The Benin Monarchy

The Benin Monarchy

Author: Benin Traditional Council Editorial Board

Publisher:

Published: 2018-10-20

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 9789785473414

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A stunning and illuminating one-of-a-kind anthology of one of the world's most ancient royal dynasties as told by its own people. Infused with the grandeur, history, artistic accomplishments, and challenges that have arisen over the centuries, The Benin Monarchy: An Anthology of Benin History is the first of its kind offering an expansive examination of the history of a nation. The Kingdom of Benin, now a part of Nigeria, has a remarkable and complex history; epicentre of the largest historical empire ever established in the 'rain forest belt' of West Africa, today it looks to compete with the most modern states within the continent whilst losing none of its unique heritage. Tracing the development of the Kingdom of Benin from the earliest times to the rise of the current monarchical dynasty, a royal line that has endured over 800 years, the reader is taken on a journey that includes trade with Europe, the vicissitudes of colonial and post-colonial periods and culminates in the c


Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs

Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs

Author: Kathryn Babayan

Publisher: Harvard CMES

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 640

ISBN-13: 9780932885289

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Focusing on idealists and visionaries who believed that Justice could reign in our world, this book explores the desire to experience utopia on earth. Reluctant to await another existence, individuals with ghuluww, or exaggeration, emerged at the advent of Islam, expecting to attain the apocalyptic horizon of Truth.


Servants of the Dynasty

Servants of the Dynasty

Author: Anne Walthall

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2008-06-10

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 0520941519

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Mothers, wives, concubines, entertainers, attendants, officials, maids, drudges. By offering the first comparative view of the women who lived, worked, and served in royal courts around the globe, this work opens a new perspective on the monarchies that have dominated much of human history. Written by leading historians, anthropologists, and archeologists, these lively essays take us from Mayan states to twentieth-century Benin in Nigeria, to the palace of Japanese Shoguns, the Chinese Imperial courts, eighteenth-century Versailles, Mughal India, and beyond. Together they investigate how women's roles differed, how their roles changed over time, and how their histories can illuminate the structures of power and societies in which they lived. This work also furthers our understanding of how royal courts, created to project the authority of male rulers, maintained themselves through the reproductive and productive powers of women.


Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba

Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba

Author: Suzanne Preston Blier

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-11-02

Total Pages: 793

ISBN-13: 1107729173

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In this book, Suzanne Preston Blier examines the intersection of art, risk and creativity in early African arts from the Yoruba center of Ife and the striking ways that ancient Ife artworks inform society, politics, history and religion. Yoruba art offers a unique lens into one of Africa's most important and least understood early civilizations, one whose historic arts have long been of interest to local residents and Westerners alike because of their tour-de-force visual power and technical complexity. Among the complementary subjects explored are questions of art making, art viewing and aesthetics in the famed ancient Nigerian city-state, as well as the attendant risks and danger assumed by artists, patrons and viewers alike in certain forms of subject matter and modes of portrayal, including unique genres of body marking, portraiture, animal symbolism and regalia. This volume celebrates art, history and the shared passion and skill with which the remarkable artists of early Ife sought to define their past for generations of viewers.


The Precolonial State in West Africa

The Precolonial State in West Africa

Author: J. Cameron Monroe

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-06-09

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1107040183

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This volume examines political life in the Kingdom of Dahomey, located in the Republic of Bénin.


Asen, Ancestors, and Vodun

Asen, Ancestors, and Vodun

Author: Edna G. Bay

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0252032551

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A social and iconographic history of a West African sculptural form


Monarchies and decolonisation in Asia

Monarchies and decolonisation in Asia

Author: Robert Aldrich

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2020-06-05

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 1526142716

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With original case studies of a more than a dozen countries, Monarchies and decolonisation in Asia offers new perspectives on how both European monarchs who reigned over Asian colonies and Asian royal houses adapted to decolonisation. As colonies became independent states (and European countries, and other colonial powers, lost their overseas empires), monarchies faced the challenges of decolonisation, republicanism and radicalism. These studies place dynasties – both European and ‘native’ – at the centre of debate about decolonisation and the form of government of new states, from the sovereigns of Britain, the Netherlands and Japan to the maharajas of India, the sultans of the East Indies and the ‘white rajahs’ of Sarawak. It provides new understanding of the history of decolonisation and of the history of modern monarchy.


Revolutionary Commerce

Revolutionary Commerce

Author: Paul Cheney

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2010-03-16

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780674047266

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Combining the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, Atlantic history, and the history of the French Revolution, Paul Cheney explores the political economy of globalization in eighteenth-century France. The discovery of the New World and the rise of Europe's Atlantic economy brought unprecedented wealth. It also reordered the political balance among European states and threatened age-old social hierarchies within them. In this charged context, the French developed a "science of commerce" that aimed to benefit from this new wealth while containing its revolutionary effects. Montesquieu became a towering authority among reformist economic and political thinkers by developing a politics of fusion intended to reconcile France's aristocratic society and monarchical state with the needs and risks of international commerce. The Seven Years' War proved the weakness of this model, and after this watershed reforms that could guarantee shared prosperity at home and in the colonies remained elusive. Once the Revolution broke out in 1789, the contradictions that attended the growth of France's Atlantic economy helped to bring down the constitutional monarchy. Drawing upon the writings of philosophes, diplomats, consuls of commerce, and merchants, Cheney rewrites the history of political economy in the Enlightenment era and provides a new interpretation of the relationship between capitalism and the French Revolution.