PE/PI Workshop: Jack Paine (Emory)

Jack Paine (Emory) will present, "The Last of the Monarchies: How Colonial State Formation Reshaped Regime Type."

Abstract:
As late as the nineteenth century, states were governed almost exclusively by monarchies. Today, though, ruling monarchies are rare. Focusing on Africa and Asia, I locate this transformation in the process of forming and reshaping colonial states. Although the overwhelming majority of nineteenth-century monarchies became Western dependencies, less than one-third of these monarchies were eliminated by the colonizer. Instead, the main challenge to monarchical hegemony was the colonizers' preference to agglomerate smaller monarchies into larger colonies. This was a dynamic process that unfolded across the colonial period; colonial units were frequently reshaped even after World War II. Subnational monarchs were rarely able to successfully recover power in the face of rising nationalist pressure and expanding electorates. The monarchies that survived as postcolonial national institutions were not the largest and strongest precolonial states, like the Sokoto Caliphate in Nigeria or the descendants of the Mughal Empire in India. Instead, colonial survivors were often small units which benefitted from an exceptional characteristic that discouraged agglomeration into a larger unit, such as oil wealth, proximity to white settlement states, Mandate/Trust status, or location in a mountainous frontier.