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stunning act of archaeological vandalism that horrified the Kaiser, the sultan also commissioned the tearing down of a centuries-old wall abutting Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate to allow Wilhelm II and his entourage to enter the city in procession. 8 Recently, Monika Wienfert has argued that during the nineteenth century ‘many European monarchies can be said to have functioned rather successfully as national symbols and as means of
53 Chapter 2 Monarchy and commonwealth: ‘republican’ defences of monarchy at the Restoration Glenn Burgess I t can sometimes seem that the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy was received gratefully by a nation weary of confusion and worried by disorder. But whatever there was of weariness soon gave way to resurgent and uncompromising monarchism: in the Restoration ‘the cult of kingship flourished as never before’. This cult took various forms (Augustan, Platonic, Davidic, miraculous and feudal); but mostly it appeared as an absolutist theory of the divine
Moving images of the British monarchy, in fact and fiction, are almost as old as the moving image itself, dating back to an 1895 dramatic vignette, The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Led by Queen Victoria, British monarchs themselves appeared in the new 'animated photography' from 1896. Half a century later, the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II was a milestone in the adoption of television, watched by 20 million Britons and 100 million North Americans. At the century's end, Princess Diana's funeral was viewed by 2.5 billion worldwide. Seventeen essays by international commentators examine the portrayal of royalty in the 'actuality' picture, the early extended feature, amateur cinema, the movie melodrama, the Commonwealth documentary, New Queer Cinema, TV current affairs, the big screen ceremonial and the post-historical boxed set. These contributors include Ian Christie, Elisabeth Bronfen, Andrew Higson, Steven Fielding, Karen Lury, Glyn Davis, Ann Gray, Jane Landman, Victoria Duckett, Jude Cowan Montague, James Downs, Barbara Straumann, Deirdre Gilfedder, Jo Stephenson, Ruth Adams, Erin Bell, Basil Glynn and Nicola Rehling.
Modern Malaysia is characterised by its elaborate monarchy, as well as by its sharply plural society – a Muslim-Malay majority, but with very large Chinese and Indian minority communities. There is not just one royal ruler: apart from the country’s King (or Yang di-Pertuan Agong ), nine of the states in the federation (which consists of thirteen states and three federal territories) have Rulers (seven with the title ‘Sultan’). Every five years, the Rulers choose one among them to be King. The country, not surprisingly, has many royal family members with the
some colonial states gave great effect to royal occasions when they issued proclamations to formally announce midweek thanksgivings for the Queen’s jubilees in 1887 and 1897. Here, perhaps, is evidence that attachment to monarchy became more intense the further one travelled from metropolitan Britain. 2 Royal occasions became more noticeable, more elaborate and more ‘national’ towards the end of the nineteenth century. Before 1870, special worship for royal events took the form of special prayers for matters affecting the
In the 1940s, the British king, the Dutch queen and the Japanese emperor reigned over colonial possessions in Asia, whose ‘protected’ indigenous monarchs included Indian and Himalayan maharajas, Shan princes in Burma, and sultans in the Malay states and the Dutch East Indies, as well as the Vietnamese emperor and the Cambodian and Lao king in the French republican empire, and the ‘white raja’ of Sarawak. Decolonisation posed the question about the form of government to be adopted in successor states to the colonial empires and about the fate of local dynasties. As their possessions gained independence, the European and Japanese monarchies also had to adapt to a post-imperial world. This collection of original essays by an international group of distinguished historians argues that the institution of monarchy, and individual monarchs, occupied key roles in the process of decolonisation. It analyses the role of monarchy (both foreign and indigenous) in the late colonial period and with decolonisation. It examines the post-colonial fate of thrones buffeted and sometimes destroyed by republicanism and radicalism. It assesses the ways that surviving dynasties and the descendants of abolished dynasties have adapted to new social and political orders, and it considers the legacies left by extant and defunct dynasties in contemporary Asia.
The survival of Brunei as the only ruling absolute monarchy in Southeast Asia has been attributed to the statesmanship of its former Sultan, Sir Omar Ali Saifuddin. 1 Credited as the ‘architect’ of modern Brunei, Sultan Omar Ali’s reign, from 1950 to 1967, coincided with a period in post-war colonial Southeast Asia marked by tumultuous change. The Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia during the Second World War highlighted the inequities brought about by colonialism, and the end of the war provided opportunities for colonised peoples in the region to question
chap 4 22/3/04 12:53 pm Page 109 4 Ecclesiastical monarchy or monarchies? Why did the French episcopate prove so tenacious in opposing the regulars’ calls for independence through the seventeenth century? Like the bishops’ quarrels with the curés, these were crises of authority in which the episcopate fought to assert its disciplinary supremacy over the religious orders. Yet the struggle between the bishops and the regulars was just one manifestation of a much larger complexity: the place of the episcopate in the church’s governing hierarchy. Not only did
Monarchies and Decolonisation in Asia is the third volume we have edited for Manchester University Press’s ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series around the previously understudied theme of monarchy – the institution of the crown, the activities of individual sovereigns and other members of royal families, and the culture of royalty – in colonial contexts. The chapters in Crowns and Colonies revealed some of the ways European and non-European monarchies came into contact around the world in the colonial age, particularly at the time that imperial powers were
British monarch’s grandest title, which Victoria first took as Empress of India and proclaimed as such on 1 January 1877 at a lavish durbar in Delhi. India transformed the monarchy, as its head knew only too well. Queen Victoria communicated via her private secretary to Earl Granville in January 1873 her impatience that no special mention of India had been made to the royal title since Britain assumed