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.
Abbey, celebrated a British monarchy revitalised by the duke and duchess. A century earlier in 1901, William’s great-great-grandparents the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York, the future King George V and Queen Mary, were on a worldwide tour of the British Empire. The most ambitious royal tour of the empire to date, their travels had been planned by Joseph Chamberlain and the duke
Disraeli’s efforts to title her as the imagined heir to the Mughal emperors, for instance, in most other respects she played a limited and sometimes resistant role in the cultivation of her imperial image. 4 On multiple occasions, she rejected proposals from her colonial subjects for a royal visit, insisting that family and the monarchy’s duties at home came first. Even when she allowed the royal tours to
Eastern Cape protested the injustice of being bullied into funding a harbour for Cape Town that would not benefit them from the general revenue of the colony. Part of the reason Governor George Grey sought to bring Alfred to South Africa, in a royal tour modelled on his brother’s planned visit to Canada, was to force the legislature’s hand on the issue of the breakwater. 2
Mughal power. During one part of the ceremonies, the King and Queen ‘sat on the marble balcony ... showing themselves to the [thousands of] people’ at Delhi Fort, the palace of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, in a ceremony proposed by the King himself. 3 The 1911 Delhi durbar was one of the grandest ritual performances in the history of the British Empire, a culmination of the royal tours and the
efforts were made sense of by ‘native’ princes and chiefs in South Africa, India, and New Zealand. 2 During the second half of the nineteenth century, imperial ritual emerged from an era of warfare and conquest to be a principal technology of British rule. 3 The development of the royal tour, in particular, reflected both continuity with the ritual encounters that had characterised the imperial experience
though a Cold War lens, and in investing in informational strategies as part of the arsenal of the struggle for decolonising ‘hearts and minds’. Promoting a racially inclusive and egalitarian Commonwealth was one approach to countering hostile anti-colonial alliances. In his concluding report, Australian press relations officer Oliver Hogue concludes that the royal tour ‘has been a significant indication
development of responsible government in the colonies of settlement, the imperial federation movement, empire exhibitions, Empire Day, the education system, and the royal tours were part of this apparatus. 1 Prince Albert’s efforts in 1860 to promote imperial unity and to make an imperial culture through the invention of the royal tour reflect an early attempt to cement the fragile pieces of empire, which
South African Native National Congress clung to the language of imperial citizenship into the early decades of the twentieth century. 4 It may be easy, in retrospect, to condemn these historical actors as out of touch with the zeitgeist of history, but they did not have the luxury of knowing what was to come. This chapter examines the reception of nineteenth-century royal tours to the Cape Colony and the British Raj by
1953–54 Royal Tour of the Pacific. Shooting 60,000 feet of film on a tour of 10,000 miles, Hawes crafted an explicit assertion of settler colonialism – ‘a new nation, flexing its muscles, filling its spaces, inheriting its own’. Arriving as Queen of the ‘free world’, the regal young mother is an ideal representative of both renewal and tradition. Her happy family – white crowds climbing trees to catch sight of the sovereign, white flower girls