A paramount chief is the English language designation for the highest-level political leader in a regional or local polity or country administered politically with a chief-based system. This term is used occasionally in anthropological and archaeological theory to refer to the rulers of multiple chiefdoms or the rulers of exceptionally powerful chiefdoms that have subordinated others. Paramount chiefs were identified by English-speakers as existing in Native American confederacies and regional chiefdoms, such as the Powhatan Confederacy and Piscataway Native Americans encountered by English colonists in the Chesapeake Bay area of North America.
More recently, Paramount Chief is a formal title created by British administrators during the 19th and 20th-century Colonial era and used in India, Africa and Asian colonies. They used it as a substitute for the word "king" to maintain that only the British monarch held that title. Since the title "chief" was already used in terms of district and town administrators, the addition of "paramount" was made so as to distinguish between the ruling monarch and the local aristocracy.
Read more about Paramount Chief: In Oceania
Famous quotes containing the words paramount and/or chief:
“If all political power be derived only from Adam, and be to descend only to his successive heirs, by the ordinance of God and divine institution, this is a right antecedent and paramount to all government; and therefore the positive laws of men cannot determine that, which is itself the foundation of all law and government, and is to receive its rule only from the law of God and nature.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)
“Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They’re inexpensive and easy to procure.”
—Robert Penn Warren (b. 1905)