Word Finder - confederacies

definition

An alliance.

definition

A state where the sovereign constituent units delegate their authority to the centre. As opposed to a federation, where the central and regional governments are each equal and sovereign in their own sphere.

definition

Specifically, an instance of a decentralized governing structure among the indigenous peoples of North America.

example

The Blackfoot, Iroquois, and Sioux peoples all were governed as confederacies. There were also multi-ethnic confederacies, such as the Iron Confederacy made up of the Plains Cree, Assiniboine, Stoney, and Saulteaux.

Moreover parliament was so far from pressing disendowment that on the petition of the Commons it passed a savage act against the heresies " commonly called Lollardry " which " aimed at the destruction of the king and all temporal estates," making Lollards felons and ordering every justice of the peace to hunt down their schools, conventicles, congregations and confederacies.

Assembling in greater and ever greater confederacies, the Danes fell upon the northern kingdoms, no longer merely to harry but to conquer and occupy them.

Similarly the various cities were divided in their allegiance between the Achaean and the Aetolian leagues, with the result that Arcadia became the battleground of these confederacies, or fell a prey to Sparta and Macedonia.

The Saxon towns, during the following century, were joining to protect their common interests, and indeed at this period town confederacies in Germany, both North and South, were so considerable as to call for the declaration against them in the Golden Bull of 1356.

Powell sets forth the laws of real and artificial kinship among the North American tribes, as well as tribal organization and government, the formation of confederacies, and the intricate rules of artificial kinship by which rank and courtesy were established.

The history of the decay of state rights makes it seem doubtful if the federal form of government is a permanent one, or is only a transient form between independent state governments or loose confederacies and a centralized national government.

The Irish barrows occur in groups in certain localities, some of which seem to have been the royal cemeteries of the tribal confederacies, whereof eight are enumerated in an ancient Irish manuscript, the Leabhar na h-UidhPi, compiled c. A.D.

He had transferred much territory to chiefs and confederacies devoted to his cause; every petty court had its Greek faction; and the detachments which he left behind at various positions, from the Afghan frontier to the Beas, and from near the base of the Himalaya to the Sind delta, were visible pledges of his return.

In April 1787 Madison had written a paper, The Vices of the Political System of the United States, and from his study of confederacies, ancient and modern, later summed up in numbers 17, 18, and 19 of The Federalist, he had concluded that no confederacy could long endure if it acted upon states only and not directly upon individuals.