Sociopolitical Hierarchies Research Articles

Constructing ‘Traditions’

This paper focuses on the Late Helladic (LH) burial structures and related sacred areas of the southern Ionian Islands and considers how they served as diachronic markers of social space and active agents within the processes of individual and collective identity formation and negotiation. More specifically, it explores a series of examples depicting instances of manipulating memory and the past. I argue that Mycenaean burial monuments played an important part in the configuration of ideological narratives and the construction of traditions aimed either to affirm or to legitimise social status and socio-political hierarchies. Development of tomb and hero cults as interrelated phenomena with strategies of past manipulation are also discussed in detail. The chronological framework covers a broad period between the early LH and the Geometric period, and focuses on the island of Kefalonia, which includes the richest dataset.

Biocultural consequences of the Late Woodland transition at Forbush Creek, North Carolina (AD 800-1200)

After several centuries of cultural continuity, the Late Woodland transition (AD 600-1000) in the Southeastern Woodlands involved a significant intensification of existing lifeways. This study examines the biocultural consequences of the Late Woodland transition at Forbush Creek (AD 800-1200), a Yadkin River Valley site from the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Twelve percent of individuals recovered from the site sustained violence-related trauma, including five individuals with healed blunt force trauma, two individuals with perimortem cranial trauma, and a single projectile point injury. Secondary burial individuals exhibited significantly more trauma (n = 10, 42%) and nutrient deficiencies (n = 12, 50%) than primary burial individuals (n = 1, 4%; and n = 5, 19%, respectively). The Forbush Creek remains provide new evidence of the biological impacts of cultural transitions and suggest that uncertainty, scarcity, and conflict arising from changing lifeways contributed to inequality in the Forbush Creek community. Secondary bundle burial inclusion may represent marginalization and an increased vulnerability to morbidity and mortality risks. The emergence of social inequality in the Late Woodland period likely shaped long-term cultural dynamics that preceded the complex sociopolitical hierarchies of the later Mississippian period.

The Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic as the pivotal transformation of human history

The objective of this paper is to set the Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation (ENT) within the truly long-term of human evolutionary history. The Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation take us out of the world of Palaeolithic mobile foraging into a new world, in which the scale and organisation of the social group and the tempo of socio-cultural evolution were transformed. The scale and diversity of cultural innovation and social organization can be seen to be linked in co-evolutionary feedback loops that have been characterised as ‘cumulative culture’, ‘ratcheting’ effects, or ‘runaway’ cultural evolution. The up-scaling of communities and the intensification of their interaction and networking enabled the emergence of super-communities that became the first large-scale societies, an inflection point on an accelerating curve of complex cultural, social and economic development, en route to emergent socio-political hierarchies, urbanism, kingdoms and empires.

Механизмы легитимизации в медиадискурсе (на материале интернет-СМИ)

Purpose. Today, new media play a crucial role in legitimating political relations. Theoretical background of the current research draws on the social cognitive approach to discourse studies. From this perspective, legitimization is understood as one of the major ways of establishing social dominance in the process of meaning negotiation. As the meanings in discourse can vary, discourse actors have tools to attribute components of meaning to specific affairs, for instance, political and social. An analysis of the news discourse aims to identify major mechanisms of establishing legitimacy of political decisions conducted by political institutions. The authors describe discursive features of constructing political decisions by applying the method of discourse analysis to the news on Venezuelan crisis, which took place in the winter 2018–2019. Results. As the study of the empirical data demonstrates, the British mass media tend to construct discursive representation of Latin America’s events by introducing of several groups of actors in the news on the Venezuelan crisis. Generally, these groups relate to socio-political hierarchy. They include individual, collective, institutional and international actors. By tracing the elements of their agency in Venezuelan crisis 2019 news, authors assume that their functions in news construction are directly connected to the mechanism of objectivation. Recognizing the informative function of media as one of the major, authors argue that this mechanism also relates to establishing legitimacy in discursive practices. The ways by which the actors of the events in the discourse on Venezuela have been embedded in the articles show the creation of increasingly formed belief in legitimate actions of the new opposition leader. Conclusion. The study contributes to the methods of discourse analysis as well as to the search for legitimization strategies applied by the media. The implications of the study include the comparative analysis of British and Russian new media discourse.

The Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic as the pivotal transformation of human history

The objective of this paper is to set the Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation (ENT) within the truly long-term of human evolutionary history. The Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation take us out of the world of Palaeolithic mobile foraging into a new world, in which the scale and organisation of the social group and the tempo of socio-cultural evolution were transformed. The scale and diversity of cultural innovation and social organization can be seen to be linked in co-evolutionary feedback loops that have been characterised as ‘cumulative culture’, ‘ratcheting’ effects, or ‘runaway’ cultural evolution. The up-scaling of communities and the intensification of their interaction and networking enabled the emergence of super-communities that became the first large-scale societies, an inflection point on an accelerating curve of complex cultural, social and economic development, en route to emergent socio-political hierarchies, urbanism, kingdoms and empires.

Coevolution of landesque capital intensive agriculture and sociopolitical hierarchy

One of the defining trends of the Holocene has been the emergence of complex societies. Two essential features of complex societies are intensive resource use and sociopolitical hierarchy. Although it is widely agreed that these two phenomena are associated cross-culturally and have both contributed to the rise of complex societies, the causality underlying their relationship has been the subject of longstanding debate. Materialist theories of cultural evolution tend to view resource intensification as driving the development of hierarchy, but the reverse order of causation has also been advocated, along with a range of intermediate views. Phylogenetic methods have the potential to test between these different causal models. Here we report the results of a phylogenetic study that modeled the coevolution of one type of resource intensification-the development of landesque capital intensive agriculture-with political complexity and social stratification in a sample of 155 Austronesian-speaking societies. We found support for the coevolution of landesque capital with both political complexity and social stratification, but the contingent and nondeterministic nature of both of these relationships was clear. There was no indication that intensification was the "prime mover" in either relationship. Instead, the relationship between intensification and social stratification was broadly reciprocal, whereas political complexity was more of a driver than a result of intensification. These results challenge the materialist view and emphasize the importance of both material and social factors in the evolution of complex societies, as well as the complex and multifactorial nature of cultural evolution.

Decolonial strategies in world politics: C.L.R. James and the writing and playing of cricket

ABSTRACTDiscussions of decolonizing world politics have flourished in international studies recently but few of these engage with popular culture, especially sports. In this paper, I address this gap and consider sports – specifically the sport of cricket – as a global phenomenon, useful for discussing key decolonizing strategies. This paper argues that cricket, as a form of popular culture, offers language and practices to critique oppressive sociopolitical norms and global hierarchies. It draws upon the cricket-writing of C.L.R. James, specifically his book Beyond a Boundary, as well as on the experiences of playing cricket to outline some decolonial strategies. These strategies include shifting perspectives on world politics, the role of biography and autobiography as critique, and the relevance of positionality in describing global processes and in the construction of knowledge. Overall, this paper claims that popular culture, especially those which are popular in the Global South, offers ways to rethink and rework relations between the powerful and less powerful. Cricket provides examples of ways in which these various decolonial strategies can be enacted in practice.

Variations of Vileness: An Introduction

The guest editors explain how this special issue of Early Modern French Studies identifies and explores the significance of the vile in three key regards: i) the heuristic value of repulsive bodies; ii) a search for transcendent beauty in death and decay; iii) revilement along linguistic, social, and political lines. They argue that, within and between these wider phenomena, variations of vileness tellingly illuminate the difficulties of calibrating moral and aesthetic categories with those of a changing socio-political hierarchy.

Looking Glass Worlds: The Queen and the Mirror

Looking Glass Worlds: The Queen and the Mirror

Sovereign Homosociality in the Henriad

In real politics, a king is ontologically a lonely person standing on the highest of the socio-political hierarchy. Yet, by staging monarchical isolation, playwrights bring into relief a sovereign as a character, which enables us to delve into a powerful man’s inwardness. In this way, specifically from the perspectives of homosocial bonding or homosociality, monarchical isolation on stage has a resonance for readers/audiences. Shakespeare explores kingly glory accompanied by sovereign loneliness in his history plays. In particular, his rendering of the trajectory of Henry V’s life reflects the playwright’s understanding of politics in the period. In many respects, Shakespeare shares his political view with Machiavellian understanding of monarchy, which not a few of his political plays demonstrate. Machiavellian understanding of monarchy was an early political science, an initial approach to politics from a realistic standpoint in the period. Yet, political theology was still widely accepted in early modern England, where a state was not separable from religion. In a variety of sacrificing homosocial intimacy for his own sovereignty, Henry V successfully obtains his sovereignty. Then the king solidifies his kingship through his spiritual communion with God at a critical moment when he feels utmost isolation. In such efforts, thus, the king becomes successful, though his success is brief. In this way, Shakespeare represents monarchical cognition of spiritual homosociality as a necessary element for a successful, not ideal though, king, which reflects the extent to which Machiavellian understanding of monarchy overlaps with political theology in the period.

Conquest, Borders, Geopolitics

Livonian War (1558–83) was not a local Baltic war, but a European conflict. What was the place of Livonian War in the context of European wars of the 16th century? Europe in this era experienced colonial wars, wars of independence, religious wars, Turkish wars etc. The Livonian War bears the strongest resemblance to Italian wars of 1494–1559. Those were wars about tying microstates to new monarchies. In part, a similar process took place in Livonia. It was a microstate with an obsolete socio-political hierarchy unable to fight back (the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order). Several new European monarchies, including Sweden, Poland, Lithuania, Denmark, and Russia, sought to divide it. Russia’s participation in the conflict set it apart from the Italian Wars. Europe immediately and unconditionally recognized the right of the Jagiellon, Oldenburg, and Vasa dynasties (but not that of the Rurikide dynasty) to divide the Baltic. Livonian War was also a more complex multi-faceted phenomenon for new European monarchies (especially for Sweden and Denmark), than it was a war similar to Italian wars of the first half of the sixteenth century (that is, a war for the takeover of microstates by stronger and more modern kingdoms going through a phase of active development). The same can be said of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in that it went through this active phase during the Livonian War and formed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Poland also positioned itself as a state whose higher mission was to act as a shield protecting the “Christendom” from “Eastern barbarians,” among whom Russians were numbered, portrayed in a similar fashion to Turks. For Russia, this war evolved from a local border conflict to a war for the annexation of the Baltic States, and finally, for Russians, the war became a holy war against a foreign foe.

Constructing Identity in Pushkin’s Russia

Luba Golburt, The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and Russian Cultural Imagination. 402 pp. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. ISBN-13 978-0299298142. $29.95. Joe Peschio, The Poetics of Impudence and Intimacy in Age of Pushkin. 174 pp. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. ISBN-13 978-0299290443. $29.95. In an alley somewhere in Kharkiv, two murals depict the duel of From one wall, a bevy of Hollywood characters come charging at viewer--Robocop, Superman, Batman, Darth Vader, Scrooge McDuck. Facing them on opposite wall, throwing off his top hat with his left while his right aims a pistol straight at us, stands a lone action hero in sideburns: Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. (1) These murals provide evidence, if any was needed, that age of Pushkin remains central to never-ending debate about meaning of Russian Hence it seems fitting that Pushkin mural appears on cover of Joe Peschio's The Poetics of Impudence and Intimacy in Age of Pushkin. How Golden Age literature helped construct Russian identities, and in process undermined cultural hegemony of imperial regime, is subject both of Peschio's book and of Luba Golburt's The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and Russian Cultural Imagination. Peschio examines how literature subverted regime's control over public sphere. Crucial in this enterprise was what might be called playful side of Golden Age literature: Pushkin and his comrades engaged in shalosti--pranks, obscenities, and calculated displays of rudeness--to construct intimate social spaces that lay beyond reach of imperial Russia's authority structures. Golburt's book, a study of Russian authors from Lomonosov to Turgenev, deals with way literature of 19th century delegitimized regime through its treatment of 18th century. The paradox of period's court-centered culture, she argues, lies in twofold way in which it forms starting point of modern Russian culture--originally as a utopian project to construct enlightened Russia of future, and then, starting in Pushkin's time, as exotic and obsolete past against which Russia's ever-changing present was measured. The circumstances of 18th-century society, historians have long argued, made it difficult for Russians to develop a strong, coherent sense of individuality. John LeDonne emphasizes authoritarian implications of country's autocratic and communal traditions: in no area of Russian life, he argues, was there any room for assertion of individual freedom, economic initiative, and social autonomy. (2) Other authors, focusing specifically on nobility, see evidence that educated Russians were continually confronted with a choice among competing models of thought and behavior. For instance, Iurii Mikhailovich Lotman argues that high society encouraged girls to respond to emotional shocks by fainting or welling up in tears, while life on tradition-bound country estates taught those same girls to be stoic. (3) Andrei Zorin finds that when nobleman Mikhail Nikitich Murav'ev wrote about his stateservice career, he alternately described it as profoundly meaningful and as vain and meaningless. Murav'ev, Zorin writes, expressed with equal strength and clarity two different emotional paradigms that guided his reactions and behavior. This kind of double identity was rather typical for Russian Pre-Romantic culture. (4) This cultural model bolstered autocracy because it encouraged Russians to mold their inner selves to fit needs of sociopolitical hierarchy--not only in political matters but in all areas of life. Consequently, spread of individualistic ways of thinking even about ostensibly nonpolitical matters has drawn interest of scholars who study decline of Russia's old regime. In his study of one small town, Aleksandr Kamenskii finds that although the communal principle of social organization remained intact, there were already signs in mid-18th century of an individualization of consciousness and of [individual] personality detaching itself from collective. …

ZANU (PF)'s Manipulation of the ‘Alien’ Vote in Zimbabwean Elections: 1980–2013

This article historicises how the post-colonial Zimbabwean government has maintained and consolidated its power through, among other tactics, the systematic manipulation of the ‘alien’ vote. The ‘aliens’ are residents in Zimbabwe who are either of foreign origin themselves or whose parents are originally from Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique. Basing its findings on oral interviews, the paper engages power and coercion as analytical concepts to understand how non-indigenous communities are affected by state power through the reconfiguration of their citizenship/belonging and relentless violence during elections. It argues that since the 1980s migrant descendants have been used and abused by the hegemonic socio-political hierarchy for its electoral benefit. Migrants, who came into what was then Southern Rhodesia during the colonial labour migration system (1890s to 1970s), like other autochthonous Zimbabweans, were allowed to vote between 1980 and 1996. Yet all this changed in the post-2000 period, when the ZANU (PF) government complicated citizenship laws and initiated the land reform exercise to, among other aims, strip ‘aliens’ of their right to suffrage in subsequent elections. This on and off relationship has been dictated by the politics of power, patronage and coercion under which migrant descendants have constituted a critical swing vote which ZANU (PF) has either embraced for its benefit or marginalised it in the face of formidable opposition politics. This disenfranchisement has invariably affected the livelihoods of these foreign descendants through violence, intimidation and denial of socioeconomic leverage.

Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human by Alexander G. Weheliye

Reviewed by: Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human by Alexander G. Weheliye Amber Jamilla Musser Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014, 224pp.ISBN 9780822357018 Alexander G. Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human covers vast terrain in a scant number of pages. Weheliye radically reorients discussions of biopolitics by challenging Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theorizations of population management and bare life. These philosophers, Weheliye argues, have neglected to theorize racialization as the prime mechanism for articulating “a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (4). The book’s title, Habeas Viscus, indicates just how far into the depths of the body—the heart and lungs—Weheliye will plumb in his theorization of ways that racialization, Man, and rights come together to exclude some from the rights of personhood. From this perspective, slavery emerges as one of the primary disciplinary apparatuses for separating out strains of humanity in the North American and African contexts. Building on this focus on slavery, Weheliye urges us to think through Hortense Spillers, who argues that gender and sexuality are central to the workings of racializing [End Page 156] assemblages, and Sylvia Wynter, who positions this decentering of Man at the heart of the enterprise of black studies. As such, Habeas Viscus analyzes the flesh or viscus in order to preserve the gendered and racialized specificity of biopolitical regimes. In addition to bringing black feminism into conversation with continental philosophy, Weheliye articulates black studies as an intellectual endeavor that “pursues a politics of global liberation beyond the genocidal shackles of Man”(4). This means that the flesh, following black feminism’s usage of it as the signifier of the gendered but not quite human and not quite animal body, is a space of potentiality because it offers a way to think about “alternative modes of life alongside the violence, subjection, exploitation, and racialization that define the modern human” (2). It is in this flesh that alternatives to Man might be able to truly take hold. The book begins by insisting that blackness offers a way to study the disparate modes of humanity because, owing to colonialism and the slave trade, it is both inside and outside of modernity. Weheliye draws on Wynter’s troubling of “the genre of Man” (25) in order to argue that “racialization figures as a master code within the genre of the human represented by western Man, because its law-like operations are yoked to species-sustaining physiological mechanisms in the form of a global color line—instituted by cultural laws so as to register in human neural networks—that clearly distinguishes the good/life/fully-human from the bad/death/not-quite-human” (27). This insistence on racialization through culture not only sets the stage for his specific intervention into Agamben and Foucault, but it opens the book to a wide array of sources—critical theory, law, film, and music—in order to prove that racialization and cultural production go hand in hand. The ordinariness of these racializing assemblages acts as an affront to the eventialization of bare life that Agamben articulates and the scientifically oriented mechanisms of biopower that Foucault favored. This is violence that is designed to cloak its origins. By way of explaining the workings of these assemblages, Weheliye argues that the video for M.I.A’s Born Free, in which redheads are rounded up and executed because they have culturally been deemed “other,” is exemplary of this racial logic. Rather than argue that red hair stands as a substitute for blackness and abjection, Weheliye argues that the video exposes the “techniques by which sociopolitical hierarchies are camouflaged by the natural features of the human body” because it shows the link between technologies of surveillance and violence and physical traits that have been made to stand for important differences (71). This is racism at its core in that it draws on the body to claim differences that become naturalized into hierarchies. In a subsequent chapter, Weheliye...

Warfare and Socio-political hierarchies: reflections on non-State societies of the predynastic Nile Valley

In a recent article, anthropologist Robert L. Carneiro reassessed his most debated hypothesis about the emergence of chiefdoms and the State as a result of environmental or social circumscription, theorized for a series of historical contexts including that of the Predynastic Nile Valley. The problem of the origin of the State is beyond our scope, but regarding the emergence of institutionalized leadership and chiefdoms in the Nile Valley, Carneiro’s ideas about warfare as a main factor in the process of social change remain interesting, even when his insistence in circumscription is still debatable. The aim of the present paper is to briefly review the available archaeological evidence of warfare among non-State societies of the Predynastic Nile Valley, and to evaluate its possible relation to the emergence of socio-political hierarchies, in turn refering to and criticizing some of Carneiro’s recent ideas about the issue.

Changing Music’s Constitution: Network Music and Radical Democratization

A review of radical democratic theories influenced by technological developments and nonhierarchical network structures allows us to analyze factors influencing hierarchical structure in music ensembles. Network music ensembles are uniquely positioned to deploy heterarchical technologies that enable them to address radical democratic concerns relating to communication structures and power distribution. This essay provides examples of current politically tinged explorations in network music and examines the room left for maneuvering in developing systems that consider the implication of data structures on sociopolitical hierarchy.

Inequality, Aspirations, and Social Comparisons

We develop a model of adaptive learning with social comparisons. Actors are more likely to choose actions that recently yielded satisfactory payoffs; satisfaction is evaluated relative to an aspiration level that reflects previous payoffs and possibly other players’ payoffs. This captures the phenomenon of social comparison viareference groups. We show that if agents compare themselves to those who are receiving higher payoffs then in stable outcomes all payoffs must be equal. If, however, agents’ aspirations are driven by less ambitious social comparisons then very unequal distributions can be stable. We apply our general results to collective action problems in socio-political hierarchies and derive conditions for stable exploitation. Finally, we develop a computational model, which shows that increases in payoff inequality make outcomes less stable.

An Architectural Perspective on Social Change and Ideology in Early Mycenaean Greece

Early Mycenaean (Late Helladic [LH] II–IIIA1) Greece witnessed major changes in the built environment, including new types of mortuary architecture and the appearance of corridor buildings (a megaron-type structure with an interior corridor and subsidiary rooms). These architectural developments have been interpreted as material reflections of an established sociopolitical hierarchy and the emergence of palatial elites, while the corridor buildings have been identified as seats of palatial administrators or the king. This article shifts the focus from the traditional dichotomous scheme of "palatial" and "nonpalatial" Mycenaean architecture to the ways in which the new built environment, and the corridor buildings in particular, shaped social interaction, influenced particular behaviors, and ultimately transformed sociopolitical structures. It is argued that rather than symbolizing elite power, the Early Mycenaean corridor buildings played an active role in structuring social relations by providing a locale not only for the display and negotiation of individual and group identities during inclusive ritualized activities but also for the creation of social cohesion and commonality. By creating patterns of encounter and contexts for interaction between distinct groups and the community at large, the LH II–IIIA1 corridor buildings created profoundly different experiences and practices from those of the earlier periods, experiences that shaped sociopolitical developments and generated social change.

Liebe in Zeiten humanitärer Intervention. Sex, Geschlechterbeziehungen und humanitäre Intervention in Goma, DR Kongo

Schlüsselwörter: Kongo, Jugend, Gender, humanitäre Intervention----- Love in Times of Humanitarian Intervention – Sex, Gender Relations, and Humanitarian Intervention in Goma, DR Congo.Abstract“In Goma there is no love – everything is about dollars” is a common saying amongst young men in Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. More than just referring to ‘love’, this statement illustrates the complex terrain of moralities and materialities in Goma and refers to dynamic gender relations in the context of protracted violent conflict and humanitarian intervention. This article’s contribution focuses on the under-researched interactions and social practices going on in the contact zone of peacekeeping missions and the local population. This contact zone is conceptualised as a ‘market of intervention’ where sex becomes a commodity. The market of intervention influences economic opportunities, sociopolitical hierarchies, normative stereotypes, and the urban infrastructure, as well as shapes local imaginations of ‘modernity’ being characterised by western goods and lifestyle. Zooming into the social practice of transactional sex, the author analyses how the market of intervention might aggravate sexual exploitation, yet also opens up manifold opportunities and may enhance conceptions of the self at the same time. Young women engaged in transactional sex reflect on their obligations towards their family, strive for income, or try to fulfil desires. Men, too, identify the opportunities generated by the market of intervention, yet are often marginalised due to social, ethnic and gendered reasons. The unequal distribution of resources and asymmetric relations of exchange perpetuate patrimonial relations on the one hand, while on the other allow some actors (mostly educated young women) to perform their dream of a ‘good life’ – at least to a certain extent. Without downplaying the prevalent images of rape and sexual abuse, the article sheds light on often neglected yet very present heterogeneous experiences and social practices of and dealing with longterm humanitarian intervention.Keywords: Congo, youth, transactional sex, gender, humanitarian intervention-----Bibliographie: Oldenburg, Silke: Liebe in Zeiten humanitärer Intervention. Sex, Geschlechterbeziehungen und humanitäre Intervention in Goma, DR Kongo, PERIPHERIE, 1-2014, S. 46-70. https://doi.org/10.3224/peripherie.v34i133.22462

Disorder, Discipline, and Naval Reform in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain

Historians have considered a series of reforms in the mid-1740s to mark a turning-point between British naval failure and British naval success; they have argued that these reforms were commonsensical, and motivated by purely naval concerns. In contrast, this article argues that the form and function of the mid-century Navy were deeply contentious matters with serious ideological implications. The reforms instituted a new professional naval culture based on order, discipline, and obedience and were motivated at least as much by political concerns as by naval. Those who supported these naval reforms also wanted to see similar hierarchical and authoritarian values enforced in imperial governance and in domestic socio-political hierarchies. Those who opposed the reforms did so from fears that a professional Navy would be turned inward on British civilians and would unbalance the constitution by over-strengthening the executive. Rather than a military composed of disciplined professionals, they advocated more widespread civilian participation in both military and political affairs. Contemporary Britons believed that the Navy represented a microcosm of the social order, and they projected their idealised versions of the Anglo-imperial polity onto naval debates.