kingship among the Miskito

The Miskito kings of eastern Nicaragua and Honduras have been described as British puppets whose authority depended solely on their role as middlemen. This paper suggests that the kings also may have been leaders of real stature in their own society, whose legitimacy was based on different cultural conceptions of leadership than those held by the British . [political anthropology, kingship, middlemen, Miskito Indians, Central American ethnology]