Different Types Of Monarchies - Denmark Bins Their Absolute Monarchy- 5th June 1849 - A Pillock's Guide To History On This Day

1849 – Denmark sacks off their absolute monarchy and swaps it on for a far more manageable constitutional monarchy. So what is an absolute monarchy? For that matter what’s a constitutional monarchy? And do they still exist? Yeah, they do. Transcript Denmark gets itself a constitution and becomes a Constitutional Monarchy rather than an Absolute Monarchy. The monarch to sign up to that was Frederick VII. But why should you care? Well unless you are Danish, there’s no particular reason. But we are sad like that. We think it’s important because an absolute monarchy is where the monarch, so like a king or queen, can technically do what they want. It’s pretty much how most places were ran for most of history. It wasn’t all that bad when you got yourself a decent one., who was good at winning wars or spotted that their kingdom would be worse off if all the poor people were dead from starvation. On the other hand, it was definitely a problem when the monarch wasn’t good at those things. Which can easily happen when the qualification is 50% winning the correct sperm race and 50% outliving your parent. Look at the monarchs in England. Elizabeth I was a decent queen for what the English needed. She kicked off a bit of colony building in the Americas, which was bad for the people over there, but very good for the English. She didn’t lose any important wars. And she had a quality ginger wig. Then you have Charles I. He was very much on board with the idea of an absolute king. He reckoned he was appointed by God, so he could do what he wanted. Only what he wanted was stupid, and he was a proper dick about it. So his parliament, who didn’t get a say in how the place should be run, chopped his head off. If you want a modern version of Elizabeth and Charles, just think about Elizabeth and Charles. Long live the queen I say, at least she keeps quiet. Monarchies are still all over the place. Let’s start with your absolute monarchies. There are sort of seven. Five of them are your classic absolute monarchies. They are Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Qatar, Oman and Swaziland. Oman has been ruled by Sultans of the House of Said since 1744. Brunei have had Sultans since the 14th Century. There was a little gap from the 1880s to 1984, when they were being ran by the British, but there was still technically a Sultan in place. Qatar is similar, beng ruler by emirs of the Al-Thani family since the 1850s, with it being under British rule to a certain extent from 1913 until the 70s. Your standard evil absolute monarchy bogeyman is Saudi Arabia, who are ran, unsurprisingly, by the House of Saud. The current set up was established in 1932, with Ibn Saud taking over the place. He was 57 when he got the job. Since then, there have been 6 kings, all of them his sons. That family live to quite an old age. Between our Queen and their King, it looks like monarching makes for a long life. Who would have thought it. The most interesting of all of these absolute monarchies is Swaziland, although we should say has recently been renamed eSwanti. Which makes it sound like an attempt to make Swaziland modern, although if that’s what they were going for it maybe should have been iSwanti. Turns out, that wasn’t the aim though and it’s actually what the nation used to be called. The current king is Mswati III. And technically Swaziland is a Didactic Monarchy, because the king is jointly ruler with his mother. Although we are told his mam, Ntfombi, is mostly a symbolic head of state. To be honest, we aren’t up to date on our eSwanti politics, so Wikipedia did the heavy lifting on that one. There are two other weird types of absolute monarchies. The United Arab Emirates is a federal absolute monarchy, which sounds mental to us. There are seven Emirates, ruled by 7 emirs. They joined together in 1972,