Search results
Queen Victoria’s love of dogs was well known in her lifetime. It was evident in paintings and photographs, and it made pet ownership respectable and admirable. There were many reports of her love of dogs, the last and most poignant being newspaper accounts of her asking for her Pomeranian Turi to be brought to her death bed. 1 Her favourites were more than family pets: they were family members. The mutual bond of affection and devotion was an exemplar of family values. The company of pets, especially her
tells of the comeuppance of Cecil Rhodes by three African kings or paramount chiefs who sailed to London to negotiate with Queen Victoria’s government in 1895. The film is based on my book King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great White Queen , published by University of Chicago Press in 1998. Rhodes used to boast that every man had his price. At least in the case of Khama, the
Indigenous people in Britain’s settler colonies engaged Queen Victoria in their diplomacy and politics, and incorporated her into their intellectual and narrative traditions. These interpretations of Victoria have much to tell us about indigenous peoples’ experiences of and responses to British colonization, and they also make a significant contribution to historical and contemporary understandings of British imperial and colonial history. The essays in this volume, that focus on Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, offer detailed studies from these settings, of the political, imaginative, diplomatic and intellectual uses of Queen Victoria by indigenous peoples. They also consider the ways in which the Crown’s representatives employed the figure of the monarch in their dealings with the people displaced by British colonization. The collection offers compelling examples of the traffic of ideas, interpretations and political strategies among and between indigenous people and colonial officials across the settler colonies. Together the chapters demonstrate the contributions that Indigenous peoples of the settler colonies made to British imperial culture and cultures of monarchy.
This book explores the influence of imperialism in the landscapes of modern European cities including London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Marseilles, Glasgow and Seville. The first part considers some ways in which the design of urban landscapes articulated competing visions of the imperial city, including large-scale planning and architectural schemes, urban design and public monuments. The final shape of the Queen Victoria Memorial in London suggests an oddly tenuous relationship between the creation of imperial space and the representation of the empire itself. The notions of empire and romanità are expressed through the location, styling and form of the Vittoriano in Rome. The second part of the book considers the role of various forms of visual display, including spectacular pageants, imperial exhibitions and suburban gardens, in the cultural life of metropolitan imperialism. The material transformation of Paris with rhetorical devices reveals a deep-seated ambiguity about just how 'imperial' Paris wanted to appear. Sydenham Crystal Palace housed the Ethnological and Natural History Department, and its displays brought together animals, plants and human figures from various areas of the globe. The largest part of imperial Vienna's tourist traffic came from within the Austrian lands of the empire. The last part of the book is primarily concerned with the associations between imperial identities and the history of urban space in a variety of European cities. The book considers the changing cultural and political identities in the imperial city, looking particularly at nationalism, masculinity and anti-imperialism.
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.
’s refusal to recognise Aboriginal land rights. 1 Still energetically pursuing proper recognition of Aboriginal rights and sovereignty, Anderson explained to his twenty-first-century London audience that ‘the old people were told back then, and it came down through the generations, that Queen Victoria gave us our land and recognised us as independent people’. 2 In fact Anderson was in London
A new year! What will it bring? May God bless all my beloved Children, Grandchildren, relations & friends. May He protect my dear Country my vast Empire & all its many peoples! This is my daily prayer. Journal of Queen Victoria, 1
When Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge visited Canada in 2011, journalists would occasionally weave into their reports a reference to Queen Victoria. Describing their visit to northern Canada, one report opened with the tidbit that the Prince met with ‘aboriginal groups who still refer affectionately to his ancestor Queen Victoria as “grandmother”’. Mixing myth
We were so frightened to hear that our husbands were going to war.... We had no slight idea what the war was about, the thing is, we only heard that Queen [Victoria] has asked for help, so they are going to fight for the Queen. We then know that this involves us, if they [the Germans] are fighting
allocated for such a visit was seen as a snub. As one Maori leader was quoted as saying, ‘Maori royalty “was not some carnival act to be rolled out at the beck and call of anyone”.’ 1 The King’s mana or dignity demanded a less rushed meeting. Meanwhile, further north, the Ngapuhi iwi (tribe) were said to be angered that Waitangi, where a famous treaty had first been signed between Queen Victoria’s