Paramount (pronounced par-uh-mount)
(1) Chief in importance or impact; supreme; pre-eminent; of the highest importance.
(2) Above others in
rank or authority; superior in power or jurisdiction.
(3) A supreme ruler;
overlord (now rare thought often in historic texts).
(4) In law (in a hierarchy of rights), having precedence over or superior to another.
1525-1526: From the Anglo-Norman paramount & paramount (pre-eminent; above), the construct being the Old French par & per (by) + amont & amunt (upward). Par was from the Latin per (by means of, through), from the primitive Indo-European per- (to go through; to carry forth, fare). Amont & amunt were from the Latin ad montem (to the mountain; upward), the construct being ad (up to), ultimately from the primitive Indo-European héd (at; to) + montem (the accusative singular of mōns (mount, mountain), ultimately from the primitive Indo-European men- (to stand out, tower). Synonyms include predominant, preeminent, outstanding, capital, cardinal, chief, commanding, controlling, crowning, dominant, eminent, first, foremost, leading, main, overbearing, predominate, premier, preponderant utmost & prevalent while the most common antonyms are insignificant, secondary & unimportant (in historic land law, the antonym paravail was from the Old French par aval (below), the construct being par + aval (down), the construct being the Latin a(d) + val (a valley), from the Latin vallis; of feudal tenants, it referred to those at the bottom of the hierarchy of rights). Paramount is a noun & adjective, paramountcy, paramountship & paramountness are nouns, paramountly is an adverb; the noun plural is paramounts.
Introduced in 1914 and now the oldest Hollywood film studio logo still in use, the Paramount Pictures “mountain peak” was based on a sketch of Ben Lomond, Utah (elevation 9716 feet (2961 m); a peak in the northern portion of the Wasatch Mountains) by William Wadsworth "W.W." Hodkinson (1881-1971), the founder of Paramount Pictures. Many versions have appeared over the years and the text used in conjunction with the image has varied with the company’s ownership structure. The semi-circles of stars partially encircling the peak originally numbered 24, an allusion to the two-dozen film stars then signed to Paramount under the Hollywood studios’ “star system” (a restrictive contractual arrangement that, in much diminished form, lasted until the 1960s).
In 1986, to mark the company’s 75th anniversary, Paramount Pictures commissioned Italian artist Dario Campanile to paint the famous corporate symbol. Technology in 1986 was not as capable as later it would become (Intel’s 32-bit 80386 chip had just been released) and, as the artist later explained: “Paramount could not use my painting in video, but they constructed a three-dimensional model of it and filmed that.” Now of course, anyone with a smartphone can prompt generative AI (artificial intelligence) to create such a video in less than a minute but forty years ago it demanded the skills of a film studio’s model-makers and editing production crew laboring for several days; over four decades there has been good and bad but also much progress. Born in Rome, Dario Campanile wholly was “self-taught” but if one wants to learn to the craft of the painter, there are few better places because, hanging in the Eternal City’s churches, museums and galleries are the works by masters dating back to Antiquity. Talent and aptitude are of course still required, but the collections in Rome are a fine “school of fine art” and in summing up his training, Sig Campanile said: “I studied by visiting the churches and museums in Rome. I used to just stare for hours. That was my school.”
Land law and freehold title
Paramount was originally a term in feudal land-title law. It described the lord paramount, the one who held absolute title to his fiefdom, not as a grant dependent upon (or revocable by) a superior lord. A paramount lord was thus superior to a mesne lord (a landlord who has tenants holding under him, while himself the subject of the holding of a superior lord (a kind of sub-letting), mesne being the general legal principle of something intermediate or intervening) whose title to a fief existed ultimately at the pleasure of a superior. The concept endures in modern land law where titles are listed in documents and, even today, there exist jurisdictions where land, said to enjoy an indefeasible title, can still be subject to “paramount interests” which, despite being unregistered, can prevail over those formalized. In land law, a lord paramount could be male or female but in a charming quirk, in the sport of archery, the noun "lady paramount" (the plural being ladies paramount) is the title awarded to the woman who achieves the highest score.
In Australia, the lord paramount is not the abstraction of "the Crown" but the person of the sovereign. In the strict legal sense, the king or queen (of Australia) “owns” all the land & waters that constitutes the nation of Australia and those who “own” their own little piece by virtue of holding a valid freehold title (in "fee simple"), in the narrow technical sense, actually hold only a revocable grant from the crown (via some instrument of the state) exercising rights delegated by the king or queen. Although of no practical significance, it’s not a legal fiction and the position of Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022; Queen of the UK and other places, 1952-2022) as lord paramount in the system of land tenure in Australia was affirmed by the HCA (High Court of Australia) in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992), one of the landmark cases entrenching in Australian law the concept of native title.
What the judgment in Mabo did was overturn the old doctrine of terra nullius (an old precept from the Legal Latin terra nūllīus (literally “nobody's land”) meaning "land belonging to no one") that European governments during the colonial era had used to justify annexation of lands inhabited by peoples either indigenous to the place or long in occupation. The legal basis of that was if there was no formal (ie structured, written documents) system of land title there could be no concept of "ownership of land" (in the Western sense) and, widening the implications of this, the colonizers decided that meant often there was no "sovereign government" and thus sovereignty could be claimed and asserted by any power with the firepower to subdue any contesting of that decision. Noting claims by colonizers, missionaries and such that because the "natives" did not "use" or "own" the land in any "civilized" way (structured agriculture, permanent settlements etc), when asked what was the "purpose" of the British Empire, the author George Orwell (1903-1950, who had served as a colonial policeman in Burma (in 1886 annexed to the British Raj by Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–1895 and then Secretary of State for India) who had triggered the not especially bloody but ultimately costly Third Anglo-Burmese War (1885)) replied: "Theft". It was the Mabo decision in 1992 that recognized (1) the continent's indigenous inhabitants had, prior to European settlement, existed in societies in which something recognizable as a form of "collective tribal ownership" (source of the modern term "first nations") prevailed and (2) except where extinguished by modern freehold titles, that "native title" could in certain circumstances endure and continue to co-exist with forms of title overlaid since the beginning of colonial settlement.
In the history of colonial oppression, the dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia was one of many wrongs were done but, at least in the heart of the empire, there was occasionally an indication the “white man’s burden” should be discharged in a manner owing something to the Christian traditions colonists liked often to invoke and impose on their new subjects. Although a Conservative, the ninth Duke of Devonshire was at heart a Liberal and, in mind, really a Whig and while serving as Secretary of State for the Colonies (1922 to 1924), in 1923 he left his Whiggish mark in the Colonial Office’s timber-lined corridors by issuing his “Declaration of Paramountcy”, known at the time as the “Devonshire White Paper” or “Devonshire Declaration”. What this did was clarify the status of the rights of natives settlers in the Kenya Colony and (because of the way the administration there operated) East Africa generally:
“Primarily, Kenya is an African territory, and His Majesty's Government think it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount and that if, and when, those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail. Obviously the interests of the other communities, European, Indian or Arab, must severally be safeguarded.... But in the administration of Kenya His Majesty's Government regard themselves as exercising a trust on behalf of the African population, and they are unable to delegate or share this trust, the object of which may be defined as the protection and advancement of the native races.”
So, under this ministerial edict, whenever the interests of native Africans clashed with those of Asian, European or Arab settlers, those of the native Africans should prevail and thus be treated as “paramount”. Because of shifts in political feeling in London, the view hardly was revolutionary although a “codification” of the hierarchy of rights in such explicit language was unexpected. While there were many idealists (some even in the Conservative Party) who welcomed the statement, there were also realists who understood it was likely to “frighten the horses” in East Africa and there were fears what would happen were such a notion to spread throughout the empire. However, despite much lobbying by those with a vested interest in “maintaining flexibility in matter of colonial administration”, the duke stood firm and neither amended nor withdrew the declaration. Viewed at the time as a “liberal” position, critics subsequently have re-characterized the Declaration of Paramountcy as a “classic colonial fix”, designed to mediate between the claims of European and Indian interests although it’s conceded it did have the effect of somewhat ameliorating the living conditions of native East Africans and did ensure the Colonial Office retained control of Kenya, ensuring white minority rule (achieved and enforced by “the splutter of musketry”) wasn’t imposed, as happened in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. So, unlike some colonial fixes, there were at least some benefits for the native population although, as the post-war “winds of change” blew across Africa, in Kenya too, things ended badly. As a footnote, the author of the famous “Winds of Change” speech was Harold Macmillan (1894–1986; UK prime-minister 1957-1963), the duke’s son-in-law.
Macmillan’s Winds of Change speech (1960) was about the mood for decolonization growing among native populations in what remained of the European empires but he re-purposed the phrase as the title for the first of his six volumes memoirs. It covered the period between the outbreak of World War I (1914-1938) and that of World War II (1939-1945), describing how the blast of war had ended the pre-1914 world that had seemed (at least to those of his class) so stable and hopeful, the 1920s & 1930s both more troubled. In an example of the way in which the effect of a speech can be determined as much by time and place as content, Macmillan had delivered the Winds of Change speech in Ghana without it attracting much comment but when, on 3 February, 1960, he read the same text to those assembled in the Parliament of South Africa, it echoed around the world. In little more than a year, South Africa's white minority government had left the Commonwealth and the country had become a republic.
No comments:
Post a Comment