Imperial Ideology

"This article examines Greek and Macedonian political propaganda connected with the Celtic invasions of Greece and Asia Minor in the third century BCE. Because in the Greek world-view of the Hellenistic Age the Celts were seen as the ultimate subhuman, barbaric ‘others’, the Greco-Celtic wars stimulated the development of panhellenic sentiments and became a pivotal point of reference in Hellenistic royal self-presentation. Hellenistic kings presented their, usually easily-won, victories over Celtic forces as the triumph of Civilization over Chaos. Thus they were able to ‘prove’ that they were in actuality the divine Saviours (soteres) they pretended to be in their propaganda. The article traces the development of this imagery from the saving of Delphi by the Aetolians in 279 BCE, through the propaganda of Antigonus Gonatas, Pyrrhus of Epirus, Antiochus Soter, and Ptolemy Philadelphus, to the Attalids of Pergamon, whose Great Altar and related victory monuments formed the apogee of ‘Celtic propaganda’.

I argue that the Hellenistic empires were not the proto-modern, pseudo-European bounded states of earlier scholarship but that they were empires that cultivated universalistic ideologies no less than the Assyrian and Achaemenid empires had done before them. Expanding an argument put forward in a 2010 article about the empire of Cleopatra, I propose that universalistic ideology had the very practical aim of integrating multi-ethnic, multicultural elites under a single ideological umbrella, and (especially in the Seleukid Empire) to tie together a variety of vassal kingdoms and other autonomous subsidiary states. The Hellenistic empires in their turn transmitted universalistic imperial ideology to the Arsakid Empire and -- in a "Hellenized" form -- to the Roman Empire as well.

It has always being said that from the starting to crawl of the printing house in the Ottoman country to coming to the beginning of the 19th century with tottery and then standing on its foots, a printing-issuing explosion was lived in the country as if revenging of delaying of 200 years. While books, newspapers and journals were advancing speedly to become the undispensable matter of the daily life, the wall calendars, which
were in fact the guide of the daily life but had not took its set on the place in which it must be, were started to be hung to the places they deserved from the middles of the century. This study in the light of the documentaries obtained from The Prime Minister’s Ottoman Archive has the aim to present a short story of the journey of the calendars that have different kinds with regard to their printer, the printing place, the causes of printing or unprinting, content and the attributes of shape in the beginning of the 20th century.

This paper, written for a volume dedicated to client kingdoms in the Roman Near East, focuses on the Hellenistic background of the Roman system of client kingdoms. It is argued that the Roman system was essentially an adaptation of the complex of subsidiary kingdoms that had existed in (and had survived) the later Seleukid Empire. During the Seleukid centuries, the Middle East saw the emergence of autonomous client kings and other polities under Seleukid hegemony. The Hellenistic patchwork of kingdoms was held together by the charisma and military prestige of the Seleukid ‘Great King’, a status that implied the right to appoint lesser kings and went back to the millennia-old Near Eastern tradition of universal rulership and ontological ideal of world unity. As the rightful, matrilineal heir to the vanished Seleukid dynasty, Kleopatra VII and her son Caesarion possessed the necessary prestige to claim overlordship over the vassal states in the post-Seleukid Middle East, and to rival the Parthian kings’ claim to have acquired the title of Great King / King of Kings by right of victory over the Seleukids. Through Caesar’s and Antony’s paternity of Kleopatra’s children, Hellenistic monarchy could thus be brought into the (republican) Roman orbit.

ENGLISH ABSTRACT
Starting at least by the late tenth century, Byzantine emperors took icons of the Mother of God with them on campaign. This article examines the appearances of such icons in the narratives of historical texts. It argues that the intercessory role of the icon in these episodes adhered distantly to the moral logic that determined the Virgin's salvation of the City in the siege of 626, but was turned by each historian to serve the critical or panegyrical goals of his own work, often with an ironic effect. The emperor and the Virgin could not share the same stage as equal protagonists.
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RESUMEN ESPAÑOL
A partir al menos de finales del siglo X, los emperadores bizantinos llevaron consigo en las campañas militares iconos de la Virgen María (la Theotokos o Madre de Dios). Este artículo examina la presencia de tales iconos en las narraciones históricas. Propone que el papel mediador del icono en estos episodios estaba vagamente conectado con la lógica moral que determinó la salvación de la ciudad por parte de la Virgen en el asedio de 626, pero fue convertido por cada historiador en un instrumento al servicio de los objetivos críticos o encomiásticos de su propia obra, a menudo con un efecto irónico. El emperador y la Virgen podían no compartir el mismo escenario como protagonistas paritarios.

This paper examines how Golden Age imagery in Alexandrian court poetry is connected to the Ptolemaic ideology of kingship and empire. The paper first reviews the use of the motif of a Golden Age in court poetry -- especially the image of the king as a creator of peace, order, and abundance -- and then relates these poetical images to a wider context of Ptolemaic monarchical and imperial representation. The paper also highlights the Ptolemaic influence of Golden Age imagery on Augustan imperial propaganda (e.g. in Virgil's Aeneid and on the Ara Pacis).

The grant of the diwani to the East India Company in August 1765 represents a climacteric moment in British imperial histories. Vested by the Mughal Emperor Shah Allam II, this newfound right to collect revenue saddled the Company with the broader and formal economic, judicial and military responsibilities of a territorial empire. Wherefore, in the era of post-Mughal political splintering, the EIC, as an emerging subcontinental state had to contend with internal revolts abetted by ethno-religious and socio-economic crises, but also because of threats posed by the Kingdom of Mysore and the Maratha Confederacy. Nevertheless, in the midst of the American Revolution, the EIC’s contentious and contested conduct of imperial governance in India became an ideological, philosophical and pragmatic point of domestic and imperial contention. Thus, confronted with the simultaneous internal and external implications of the crises of Empire between 1765 and 1788, the role of the Company’s fiscal-military administration and exercise of violence within the spheres British imperial governance was reconceptualised and in doing so contemporaries underwrote the emergence of what historians have subsequently called the ‘Second British Empire’ in India. Alternatively, the reconceptualisation of the EIC’s fiscal-military administration served to ensure the continuity and preservation of the British imperial nexus as it was imposed upon Bengal. This work, therefore, traces the Company’s fiscal-military administration and dispensation of violence during the ‘crises of empire’ as a point of genesis in the development and reformation of British imperial governance. Moreover, it will show that the interdependent nature of the Company’s ‘fiscal-military hybridity’ ultimately came to underwrite further the ideological, philosophical and pragmatic consolidation of imperial governance in ‘British India’. Accordingly, this dissertation examines the interdependent role between Parliament’s reconceptualisation of the East India Company’s fiscal-military administration of violence and the changing nature of British imperial governance in ‘British India’.

Après avoir étudié respectivement les relations entre souverain et Église (Rome, 2017), les stratégies et rythmes de l’impérialité (Oxford, 2018), les langues des pseudo-empires (Madrid, 2018), et l’eschatologie impériale du souverain (Paris, 2019), le programme s’achève, en juin 2021, avec ce colloque sur « La gloire impériale du souverain ». Parce qu’elle touche à la manifestation de la Majestas, la gloire du souverain mobilise toute une économie spectaculaire propre à mettre en œuvre les éléments d’une culture impériale largement partagée, confondant l’expression légitime de la publicité de l’empereur avec les appropriations par des princes et des rois du large spectre de l’impérialité.  Si la Majesté n’est véritablement saisie, juridiquement, qu’à travers les gestes qui la blessent, il appartient au monde des phénomènes d’en faire connaître la grandeur et la dignité par le déploiement de ces fastes ou par la mobilisation d’une esthétique particulière. Le spectacle de la gloire et toute l’encomiastique impériale concourent en effet à rendre plus perméables les différentes strates de la publicité impériale en donnant à voir, à ressentir, à entendre et à connaître l’expression d’une suprématie apte à se parer dès lors de l’ample costume de l’impérialité. Car comme le dit Robert Hariman, « le pouvoir est une question de style » qui met en jeu une rhétorique du spectaculaire et manifeste la gloire souveraine et l’empire du prince dans toute son épiphanie.

Ciertos textos publicados entre la última década del siglo XVI y la primera quincena del siglo XVII (De La Puente, Fr. J., Tomo Primero de la Conveniencia de las dos Monarquias Catolicas, la de la Iglesia Romana y la del Imperio Español, y defensa de la Precedencia de los Reyes Catolicos de España a todos los Reyes del Mundo. Madrid, 1612; Gregorio López Madera, Excelencias de la Monarquía y Reino de España, (ed. y estudio preliminar de JOSÉ LUIS BERMEJO CABRERO). Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, Madrid, 1999; Juan de Salazar, Política Española (1619), C.E.P.C., Madrid, 1997; Juan de Garnica, De Hispanorum Monarchia (Mss 7382 de la B.N.E), definían "Monarquía" como algo más que una forma de gobierno., remitiéndose a Daniel, 2 y 7, a la teoría de los cuatro imperios, denegando  el título de Monarquía a cualquier otra entidad política que no fuera la española, concibiendo a la española junto con la Iglesia como monarquías universales (llamadas a perdurar hasta el final de los tiempos y a ser ecuménicas) y narrando un pasado de España que prescindía de los discursos constitucionales de los territorios de la misma pero que podía integrarlos y que se presentaba en términos de caídas y redenciones (es decir, se presentaba como una historia eclesiástica) de dicha nación bíblica,  que además provenía de Tubal.  A ese conjunto de asunciones las llamamos “discurso de Monarquía de España”