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This chapter contains the argument that drives the rest of the book. The rejection of hierarchy is rooted in a major theological shift. Social and political hierarchy in the ancient Near East received metaphysical legitimation, as the heavenly order was construed as paralleling the terrestrial one. The common person in this scheme emerges as a servant, the lowest rung in the hierarchy, as evidenced in Mesopotamian creation epics Atrahasis, and echoed in Egypt and Ugarit well. The theology of covenant in the Pentateuch rejects this. In light of parallels with Late Bronze Age suzerainty treaties, the covenant narratives implicitly suggest that the whole of Israel—not its king, not his retinue, not the priests—bears the status of a vassal king entered into treaty with a sovereign king, God. While much of this material has been extant in the scholarship for some fifty years, the material is examined here in new light, and from two directions. The first borrows observations from the field of anthropology concerning the role and display of honor between superiors and subordinates that offers new insight into the suzerain‐vassal paradigm for the relationship between God and Israel. The second is a revisiting of the Hittite treaties whose form and language are paralleled in the covenantal material in the Pentateuch. This study concludes that not only does Israel as a collective whole attain the status of a subordinate king, but that, indeed, hierarchy is eschewed as every man in Israel becomes endowed with this status as well. Parallels are drawn between the Israel as vassal paradigm, and Israel as spouse paradigm.

Persian sources from the Mughal period have created an image of Afghan rulers like Sikandar Lodi and Sher Shah as bigots. The acts of violence were however linked to rebellion in the region, or were a part of political subjugation. The chieftains who accepted the suzerainty of the Afghan kings and paid tributes were allowed to administer their territories. This chapter looks at the Rajputs who dared to offer resistance to Sher Shah. His policy towards Rajputs was primarily aimed at incorporating them in his imperial network. The Afghans continuously bombarded the besieged chieftains. For a change, artillery came to play an important role in Sher Shah’s campaigns. Recollecting the shocking affairs of Chausa and Qannauj, the Mughals however erroneously felt that artillery was the mainstay of Sher Shah’s army. Sher Shah made judicious use of elephants and destroying the Rajputs. Once the issue of badshahat of Hindustan was settled, the Rajputs, barring a few, did not delay acknowledging the suzerainty of the Sur emperor.

This chapter details the failed efforts to define the boundary with China despite two successive boundary commissions. A boundary consciousness never receded from the minds of the authorities in London, Calcutta, and Simla. There was also the fear of the Russian expansion. This consciousness was fed by the surveys, launched with official approval, and by the need to print official maps of the region, now that it was under British suzerainty. Relations with China, moreover, were not to be put at risk either by ignorance of the border zones or the foolhardiness of Kashmir's Maharaja. Security problems also pressed themselves for decision.

China’s relations with Tibet have been, and are, a frequent source of difficulty. During WWII, they achieved a nadir, leading the Nationalists to appoint a high level representative who set out, with some success, to improve relations and push back againt growing British influence. Shen Zonglian was successful, but not to the degree that after the end of WWII Tibetan representatives accepted full incorporation into the Nationalist body politic.

This chapter takes a larger grip of the transition of the East India Company(EIC) from mercantile trader to governor of territory. It defines three significant shifts in this transition: 1790–3, in the introduction of a bureaucratic relationship to land and cultivators with consequences for human–land relations; the 1820s, in the military and fiscal needs driving the surveys, and enforcement of dependent relations by the EIC of the neighbouring polities; the 1830s, in the strengthened efforts to introduce uniform administration in the larger region, and the removal of Mughal privileges. The chapter contrasts the relatively stronger ruler–subject relations formed in the diwani territories compared to the almost non-existent subject relations in the annexed kingdoms. The former is elaborated in terms of ‘fiscal subjects’.

This chapter focuses on Korea, describing how after 1945 those who had criticized colonial rule achieved influence, started to build modern academic institutions, and, in the southern state, excluded Marxists from the profession. A positivist style of history, modelled along the lines of modernization theory, dominated the discipline in South Korea for a long time, especially after the suppression of the student revolts in the 1960s. It was only after 1980 that the situation changed. In the wake of rapid economic modernization and concomitant political changes, long-dominant modernization theories were increasingly challenged, and notions of multiple modernities—assuming divergent paths to different manifestations of modernity—were fruitfully applied to research on Korean history. In this context, postcolonial theories and the Korean historical experience of suzerainty under Chinese and Japanese colonialism started to play an important role in conceptualizing multiple modernities, and have recently influenced the writing of history in Korea.

This chapter assesses the legality of China’s claim to Tibet. The Chinese government justified their invasion of Tibet by their claim to suzerainty. It is argued that if the history of Chinese suzerainty over Tibet is allowed to be justified, China has no right and has violated the independence of Tibet. If, on the other hand, China is allowed to rely on treaties, old titles, and legal conceptions which are believed to be dead, such reliance defeats the most sacred notions of international law in Asia, according to which such treaties, titles, and conceptions must give way whenever the independence of nations in this and other parts of the world is at stake.

This chapter discusses the most enigmatic clause (Deut 17: 15b) in the ‘law’ of the king, enigmatic since it is difficult to imagine what attractions the rule of a foreigner might have offered. This chapter argues that this forcefully phrased interdict reflects the subjection, through the making of treaties, of Israel and Judah to the superpowers of the time―Assyria, Egypt, Babylon―to whom they surrendered their suzerainty and whose kings in effect they ‘set over’ themselves. The chapter rejects the view that Assyrian hegemony required vassal states to worship the suzerain’s gods, but suggests that a perceived powerless of the national god to overturn the apparently permanent rule of Assyria may have encouraged the variety of the cults purged by Josiah. A further theme of Deuteronomy is reflected here: its distancing or ‘depoliticizing’ of the Israel here envisaged from Israel as a historic state involved in the power-politics of its time.

This chapter is dedicated to Radbruch’s seminal text on “The Origin of Criminal Law in the Class of Serfs.” It contains a number of counter intuitive insights on the relationship between public punishment and private revenge, derived from the domains of legal history and anthropological research in non-state societies. Radbruch’s aim was not to provide a historiography of punitive interventions in tribal Germanic society, but to remind his readers of the constitutive importance of sovereignty for the emergence of criminal law. This relates to Radbruch’s concern for legal certainty, and explains his inquiries into the continuity and discontinuities between the pater familias of the Germanic clan and the institution of the sovereign. My own investigations could similarly be understood as a kind of “historical jurisprudence,” highlighting the significance of the mutation that occurred when punitive interventions between equals (private revenge) were prohibited and became themselves punishable as criminal offences.