Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects, and the Making of a British World, 1860-1911 examines the ritual space of nineteenth-century royal tours of empire and the diverse array of historical actors who participated in them. The book is a tale of royals who were ambivalent and bored partners in the project of empire; colonial administrators who used royal ceremonies to pursue a multiplicity of projects and interests or to imagine themselves as African chiefs or heirs to the Mughal emperors; local princes and chiefs who were bullied and bruised by the politics of the royal tour, even as some of them used the tour to symbolically appropriate or resist British cultural power; and settlers of European descent and people of colour in the empire who made claims on the rights and responsibilities of imperial citizenship and as co-owners of Britain’s global empire. Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects, and the Making of a British World suggests that the diverse responses to the royal tours of the nineteenth century demonstrate how a multi-centred British-imperial culture was forged in the empire and was constantly made and remade, appropriated and contested. In this context, subjects of empire provincialized the British Isles, centring the colonies in their political and cultural constructions of empire, Britishness, citizenship, and loyalty.
The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.
Instead of wasting British time through improvement projects and economic development, Lytton proposed, the British ought to hold a grand durbar to celebrate Victoria’s new title, Empress of India. This chapter explores how colonial officials embraced this impulse toward ornamentalism between 1860 and 1911 by developing a shared repertoire of ritual practices across the British Empire and how these
. Much more recently, Cannadine’s Ornamentalism used the grand ritual ceremonies of empire, particularly in the Raj, to explore the reinvention of the monarchy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 8 In a rather different vein, scholars of historical anthropology and ‘area studies’ have understood colonial rituals as part of a larger effort to acquire and use colonial knowledge for
, and local people – to various ends. Yet the reality of the Great Queen was rather different. The ornamentalism described by Cannadine, and the willing role played by the monarchy in it, was an imperial fantasy. Indeed, Victoria’s attitudes to royal visits to the empire reflect a certain ambivalence and reluctance about empire that contrast sharply with the mythology. While Victoria relished Benjamin
.queen-victorias-scrapbook.org/ . 17 Cannadine quotes P. D. Morgan on the need to reach a ‘synoptic view’ of the imperial system in his Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2001 ). The source is Philip D. Morgan, ‘Encounters between British and “indigenous” peoples, c . 1500– c . 1800’, in Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern (eds), Empire and
British ornamental imagination. The ritual practices of the royal tour were on full display in Delhi. George V received and gave addresses. The viceroy gave and received visits with the princely elite, and the King granted private audiences to the more important princes. Massive tents were erected to serve as residences for visiting dignitaries. Like his uncle, Prince Alfred, the King went tiger hunting in
the subtly painted portraits in frames of ‘festive gold ornament’ – perfectly in tune with the classicist sympathies inherent to socialist realism. As properly ‘orthodox’ artworks, the vases were exhibited in the State Hermitage Museum.12 KARPOVA 9781526139870 PRINT.indd 27 20/01/2020 11:10 28 Comradely objects Yet one should not overestimate the role of figurative elements in early 1950s decorative art. Although encouraged, realistic depiction was avoidable. First, purely ornamental decoration was justified if it was based on folk art, which made it art of
flows and flows, methodically and repetitiously, but it is very cooling, very refreshing.31 Doodles spawn here, in the stream of boredom. It repeatedly hatches a teeming population of geometric patterns, organic fantasies, bizarre figures, hybrid animals, daisy-chain margins and merry-go-round calligraphs. Pictorially, these animate the moribund and invigorate the ornamental, becoming inadvertent ‘gateways to the imagination’.32 Having nothing particular or interesting to do evacuates the mind of impediments to drawing – from mere disinclination to graphic
writer, or a ‘dissociated sensibility’, in T. S. Eliot’s phrase. Nevertheless, Bacon’s impatience with stylistic affectation is well known from his own comments: ‘eloquence and copie of speech’ is, he writes in The Advancement of Learning, ‘the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter’.2 In conjunction with this repudiation of ornamental excess, Bacon’s preference for an unadorned style of writing for the communication of natural philosophy, in particular his recommendation of the aphorism for the purpose, apparently confirms his antipathy to
