Kings and Clans

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Barbara N. Ramunsack

"Although the princes of India have been caricatured as Oriental despots and British stooges, Barbara Ramusack's study argues that the British did not create the princes. On the contrary, many were consummate politicians who exercised considerable degrees of autonomy until the integration of the princely states after independence. Ramusack's synthesis has a broad temporal span, tracing the evolution of the Indian kings from their precolonial origins to their roles as clients in the British colonial system. The book breaks new ground in its integration of political and economic developments in the major princely states with the shifting relationships between the princes and the British. It represents a significant contribution, both to British imperial history in its analysis of the theory and practice of indirect rule, and to modern South Asian history, as a portrait of the princes as politicians and patrons of the arts."--Jacket.

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Y. Vaikuntham

Contributed articles on the political situation and peasant uprisings in princely states of India in 19th and 20th century earlier presented at a seminar.

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James C. Olson

From the mid-1860s until the end of organized resistance on the Great Plains, Red Cloud, the noted Oglala Sioux, epitomized for many the Indian problem. Centered on Red Cloud's career, this is an admirably impartial, circumstantial, and rigorously documented study of the relations between the Sioux and the United States government during the years after the Civil War.

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[by] Patrick Vinton Kirch

In How Chiefs Became Kings, PKirch addresses a central problem in anthropological archaeology: the emergence of "archaic states" whose distinctive feature was divine kingship. Kirch takes as his focus the Hawaiian archipelago, commonly regarded as the archetype of a complex chiefdom. Integrating anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, traditional history, and theory, and drawing on significant contributions from his own four decades of research, Kirch argues that Hawaiian polities had become states before the time of Captain Cook's voyage (1778-1779). The status of most archaic states is inferred from the archaeological record. But Kirch shows that because Hawai'i's kingdoms were established relatively recently, they could be observed and recorded by Cook and other European voyagers. Substantive and provocative, this book makes a major contribution to the literature of precontact Hawai'i and illuminates Hawai'i's importance in the global theory and literature about divine, kingship, archaic states, and sociopolitical evolution. --Jacket.