Search results
Royal tours are staged presentations of the crowned self before random or selected spectators. Elements of a tour may include public processions, uniformed retainers, honour guards, display of flags, levees or durbahs, religious ceremonies and gifts. The royal personage may travel in open carriage or closed litter, and in audiences may be elevated on a dais on public display or concealed by a curtain. Forms of obeisance
Margaret mingled informally with ex-servicemen, scouts and girl guides before leaving for their next engagement with Durban’s African residents. While the mannered loyalism of Kajee’s speech and ornamentalist pageantry were replicated in meetings between the British king and his Southern African subjects during a spectacular three-month royal tour, the size of this crowd is noteworthy. Taking place in the midst of the passive
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.
Royal tours of the 1800s and early 1900s, and since, have created much documentation, perhaps the most obvious record contained in newspapers and magazines, newsreels and then radio and television broadcasts. Tours expressed and promoted royal and imperial authority, though in some instances they revealed resistance against expansionist designs. The royal visitor was the central actor in a tour, but was surrounded by an entourage of other people and a store of paraphernalia that played essential roles. This book examines how presentation is managed when ambassadors are sent in place of the royal personage. Sultan Alauddin of Aceh mounted a royal tour by proxy in which he was embodied - and concealed - in his gifts and in the humbler persons of his placeholders. Prince Alfred Ernest Albert, Duke of Edinburgh, provided a template for later royal tours in three ways. First, he pioneered a new relationship with the Royal Navy as a training institution for British princes. Second, his lengthy visits paved the way for similarly ambitious global tours. Alfred's tours cultivated a range of trusted support staff. Imperial citizenship and even Britishness were embraced by non- English and non- British subjects of the queen. One young prince who was present in Britain at some of the most glittering events was Thakur Sahib Bhagvatsinh, a Rajput who ruled Gondal. The book also discusses Kaiser Wilhelm II's tour, King Sisowath and Emperor Khai Dinh's tour to France, the Portuguese crown prince's tour of Africa, and tours during Smuts's Raj.
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
wealthy maharajas, visits to Europe were becoming as significant as the ‘Grand Tour’ of the European continent had been for the eighteenth-century British elite. 6 In European capitals, spa towns and Mediterranean resorts, royals were far from uncommon, though they travelled and were accommodated in ways to which commoners were far from accustomed. Writing the history of royal tours Royal tours of the 1800s and early 1900s, and
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
came from William Cadbury, the chocolate manufacturer, who depended for supplies on cocoa plantations, some of the largest located in São Tomé. A 1905 trip by Cadbury to São Tomé and Angola to investigate labour recruitment created considerable negative international publicity. The royal tour was intended to challenge these findings; the conflict was one of the ‘tensions of empire’. 2
When the young British princes Albert Victor and George visited Australia in 1881, they and their hosts recalled another royal tour and another royal tourist. Visiting a new grammar school in Brisbane, ‘they were told how their uncle, the Duke of Edinburgh, had laid the foundation-stone of the old Prince Alfred Grammar School, within sight, and now vacated’. 1 Alfred was in many ways the first British royal to tour major