The Oyo Empire, ca. 1570–1840: The Art of Being a Compositional State

Summary

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Yoruba sovereign states matured about the eleventh century in ideology, symbols of authority, and organizational structure. Governed by a system of monarchy comprising the divine king/palace officials and non-royal lords, theirs was a political arrangement that placed the king as first among equals with the non-royal lords who represented the corporate branches (ilé) of the political collective—the state (ìlú). Those corporate units collectively granted the king the authority to rule. Each of these political actors—the king and the non-royal lords—possessed ritual power and other assets that made the state an interdependent and compositional entity. This arrangement has confounded many theorists of state formation, who have placed the Yoruba states in the categories of segmentary or poorly centralized states. Moving beyond evolutionary typology, this paper seeks to contribute to the debates on state formation processes by focusing on how the Oyo Empire was constituted in the late sixteenth century and maintained from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century, as well as the materiality of citizenship and corporate identity in the empire. Yet, power was diffuse, nested, and networked; a multipolar system evolved with generative constituent units that were simultaneously competitive and collaborative, thereby creating a compositional state.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives.   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38722.0