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Content archived on 2024-06-18

Why Women Ruled: Explaining the Rise and Persistence of Female Rule in Pre-colonial Southeast Asia and Madagascar

Objective

There are only a handful of known examples in all of world history in which female rule has been institutionalized in the sense that a line of consecutive, or near consecutive, women rulers have exercised formal authority over an independent or semi-independent state and where female rule seems to have been widely accepted by contemporary society as being the “normal” or desirable order of things. The project compares three such, relatively well-documented but little studied and understood, cases of institutionalized female rule in the pre-colonial history of the Malayo-Polynesian world: Patani (presently in southern Thailand) c. 1584–1694, Aceh (presently in western Indonesia) 1641–99 and Imerina (central Madagascar) 1828–96. Combining the two approaches of comparative history (histoire comparée) and entangled history (histoire croisée), the project aims to: 1) explain why female rule was established and institutionalized in each of the three polities; 2) understand what, if any, political and social difference it made that the ruler was a woman rather than a man; 3) explain why royal power under female rule in all three cases gradually declined and eventually was suspended; and 4) to contribute to an enhanced theoretical understanding of the sexual and gendered dimensions of political power and leadership in world history. A broad range of first-hand, published and unpublished, contemporary sources are used and interpreted hermeneutically, comparatively and from a historical-anthropological perspective in order to answer the questions at issue.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Topic(s)

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Call for proposal

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FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IEF
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MC-IEF - Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)

Coordinator

ECOLE DES HAUTES ETUDES EN SCIENCES SOCIALES
EU contribution
€ 223 047,20
Address
54 BD RASPAIL
75270 Paris
France

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Region
Ile-de-France Ile-de-France Paris
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

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