Sacred kingship has been the core political form, in small-scale societies and in vast empires, for much of world history. This collaborative and interdisciplinary book recasts the relationship between religion and politics by exploring this institution in long-term and global comparative perspective.

Editors A. Azfar Moin and Alan Strathern present a theoretical framework for understanding sacred kingship, which leading scholars reflect on and respond to in a series of essays. They distinguish between two separate but complementary religious tendencies, immanentism and transcendentalism, which mold kings into divinized or righteous rulers, respectively. Whereas immanence demands priestly and cosmic rites from kings to sustain the flourishing of life, transcendence turns the focus to salvation and subordinates rulers to higher ethical objectives. Secular modernity does not end the struggle between immanence and transcendence—flourishing and righteousness—but only displaces it from kings onto nations and individuals.

After an essay by Marshall Sahlins that ranges from the Pacific to the Arctic, the book contains chapters on religion and kingship in settings as far-flung as ancient Egypt, classical Greece, medieval Islam, Mughal India, modern European drama, and ISIS. Sacred Kingship in World History sheds new light on how religion has constructed rulership, with implications spanning global history, religious studies, political theory, and anthropology.

[An] excellent edited collection. -- Christopher Smith * Anatomies of Power *
The brilliance of this volume, its abiding appeal, lies in unsettling teleologies. * Journal of Church and State *
This book is extremely ambitious, for it deals with no less a subject than provincializing secular modernity through a global history. * Journal of the American Academy of Religion *
Mustering the typological distinction between immanentist and transcendentalist religions, Sacred Kingship in World History addresses forms of sacred rulership and sovereignty over a long swath of human prehistory and history, to the present. Well-framed by Moin and Strathern, this book will constitute an unavoidable point of reference for further discussion of conceptions and practices of sovereignty. -- Philippe Buc, author of Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West
This broad-ranging and ambitious book is a model of theoretically informed, comparative world history. The individual case studies are impressively erudite, cover an astonishing geographical and chronological range, and are composed with an unusual level of collective rigor. Together, they demonstrate how the tension between immanent and transcendent kingship has shaped history in delicate and constantly evolving ways that continue to be profoundly felt in our world today. -- Giancarlo Casale, author of The Ottoman Age of Exploration

A. Azfar Moin is associate professor and chair of religious studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (Columbia, 2012).

Alan Strathern is associate professor of history at the University of Oxford and tutor and fellow at Brasenose College. His books include Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History (2019).