These days it is perhaps difficult
to put oneself empathetically into a world in which the dynastic realm
appeared for most men as the only imaginable 'political' system. For in
fundamental ways 'serious' monarchy lies transverse to all modern conceptions
of political life. Kingship organizes everything around a high centre.
Its legitimacy derives from divinity, not from populations, who, after
all, are subjects, not citizens. In the modern conception, state sovereignty
is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimetre of a
legally demarcated territory. But in the older imagining, where states
were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties
faded imperceptibly into one another. Hence, paradoxically enough, the
ease with which pre-modern empires and kingdoms were able to sustain their
rule over immensely heterogeneous, and often not even contiguous, populations
for long periods of time.
...[T]hese antique monarchical
states expanded not only by warfare but by [intermarriages of royalty]...
Through the general principle of verticality, dynastic marriages brought
together diverse populations under new auspices....
In realms where polygyny was
religiously sanctioned, complex systems of tiered concubinage were essential
to the integration of the realm. In fact, royal lineages often derived
their prestige, aside from any aura of divinity, from, shall we say, miscegenation?
For such mixtures were signs of a superordinate status. It is characteristic
that there has not been an 'English' dynasty ruling in London since the
eleventh century (if then)....
Hobsbawm observes that 'The
French Revolution was not made or led by a party or movement in the modern
sense, nor by men attempting to carry out a systematic programme. It hardly
even threw up "leaders" of the kind to which twentieth century revolutions
have accustomed us, until the post-revolutionary figure of Napoleon.' But
once it had occurred, it entered the accumulating memory of print. The
overwhelming and bewildering concatenation of events experienced by its
makers and its victims became a 'thing' --and with its own name: The French
Revolution. Like a vast shapeless rock worn to a rounded boulder by countless
drops of water, the experience was shaped by millions of printed words
into a 'concept' on the printed page, and, in due course, into a model.
Why 'it' broke out, what 'it' aimed for, why 'it' succeeded or failed,
became subjects for endless polemics on the part of friends and foes: but
of its 'it-ness', as it were, no one ever after had much doubt.
In much the same way, the
independence movements in the Americas became, as soon as they were printed
about, 'concepts', 'models', and indeed 'blueprints'.... Out of the American
welter came these imagined realities: nation-states, republican institutions,
common citizenships, popular sovereignty, national flags and anthems, etc.,
and the liquidation of their conceptual opposites: inherited nobilities,
serfdoms, ghettoes, and so forth.... Furthermore the validity and generalizability
of the blueprint were undoubtedly confirmed by the plurality of
the independent states.
In effect, by the second decade
of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, a 'model' of 'the' independent
national state was available for pirating.... But precisely because it
was by then a known model, it imposed certain 'standards' from which too-marked
deviations were impermissible....