New Perspectives On Power And Political Representation From Ancient History To The Present Day

New Perspectives on Power and Political Representation from Ancient History to the Present Day offers a unique perspective on political communication between rulers and ruled from antiquity to the present day by putting the concept of representation center stage. It explores the dynamic relationship between elites and the people as it was shaped by constructions of self-representation and representative claims. The contributors to this volume – specialists in ancient, medieval, early-modern and modern history – move away from reductionist associations of political representation with formal aspects of modern, democratic, electoral, and parliamentarian politics. Instead, they contend that the construction of political representation involves a set of discourses, practices, and mechanisms that, although they have been applied and appropriated in various ways in a range of historical contexts, has stood the test of time.

From oaths and hand-kissing to coronations and baptisms, Power and Ceremony in European History considers the governing practices, courtly rituals, and expressions of power prevalent in Europe and the Ottoman Empire from the medieval age to the modern era. Bringing together political and art historical approaches to the study of power, this book reveals how ceremonies and rituals - far from simply being ostentatious displays of wealth - served as a primary means of communication between different participants in political and courtly life. It explores how ceremonial culture changed over time and in different regions to provide readers with a nuanced comparative understanding of rituals and ceremonies since the middle ages, showing how such performances were integral to the evolution of the state in Europe. This collection of essays is of immense value to both historians and art historians interested in representations of power and the political culture of Europe from 1450 onwards.

Today, the demand for transparency is omnipresent. In particular, transparency is considered a prerequisite for good governance, for political participation and democracy. On closer inspection, however, transparency proves to be ambivalent. For complete transparency has not yet been achieved anywhere. Moreover, measures to increase transparency can have the opposite effect and stir up mistrust. Historians are just beginning to discover this topic. The volume assembles contributions covering European history since the 19th century. The contributors focus on political and cultural history, but include also economic and media history as well as the history of ideas. They analyse publicly debated demands and efforts for transparency, conceived as the access to information or ist disclosure.

Staging Authority: Presentation and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe is a comprehensive handbook on how the presentation, embodiment, and performance of authority changed in the long nineteenth century. It focuses on the diversification of authority: what new forms and expressions of authority arose in that critical century, how traditional authority figures responded and adapted to those changes, and how the public increasingly participated in constructing and validating authority. It pays particular attention to how spaces were transformed to offer new possibilities for the presentation of authority, and how the mediatization of presence affected traditional authority. The handbook’s fourteen chapters draw on innovative methodologies in cultural history and the aligned fields of the history of emotions, urban geography, persona studies, gender studies, media studies, and sound studies.

For centuries, Roman emperors ruled a vast empire. Yet, at least officially, the emperor did not exist. No one knew exactly what titles he possessed, how he could be portrayed, what exactly he had to do, or how the succession was organised. Everyone knew, however, that the emperor held ultimate power over the empire. There were also expectations about what he should do and be, although these varied throughout the empire and also evolved over time. How did these expectations develop and change? To what degree could an emperor deviate from prevailing norms? And what role did major developments in Roman society – such as the rise of Christianity or the choice of Constantinople as the new capital – play in the ways in which emperors could exercise their rule? This ambitious and engaging book describes the surprising stability of the Roman Empire over more than six centuries of history.

The 'mirror for princes' genre of literature offers advice to a ruler, or ruler-to-be, concerning the exercise of royal power and the wellbeing of the body politic. This anthology presents selections from the 'mirror literature' produced in the Islamic Early Middle Period (roughly the tenth to twelfth centuries CE), newly translated from the original Arabic and Persian, as well as a previously translated Turkish example. In these texts, authors advise on a host of political issues which remain compelling to our contemporary world: political legitimacy and the ruler's responsibilities, the limits of the ruler's power and the limits of the subjects' duty of obedience, the maintenance of social stability, causes of unrest, licit and illicit uses of force, the functions of governmental offices and the status and rights of diverse social groups. Medieval Muslim Mirrors for Princes is a unique introduction to this important body of literature, showing how these texts reflect and respond to the circumstances and conditions of their era, and of ours.

This book focuses on the conceptualization of the court, palace and ruler of the Umayyad Caliphate of al-Andalus. Western terminology still plays a normative role in the representation of foreign courts, determining concepts that fit poorly into chronologies with their own dynamics and specificities, which is the case of Muslim courts. While Court Studies is a well-developed field for modern Western societies, Muslim medieval courts lack a consistent field of research. Sources elaborate a specific terminology for medieval Muslim court societies. In the specific case of the Umayyad Caliphate of al-Andalus, the court is usually articulated as Bāb Suddat al-Khalīfa (“The door of the Sudda of the caliph”) – a reference to the symbology of the main city gate of Cordoba – or simply as Bāb. Bāb Suddat al-Khalīfa became the most emblematic concept to name the Umayyad palace and its society, which will be additionally interpreted in the framework of the performance of ceremonial. The strong conceptualization of the Umayyad court of Cordoba was highlighted through the articulation of ceremonial, as the mis-en-scène of the conceptualization, expressed by gestures, insignia and hierarchies. The preliminary comparative perspective with the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus, the ‘Abbasid and Fatimid Caliphates and the Byzantine Empire further discusses the Umayyad Andalusi model in relation to other dynasties. While this book focuses on the Umayyad conceptualization and articulation of ceremonial, this model will be discussed within the Mediterranean and Eastern framework of the 10th and 11th centuries, which broadens the interest of the book to other fields of research.

Approaching subalternity from a broad Gramscian angle, this edited collection contributes to the understanding of popular politics in parliamentary, autocratic, and colonial contexts. The book explores individual stories and micro-histories of complaints, requests, rumors, and other mediated and unmediated interactions between political institutions and the subjects they claimed to govern or represent. It challenges the approaches of institutionally oriented political historiography and its attention to the top-down construction of political representation, citizenship, and power and powerlessness. The book discusses more subtle forms of agency and the spaces these pertained to, which could indicate contestation or resistance taking place within a framework of loyalty towards the existing political institutions. This research does not only bridge the divide between political and apolitical frames of reference, but it also provides a new perspective on the dichotomy between loyalty and resistance by acknowledging the nuances of these seemingly opposing stances. With case studies from Europe, North Africa, South America, and India, the chapters cover political communication in proto-democratic, democratic, imperial, and authoritarian contexts. This volume is crucial reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars in history and social sciences who are interested in political culture and the mechanisms of negotiating local, national, or imperial identities.