To legitimate the alaafin's ' traditional ' preeminence, the colonial regime deployed historically intelligible, but highly contentious interpretations of traditional monarch as royal potentates.
Accordingly, they extol the virtues of a monarch who, although autocratic, was also enlightened and improved the lot of his people.
The miners' declaration is couched in the language of deference, assuming the standard forms of respect granted to the monarch.
Thus, monarchs can stand above tribal, religious, ethnic, and regional divisions by acting as the linchpin of the political system.
The personal qualities-competence, sense of justice, etc.- of monarchs were certainly not discounted as factors of importance.
It failed in its own terms, through his successors' inability to maintain the constant attendance of the nobility upon the monarch.
The emergence of this system had rendered most of the monarch's formal prerogatives obsolete.
These are not biographies, but analyses of the diverse and often contradictory representations of monarchs in their own times and afterwards.
