered as a single polity, albeit on radically unequal terms. This article examines how international law was used to suppress the Palestinians and privilege the creation of a Jewish state of Israel. The legacy of this regime can be seen in the present‐day thwarting of Palestinian self‐determination through Israel's use of the military for civil administration, digital surveillance, and the right‐wing agenda for annexation of the West Bank and perpetual war in Gaza.

Montesquieu and The Federalist : A Contested Legacy at the American Founding

Abstract: During the contentious political debate of 1787, Montesquieu enjoyed exceptional prestige in the United States. In their struggle against the Constitution adopted in Philadelphia, Anti-Federalists appealed to The Spirit of the Laws as their leading authority. In response, those defending the proposed Constitution had to go back to Montesquieu's founding theories to counter the arguments of their opponents. Building upon previous scholarship, this article will explore three aspects of The Federalist 's political doctrine where Madison and Hamilton analyzed and subverted Montesquieu's ideas: first, the dogma that republics cannot survive when surrounded by empires if they do not unite their forces in a confederation; second, that in a federative state as in any kind of state, power should limit power; third, that in this constitutional arrangement, an independent judiciary should play a special role. Thus, the core of American federal ideology was borrowed from Montesquieu: that multiple layers of government could legitimately exist within a single polity, and that such an arrangement is not a defect to be lamented but a virtue to be celebrated if the balance of powers is properly respected. Yet it is only by confronting the Anti-Federalists' intellectual allegiance to axioms of The Spirit of the Laws that Madison and Hamilton were able to provide the first political treatise – however unfinished it might be – on the viability of modern democracies.

Transmuting Words into Gold: Writing Failure in the Discovery of Guiana

abstract: Sir Walter Ralegh’s quest for El Dorado and gold mines in Guiana famously ended in failure. Yet his chronicle, The Discoverie of Guiana , and supporting works by George Chapman and Lawrence Keymis became quintessential texts of English imperialism, sustaining interest in colonization after decades of setbacks. This article considers how alchemical discourse reframed failure as a productive deferral of England’s imperial destiny. Drawing on English sericonian alchemy, Ralegh, Chapman, and Keymis envisioned empire transforming dissolute adventurers into virtuous and industrious men who would advance the state’s objectives and redeem Amerindians through good governance and Christianity. Metaphors of the chemical wedding downplayed Native dispossession by conceptualizing conquest and colonization as a benevolent, if initially violent, amalgamation of England and Guiana into a single polity. They urged Queen Elizabeth to fulfill providential history by accepting her role as alchemist of the imperial state. Though Ralegh could not transmute failure into success, the Guiana texts contributed to England’s “White Legend” and legitimized the eventual profits of empire as just compensation for spreading Protestantism and benefitting the commonwealth.

Rethinking Premodern Governance: Passing the Torch

During his long, prolific career, Henri J. M. Claessen was a major contributor to the comparative study of political organizational change. Starting with The Early State (1978), edited with Peter Skalník, Claessen's writings served to broaden and enrich evolutionary approaches in anthropology by recognizing key axes of diversity in political forms and variation in temporal sequences. Furthermore, he recognized that studies of long-term political change required multiscalar concepts that included analytical lenses larger in size than single polities. Claessen drew on his encyclopedic knowledge of ethnographic and historical cases in challenging and expanding the mid-twentieth century approaches to social evolution. With his passing, now is an appropriate time to build on the theoretical advances that Claessen forged, most specifically by taking fuller account of what archaeological research has discovered during the years coincident with his academic career. Grounded in these findings, further steps toward a comparative framing aimed at understanding diversity and change in human political organization and cooperation are advanced.

Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the Separation of Powers in Federal Polity and “Wills of Nation”

The problem of this article is built around the tension between the concept of organ sovereignty and democracy theory. First of all, this vision of sovereignty fails to describe the diverse forms of popular participation in collective decision-making. It speaks very sparingly of the people as a political actor. Moreover, the concept of organ sovereignty does not provide the theoretical resources to describe the intermediary bodies in the space between the state and the individual. The tradition of liberal democracy emphasises the importance of such bodies for maintaining popular control over state. Also, the idea of organ sovereignty, by reducing all power to a single legislature, ignores the demand for self-government coming from communities located within the same state and yet united by a certain collective identity. Today, democracy theorists are turning to the concepts of federalism in order to overcome the above-mentioned limitations set by the concept of organ sovereignty. So far, however, the concepts of federalism have not been very convincing in describing the various forms of popular participation in collective decision-making. Above all, they have failed to consistently justify the existence of multiple decision-making centres within a single polity. The article argues that the model of the federal polity proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his later work “Considerations on the mode of government in Poland” explains how within one polity multiple centres of collective decision-making can coexist. The model also provides an understanding of how citizen participation in multiple decision-making centres can be organised.

EXITitis in Europe? Yugoslavia as the First European Disunion

Yugoslavia (YU), a multinational federation, collapsed into civil war and ultimate dissolution in 1991, exactly when the European Union (EU) was coming into existence as a multinational federation. What failed in YU, and is threatened in EU, is the concept of a federation composed of nation-states in the European sense of that term, in which the nation (as ethno-religious community) is sovereign in its own state (territory plus government). If the EU remains defined as a single polity of nation-states whose sovereignty is subordinated to regulatory processes from Brussels, which nationalists can charge are damaging to the interests of their particular ethno-nation’s control over their own state, its future seems as unpromising as was Yugoslavia under socialism.

"The Cradle of Dari": The Question of "Origins" in Modern Literary Historiography in Afghanistan

یا ،دحاو یمرکز تقدر کیادبیات فارسی در درازنای تاریخ در سرزمین پرپهنایی آفریده شده که هیچگاه به :کیده چ سنت نیااما، در سایه بینشی ملی گرایانه، تعریفی که ،نیونوزگار رده است. در وبنبا مرزهای مشخص، محدود یرکشو و افغانستان، با ناسیاسی در جغرافیای معینی به دست دهد، سامان پذیرفته است. در ایر یرحدود و ثغو ارادبی گسترده فرهنگی ییااستای دیدگاه ملی گررنان بنیادی در وچ مهو شهپژو عموضو نابه عنو مه ارسازه هایی که ادبیات رظهو تا دنابوده نبیشتر در پی آ نادار بوده است. ادبای اهل ایرروخبر یی هزد، تاریخ ادبیات فارسی از اهمیت ویژرنگاه می و یکسره ارگان ادبیات فارسی رجلوه دهند و بز ناگی سنت ادبی در سرزمین ایرراز شکوه و بز یینمایه ارپیشینه ادب فارسی د در شگوفایی فرهنگ فارسیوختا بر مرکزیت سرزمین دنااهل افغانستان، اما، پیوسته کوشیده نابخوانند. پژوهشگر ینایرا آنچه در بالا آمده است، نگاهی .دنفرهنگ پندار نیا یلصاشگاه رزادگاه و پرو ارو افغانستان دنزرتاکید و )یو فارسی در در زمینه اروبل ژ یارآ هتشبن نیاوبل. ژتاریخ ادبیات افغانستان اثر زنده یاد محمد حیدر شزرااست بر کتاب اثرگذار و باهای زبانشناسی تاریخی و تبارشناسی لغات به تحلیل می گیرد. Persian literatury has historically remained borderless, transcending any single polity or nationstate. In the modern period, however, nationalist reconfigurations of this literary tradition tend to ascribe to it a territorially bounded definition. Concurrent with the emergence of Persian as a scholarly discipline and a national institution in Iran and Afghanistan, Persian literary historiography has become a significant ground for contention and contestation. While Iranian scholars consider Persian literary history to epitomize the splendor of Iranian cultural heritage, Afghan scholars, in contrast, are keen to point out that the territory that constitutes Afghanistan can best claim to represent the “original” home of Persian literary efflorescence, the ground where Persian literary production emerged, developed, and came to full fruition. This paper offers a critical perspective on M. H. Zhubal’s Tarikh-i Adabiyat-i Afghanistan, a seminal and influential text of literary historical inquiry and philological investigation. La littérature persane est historiquement demeurée sans frontières, transcendant toute forme d’entité politique ou d’État‑nation. Cependant, à l’époque moderne, les reconfigurations nationalistes de cette tradition littéraire tendent à lui attribuer une définition territorialement limitée. Parallèlement à l’émergence du persan en tant que discipline académique et institution nationale en Iran et en Afghanistan, l’historiographie littéraire persane est devenue un terrain important de controverse et de contestation. Alors que les chercheurs iraniens considèrent l’histoire littéraire persane comme l’incarnation même de la splendeur du patrimoine culturel iranien, les chercheurs afghans, en revanche, tiennent à souligner que le territoire qui constitue l’Afghanistan peut le mieux prétendre représenter le foyer « originel » de l’efflorescence littéraire persane, le terrain où la production littéraire persane est née, a évolué et a pleinement porté ses fruits. Cet article offre une perspective critique sur Tarikh-i Adabiyat-i Afghanistan de M. H. Zhubal, texte fondamental et influent sur la recherche historique littéraire et philologique.

Introduction: A Research Agenda for Federalism Studies

This book conveys current and original reflections of 16 leading scholars from five continents on the past, present, and future of federalism research. They analyze the state of research on key facets of federalism worldwide and present ideas for new research to further understanding of federalism as a principle and mode of governance. Although only about 28 countries are arguably federal, more than 40 per cent of the world’s people live in federal systems, making federalism a leading mode of governance, potential basis for democracy, and means to accommodate diverse, territorially based national, linguistic, ethnic, racial, and/or religious communities in a single polity. Federalism is a very important principle of governance, one that is, in many cases, the only viable means to achieve unity peacefully and democratically in the face of human diversity. The contributors address research gaps, needs, and directions in normative political theory, constitutionalism, comparative governance, fiscal systems, gender, territorial diversity, nationalism, conflict resolution, shared rule, and federalism challenges in Africa, Asia, and the European Union.

A Koronivalu kei Bua: Hillforts in Bua Province (Fiji), their Chronology, Associations, and Potential Significance

Sixteen hillforts constructed and occupied perhaps several centuries before contact in the early nineteenth century are described from Bua district in northern Fiji. These hillforts represent inland settlements in fortifiable locations on high volcanic islands, plausibly established in response to the outbreak of sustained conflict. The chronology and functions of these hillforts were investigated through mapping, excavation, and collection of oral traditions. Four groups of hillforts are recognized. The Seseleka and Yadua (Island) groups represent single polities, comprising a mountaintop site surrounded with fortified narrow steep-sided basalt ridges with tributary sites at lower levels functioning as lookouts and/or food-processing sites. The Northwest Bua group comprises mountaintop sites occupied only when aggressors threatened, and are otherwise characterized by occupation around their bases. The Inland Bua group ranges along one of the highest ridges in the area and were all reportedly in conflict with each other. The Buan hillforts represent those found elsewhere in Fiji and on other high Pacific Islands. Insights from the study of these hillforts illuminate this period of Fiji history and help interrogate broader questions about drivers and proximate causes of the conflict that may have seen hillforts established near simultaneously on high Pacific Islands during the last millennium.

Steppingstones to Imperial Unity? The British West Indies in the Late-Victorian Imperial Federation Movement

Formed in 1884, the Imperial Federation League sought to promote the idea of imperial unity, based on a vision of Britain and its colonies consolidating as a single polity. Consideration of the place of the British West Indies in a federation scheme served to highlight the divisions within the empire and the differences in understandings of imperial citizenship. Federationists were inconsistent about whether the West Indies should form part of the self-governing empire, based largely on different assumptions about race and the capacity for self-government. This failure to clearly define the nature of imperial community highlighted the tensions and inconsistencies of late-Victorian imperialism.

Sovereignty, Property, and Empire, 1500–2000. By Andrew Fitzmaurice. Ideas in Context, volume 107. Edited by David Armitage et al.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. x+378. $99.00 (cloth); $79.00 (Adobe eBook Reader).

<i>Sovereignty, Property, and Empire, 1500–2000</i>. By Andrew Fitzmaurice. Ideas in Context, volume 107. Edited by David Armitage et al.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. x+378. $99.00 (cloth); $79.00 (Adobe eBook Reader).

A Common State in Israel–Palestine: Historical Origins and Lingering Challenges

This papers investigates Palestinian and Zionist understanding of a common state in Palestine by examining two central historical texts that promoted a one state solution in Palestine. It explores the ways in which Palestinian and Zionist nationalisms tried to address the relationship between the state and the nation as well as offered ways to protect collective and individual rights in a single polity. It also examines how each side viewed the identity and needs of the other party, in order to understand how each party thought it (im)possible to accommodate them into a single polity. The paper shows that the Palestinians, while trying to come to terms with the Jewish presence in Palestine after 1970, have often failed to appreciate the complexity of Jewish national identity in a single polity. They accepted the two states solution as an attempt to reconcile with Jewish Nationalism only to find that their political rights were further eroded. The Zionists, on the other hand, has often justified the one state solution from a purely introspective dimension, namely with regards to its congruence with Jewish needs and notions of justice. Although they tried to take into consideration Palestinians claims, they maintained an orientalist tone in their approach to Palestinian claims and options. Moving forward a discourse of rights needs to supersede a reified understanding of self-determination and provide a new political formula that can protect the collective and individual rights of all those living on the land.

“Great Conceptions of Their Own Power”: Native and U.S. Diplomacy in the Old Southwest

> In summer 1835, U.S. officials planned a treaty council designed to assert control over the Old Southwest and its Native inhabitants. The council instead furthered the diplomatic and economic goals of the Plains and removed Indians who were adjusting to new western contexts. The first few months of 1835 in Indian Territory were bitterly cold. The Arkansas River was frozen solid between Fort Gibson and the nearest American settlements on the Arkansas border, halting boat traffic and preventing news and supplies from reaching the southwestern frontier.1 But some U.S. government officials in the region had more important reasons than warmer temperatures to be anxious for the arrival of spring. They were anticipating finally being able to hold a treaty council with the Comanches, the powerful Plains nation that controlled the western portion of the area Congress had designated “Indian Territory” to help further its goal of controlling Native American migrations and forced removals into the trans-Mississippi West. In the early nineteenth century, Indian Territory was part of an expansive borderlands space where no single polity exercised complete sovereignty. Congress believed that the United States “owned” the land because of the Louisiana Purchase and made removal policies based on that assumption. However, the most powerful actors in the region—the Comanches—were reaching the peak of their economic and political dominance just as the U.S. government began forcing more Native removals into a western space federal officials had little knowledge about and virtually no control over. Brian DeLay and Pekka Hamalainen have demonstrated that the Comanches controlled a vast commercial empire on the Southern Plains in the …

TRANSMIGRATION, MULTICULTURALISM AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN EUROPE

All European societies are ethnically and culturally plural. Historically, the most significant source of cultural (not necessarily synonymous with ethnic) diversity in European nation-states has been regional, often a result of conjoining economically, socially, culturally, linguistically - and indeed ethnically - disparate places into single polities, and (certainly in Northern and Western Europe) engaging them in what the French call nationalization. This paper discusses the relationship between cultural diversity in Europe, and that international movement described as “transnational” (transmigration). Though not as new or as homogeneous as some have proposed, transmigration will grow in importance in the 21st century. Groups or individuals may return to places of origin or “assimilate” into receiving societies, but without resort to unacceptable levels of control of the movement of people, goods and ideas, transmigration will be a prominent structural feature of European societies for the foreseeable future: do we really wish to monitor every exchange between receiving and sending societies? In any case, modern systems of communication (e.g. the Internet), and the cheapness and rapidity of mass international travel make such surveillance difficult, even impossible in a transnational, globalizes world.

Byzantium and the Turks in the Thirteenth Century, by Dimitri Korobeinikov

The thirteenth century is in many ways an anomalous one in Byzantine history. Political power, previously monopolised by Constantinople, was redistributed throughout the Aegean world. A plethora of polities formed within or expanded into what had been the territory of the Komnenian/Angelid ‘empire’. In this transformative anarchic landscape, where an increased number of small(er) polities competed for the same amount of territory and resources, the importance of inter-political relations had never been so high. Thus it is not before time that Dimitri Korobeinikov has placed the relations between these polities at the centre of an extended study, rather than at the periphery of a story about any single polity. A world that is simultaneously fragmented and connected in such a wide variety of ways demands synthetic treatment. Yet, because of the level of political fragmentation, different areas of the thirteenth-century Byzantine/Aegean world have been examined by different communities of scholars, each with their own research agendas. Nowhere is this more striking than in the relationships between the Seljuk sultanate and its Byzantine contemporaries. The disjuncture is exacerbated by the large numbers of languages required to work in both the ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ literature of the different disciplines. Undeterred, and apparently entirely unhindered, by this plethora of languages and academic traditions, Korobeinikov is completely in command of his sources, be they Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic or Turkish (Ottoman). The text is peppered throughout with the author’s extended translations. For the reader unversed in Persian, the extended quotation of key source material and his general excursus on the Persian sources (pp. 22–6) are both necessary and informative. Korobeinikov has clearly thought carefully about individual works, their authors and the traditions within which they were created. In particular, the incorporation of an analysis of Ibn Bibi’s writings as literature is a profound advancement from the cherry-picking of ‘facts’ from Duda’s German translation of the Mukhtaṣar (abridgement).

Urban Scale Shifts since the Bronze Age: Upsweeps, Collapses, and Semiperipheral Development

This is a study of the growth and decline of cities for the purpose of identifying those events in which they significantly increased in size. Significant changes in the scale of cities are important for understanding the long-term trend toward more complex and hierarchical human societies. We report the results of an inventory of cycles, upsweeps, and collapses of settlements in five separate interpolity systems. Upsweeps are instances in which the largest settlement in a world system significantly increases in size. Collapses occur when the size of the largest settlement greatly decreases and stays down for a significant period of time rather than rebounding. We use regional interpolity systems (world systems) rather than single polities or settlements as our unit of analysis. Because the accurate designation of sweeps requires interval scale measures, we are limited to those regions and time periods for which quantitative estimates of largest settlement sizes are regularly available. We find a total of 18 upsweeps and five downsweeps, and only two instances of prolonged systemwide settlement collapse. We also investigate whether or not the rate of cycles has increased over the long run, and we find that cycles of city growth and decline have not accelerated. We also find a greater rate of urban cycles in the Western (Central) System than in the East Asian System, which supports the usual notion that the Western city system was less stable than the Eastern city system.

Polity scale shifts in world-systems since the Bronze Age: A comparative inventory of upsweeps and collapses

In this article we report an inventory of cycles, upward sweeps and collapses of polity sizes in five separate interpolity systems: Mesopotamia, Egypt, South Asia, East Asia and the expanding Central System that eventually became the contemporary global system. Upward sweeps are defined as instances in which the largest sovereign polity in a network of fighting and allying polities significantly increases in size. Collapses are instances in which the size of the largest polity greatly decreases and stays down for a significant period of time (centuries). We use regional interpolity systems rather than single polities as the unit of analysis, following the comparative world-systems framework. We are limited to those regions and time periods for which quantitative estimates of largest polity sizes are available. We compare the frequencies of cycles and sweeps across five interpolity networks, and find more similarities than differences across the five systems. This is somewhat surprising because most studies that compare East Asia with the West stress important differences. We find a total of 22 upsweeps and 19 downsweeps across the five systems, but only three instances of prolonged system-wide collapse. We also find that the frequency of cycles increased over the long run, while the frequencies of upsweeps and downsweeps did not display long-term trends. The lack of a downward trend in downsweeps challenges the supposition that resilience grows with sociocultural complexity and size.

Insecure Alliances: Risk, Inequality, and Support for the Welfare State

Popular support for the welfare state varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue that these variations—vital to understanding the politics of the welfare state—reflect in part the degree to which economic disadvantage (low income) and economic insecurity (high risk) are correlated. When the disadvantaged and insecure are mostly one and the same, the base of popular support for the welfare state is narrow. When the disadvantaged and insecure represent two distinct groups, popular support is broader and opinion less polarized. We test these predictions both across nations within a single policy area (unemployment insurance) and across policy domains within a single polity (the United States, using a new survey). Results are consistent with our predictions and are robust to myriad controls and specifications. When disadvantage and insecurity are more correlated, the welfare state is more contested.