The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (57 page)

The Hunza Kingdom

The entire process of creating a Hunza monarchy may have taken 150 years, beginning with Mayori’s slaughter of rival factions and climaxing with the territorial expansion of Ghazanfar Khan (1824–1865). This is further evidence that the transition from chief to king is a process rather than an event, with a long succession of rulers contributing to the final outcome.

Like the Hawai’ian and Zulu cases seen earlier, the unification of the Hunza required one aggressive lineage to achieve an advantage over its rivals. The ultimate advantage in this case was an irrigation system, turning barren tracts into fields controlled by the mir. Three significant consequences were (1) a reduction in the authority of clan elders and lineage heads, (2) the replacement of supernatural legitimacy by true political power, and (3) the triumph of centralized control over ethnic loyalties. The result was a monarchy with a royal lineage; wealthy nobles; a bureaucracy including a vizier, heads of districts, heads of villages, tax collectors, and multilingual diplomats; and a commoner workforce consisting of peasant farmers, herders, and slaves.

THE UNIFICATION OF MADAGASCAR

Madagascar, the world’s fourth largest island, lies in the Indian Ocean some 400 miles east of Africa. Over the years it has become a laboratory for studying the creation of kingdoms out of rank societies, one where collaboration between social anthropologists and archaeologists has been exemplary.

Like Hawai’i, Madagascar has a rich oral history, much of which has been compiled in a manuscript called
Tantàran ‘ny Andrìana,
“The History of the Kings.” According to historian Mervyn Brown, this manuscript traces Merina rulers back to the fourteenth century, “where tradition becomes legend, with the first king said to be the son of God.”

During the 1960s social anthropologist Conrad Kottak began working in Madagascar and immediately saw the potential for collaborating there with archaeologist Henry Wright. Wright teamed up with archaeologists Robert Dewar, Susan Kus, and Zoe Crossland, as well as Malagasy scholar Jean-Aimé Rakotoarisoa. We draw on the results of their work in the pages that follow.

The rise of the Merina began during a period of chiefly cycling like that of other rank societies we have described. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, European visitors reported finding powerful rank societies in the highlands of Madagascar. Their existence has been verified by Dewar and Wright’s archaeological surveys, which reveal that chiefly centers were each surrounded by five to ten subordinate villages.

Oral histories claim that conflicts broke out between two ethnic groups called the Vazimba and the Hova. These conflicts escalated once the Hova acquired iron axes and crossbows, giving their warriors what Brown calls “a decisive superiority” over the neighboring Vazimba.

Sometime around the end of the sixteenth century, an ambitious Hova chief named Ralambo attempted to unify the Malagasy highlands. Western historians attribute his victories over the Vazimba to the acquisition of European firearms, an advantage similar to Kamehameha’s in Hawai’i. In the logic of Ralambo’s society, however, his success was credited to his possession of a
sampy,
a powerful talisman that could, like a Mandan sacred bundle, increase a person’s life force. Here we see that, as among the Hunza and Polynesians, Hova leaders were seen as possessing or acquiring superior amounts of sacred power.

Ralambo was the first chief to refer to his territory as Imerina, and his successor was the first to move his paramount village to Tananarive, the current capital of Madagascar. At this point it was said that there were four ranks of Imerina nobles, based on their genealogical relationship to the paramount chief.

During the seventeenth century a young noble named Andriamasinavalona managed to usurp the position of paramount chief from his older brother by promising his supporters to share more power. In a move reminiscent of Silim Khan’s creation of irrigation canals, Andriamasinavalona rounded up corvée labor to convert a huge marsh near Tananarive into rice paddies.

The intense level of raiding at this time is reflected in the archaeology of the region. Surveys by Dewar and Wright reveal a landscape dominated by large polygonal fortresses, often with multiple defensive ditches, and surrounded in turn by smaller fortified communities. There are also signs that many small valleys in the region had been converted to rice paddies. Like Kamehameha’s terracing of O’ahu’s Anahulu Valley, the Merina chiefs’ intensification of rice production underwrote their territorial expansion.

Problems with chiefly succession, as we have seen in earlier chapters, contribute to the periodic collapse of rank societies. Oral history records that Andriamasinavalona created such a situation. Rather than leaving his territory to his oldest son (primogeniture) or his youngest son (ultimogeniture), he divided it among all four of his heirs. Soon they were all in competition, each seeking to take over his brothers’ provinces.

This breakdown of centralized control provided opportunities for usurpation. Around 1745, in the northernmost of the four disputed provinces, a young man named Ramboasalama was born. He was the nephew of Andrianjafy, the current chief of the province, and soothsayers predicted great things for him. These predictions worried his uncle so much that Ramboasalama, like the young Kamehameha, went into hiding for a time.

Andrianjafy turned out to be a hated despot. In 1787 12 Merina chiefs rallied to Ramboasalama, giving him the support he needed to usurp Andrianjafy’s position. Ramboasalama then changed his name to Andrianampoinimerina, “Prince Desired by Imerina.”

Because usurpers achieve their titles by strategy or force rather than genealogical entitlement, they must often work hard to establish their legitimacy. Andrianampoinimerina’s new name implied that the Merina people wanted him. He also argued that it was his destiny to rule. To support this notion he relied on the Merina concept of
vintana,
a process by which events are predestined through the ordering of time and space. He added special talismans to increase his
hasina,
or vital force.

Andrianampoinimerina began his rule modestly. His first “royal residence” was a wooden hut 20 by 12 feet in extent; its largest piece of furniture was said to have been the bed for his 12 wives. Over time, however, he succeeded in reunifying the provinces that Andriamasinavalona had divided among his four sons. During the next decade Andrianampoinimerina extended his political control to the entire central Malagasy plateau. “The sea,” he is said to have boasted, “shall be the limit of my rice fields.” His son Radama I, who took over in 1810, made good his father’s boast.

As with other cases we have seen, the Merina creation of monarchy was a gradual process involving a series of aggressive rulers and some occasional setbacks. Along the way there were appropriate changes in social logic. Recall that the Hova attributed Ralambo’s earlier victories to a powerful sampy, or talisman. Later Merina rulers appropriated all local sampy and created a class of “royal talismans” for their use alone. These royal talismans were called
sampy masina,
which implied a significant change in the distribution of hasina or vital force. According to Kottak, Merina nobles now claimed to have been born with much more hasina than commoners, providing the justification for social stratification.

The upper stratum of Merina society was called the
andriana,
or hereditary nobility. Commoners were divided into “true
hova
”—the descendants of central Imerina’s ten original villages—and
mainty,
the royal servants and former slaves. These ranks within the commoner class remind us of the Zulu distinction between respected commoners and menials. Denied Merina citizenship was one group known as
andevo,
or slaves, mostly enemies captured in battle.

Dewar and Wright found that the structure of the Merina kingdom was visible in the archaeological record. Between 1760 and 1810 its heartland was reorganized and featured a settlement hierarchy of four levels. At the top was a fortified, 86-acre capital city. Below this city was the second level, a series of fortified 25-acre towns whose entrances could be closed with multiton stones. The third level of the hierarchy consisted of villages, while the fourth level was made up of smaller hamlets. There were also specialized military settlements at the frontiers between the Merina and other ethnic groups. Hereditary nobles were buried in tombs within each town’s defensive walls, while the graves of the commoner class were left outside the walls.

Finally, just as in other monarchies we have examined, loyal commoners were sometimes appointed to bureaucratic positions. These commoner appointments were made because rulers did not always trust other members of the nobility, and because commoners realized from the outset that they did not have the genealogical credentials to usurp a higher position.

THE NATURE OF INEQUALITY IN KINGDOMS

Having looked at early monarchies in four different regions of the world, let us now consider this question: Was inequality any greater under a despotic king than under a despotic paramount chief?

Slavery, after all, was practiced even by foragers like the Tlingit. Certain villagers in New Guinea were treated as rubbish men. Hawai’ian chiefs rendered thousands of their own subjects landless. Bemba chiefs mutilated people who annoyed them.

Kingdoms continued many of those forms of inequality. In addition, partly as a result of the processes by which they formed, kingdoms created new types of inequality and enhanced others.

In the four cases we examined, not one kingdom was the offspring of a rank society that simply got bigger. There is apparently no social steroid that can trigger that kind of growth. Instead, all four kingdoms arose through the forced unification of a group of competing rank societies. It would seem that competition among chiefs, like the confrontations that produce an alpha chimp, was one of the engines driving the process.

In many parts of the ancient world, including Alabama and Panama and Colombia, such chiefly competition continued indefinitely. In Hawai’i, Natal, Madagascar, and the Hunza Valley one of the competing societies eventually gained an advantage. That advantage could be new weaponry, new military strategy, a new irrigation system, or thousands of new rice paddies. In addition, the ruler pressing the advantage seems to have been very aggressive, often a usurper with a chip on his shoulder, a man of elite ancestry but not in line to be heir, someone prepared to kill his half brother and marry his half sister if necessary.

This man and his heirs succeeded in subduing their neighbors, turning rival rank societies into the provinces of a larger territory. Neighboring chiefs who capitulated might be allowed to stay on as governors of their own provinces. Those who resisted were killed or exiled and then replaced with one of the victor’s trusted allies.

Many conquered provinces still preserved the three levels of administrative offices left over from their days as chiefdoms. The man who unified the provinces now got tribute from them all. He had created an overarching administrative level and needed a higher title—“king”—because “chief” was now only a provincial title.

Some newly created kings turned their residences into palaces; moved or enlarged their capitals; turned their chiefly retinue into courtiers; had monuments erected to themselves; and ordered that their tombs be greater than anyone else’s. All such acts help archaeologists identify kingdoms.

Kings also designed strategies to break down their subjects’ former loyalties to their respective territories, replacing them with loyalty to the royal family. In the case of the Zulu this process began with Shaka’s expansion of the amabutho to include youths from all the societies he had conquered. Once Shaka had become a king the process expanded further, and he endeavored to turn all commoners into citizens of a Zulu state.

It was here that a new form of inequality—ethnic discrimination—came to the fore. We have seen that ethnocentrism is universal; even villagers in egalitarian societies consider their behavior superior to that of their neighbors. Kings like Shaka and Andrianampoinimerina, however, had incorporated many neighbors into their realms. Certain commoners would be treated as full citizens, “true Zulu” or “true Hova.” Other commoners, however, would be considered “destitute,” “menials,” “people with strange hairstyles,” and so on. The eagerness of kings to incorporate foreigners into their labor force was greater than society’s ability to tolerate their ethnic differences. Second-class citizenship was the result.

Some of the kings discussed in this chapter also increased inequality by weakening power-sharing. Recall that among the Bemba, members of the council inherited their positions, while the chief was chosen by his fellow aristocrats. Since the councillors were not under his thumb, the Bemba chief had to take their advice seriously.

Some early kings, however, handpicked their major advisers. Twelve Merina chiefs had helped Andrianampoinimerina usurp his uncle’s position; he made them his inner council of advisers. Once he had become king, he also added a council of 70 aristocrats called “husbands of the earth.” Every year he gave a public speech called the
kabary,
allegedly to “share decision making with the people.” Such public displays of power-sharing, however, were largely cosmetic.

Kamehameha turned five chiefs of his native Kona district into councillors and initially sought their approval on important decisions. According to Ralph Kuykendall, however, once the five original councillors retired, their successors had much less influence on Kamehameha. Mir Silim Khan delegated power to his vizier and was supposed to share power with a Hunza council called the
marika.
However, as Homayun Sidky points out, the mir himself presided over the marika, and “nobody dared speak out of turn.”

All first-generation kings, no matter how despotic, needed political support. They often obtained this support by making at least a pretense of power-sharing. Kings were, however, more likely to handpick or bypass their advisers than were the chiefs who preceded them.