Crowns and colonies

European monarchies and overseas empires

Robert Aldrich, Cindy McCreery

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526100894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Queen Victoria, who also bore the title of Empress of India, had a real and abiding interest in the British Empire, but other European monarchs also ruled over possessions 'beyond the seas'. This collection of original essays explores the connections between monarchy and colonialism, from the old regime empires down to the Commonwealth of today. With case studies drawn from Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy, the chapters analyse constitutional questions about the role of the crown in overseas empires, the pomp and pageantry of the monarchy as it transferred to the colonies, and the fate of indigenous sovereigns under European colonial control. The volume, with chapters on North America, Asia, Africa and Australasia, provides new perspectives on colonial history, the governance of empire, and the transnational history of monarchies in modern Europe.

Chapter one

European sovereigns and their empires ‘beyond the seas’

Robert Aldrich and Cindy McCreery

The word ‘empire’ conjures up both the idea of a dynastic lineage of emperors and empresses and the idea of a collection of conquered territories, particularly overseas colonies. Indeed, many colonial empires were ruled over by the crowned heads of metropolitan powers. Some of the Holy Roman Emperors in early modern Europe reigned over Spanish colonial possessions in the Americas; later, such nineteenth-century rulers as Her Britannic Majesty Queen Victoria, the Empress of India, and her contemporary, Emperor Napoleon III of France, became sovereigns over lands scattered around the world (see Figure 1). By the early twentieth century, Spain had virtually no more colonies and France had no more emperor (though it did have an even more extensive overseas empire than at the time of Napoleon III), but monarchs such as the Queen of the Netherlands and the Emperor of Germany ruled far-flung domains. This book explores the multiple and evolving connections between European monarchs and their colonies. It argues that during much of the history of colonialism there existed a direct and important link between most colonial empires and the institutions of monarchy.

1.Statue of Queen Victoria outside Government House, Port-Louis, Mauritius. Photograph by Robert Aldrich, June 2015

Ruling over the world’s largest empire, the British sovereign’s relationship with the colonies was of special moment. That relationship was dramatically on display at the time of the monarch’s coronation, and such ceremonies provide a unique perspective on the sovereign’s role as paramount rulers of colonial empires.

British imperial coronations, 1937 and 1953

On 12 May 1937, George VI was crowned ‘King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the seas’ and Emperor of India. A commemorative publication issued by The Times, in London, spoke of the monarchy as the most important single institution of common interest to all the peoples of the Empire. It recalled that an imperial conference in 1926 had declared that the peoples of Britain and its dominions – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Irish Free State and Newfoundland – were ‘united by a common allegiance to the Crown’ and noted that, according to the 1931 Statute of Westminster, ‘any alteration in the law touching the Succession to the Throne or the Royal Style and Titles shall hereafter require the assent as well of the Parliaments of all the Dominions as of the Parliament of the United Kingdom’. The newspaper conceded that different parts of the Empire had varying legal and emotional links with the monarch. In the princely states of India, ‘the Coronation of the King-Emperor does not possess that special significance which attaches to it in respect of British India’, that is, the portion of the subcontinent directly governed by the British, but the princes nevertheless

are bound to the King-Emperor by treaty relations, and they recognise in him the personal embodiment of the paramount power of the Crown. Moreover, for them as monarchs, within their own sphere, the institution of monarchy has a more than ordinary appeal, and they have a strong interest in its maintenance and in the increase of its prestige.

In the formal colonies – the bulk of the British outposts in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans –

the attitude of the native peoples towards the King is, in most of the colonial possessions of His Majesty, in a sense, a much more personal one than is that of any other section of His Majesty’s subjects. They look to him as their supreme ruler and they trust to him that their welfare and protection will be secured. They make little distinction between His Majesty and His Majesty’s Government.¹

Those words not only underlined the personal links that were thought to bind both settlers and colonised peoples to their monarch but also alluded to the complex constitutional issues of what exactly royal rule meant overseas; in passing, The Times noted moves to increasing self-government in Southern Rhodesia, Ceylon and Burma, evidence that the relations between Britain and its empire, and between sovereign and subjects, were not immutable. For the moment, however, the newspaper concentrated on the pageantry of the coronation, witnessed by the prime ministers of the dominions, troops brought to London from around the British Empire (singling out the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, ‘fine figures in scarlet tunics’, and the ‘dark-skinned officers and men of Indian regiments, in the many uniforms and sometimes strange headdresses’) and the indigenous maharajahs and sultans sitting in Westminster Abbey alongside European royals from Belgium, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

Here, too, were the Indian Princes, robed in the rich fabrics of the East, their sparkling gems not insignificant against those of the [British] regalia. Among them were the popular Maharajah of Bikaner, who has behind him so great a record as a soldier [in the First World War], administrator, and statesmen; the Prince of Berar, representing his father, the Nizam of Hyderabad …; the Maharajah Gaekwar of Baroda, with the Maharani at his side; and those keen polo players, the Nawab of Bhopal and the Maharajah of Jaipur.

The commemorative publication reported, too, on the King’s address to his people on the evening of the coronation, in which he said: ‘I felt this morning that the whole Empire was in very truth gathered within the Walls of Westminster Abbey.’

A celebratory booklet was also published in India, offered ‘as an humble tribute, a token of the loyalty and affection of the citizens of the Indian Empire’ to George VI. The text, no doubt written largely by and for Britons and an Anglophile Indian elite, welcomed the new king ‘to the throne of the greatest Empire that the world has seen’. The publication included an article by Winston Churchill on ‘India and the Constitution’, in which Churchill, then in the political wilderness but gaining attention with his warnings about Fascism, said that ‘the British monarchy and constitution, spread as they are in different forms throughout the self-governing dominions, stand at this time as the most obvious bulwark against arbitrary rule, tyrannies and dictatorships of all kinds’. Churchill’s allusion to Japanese aggression in Manchuria, Italian conquest of Ethiopia and Hitler’s demands for the restitution of Germany’s colonies were the snatch-and-grab moves that Britain had abjured, he stated, for ‘far gone are the army days of Queen Victoria’. The Indian booklet, like ones printed for the coronation elsewhere in the empire, offered readers detailed accounts of the investiture, descriptions of the regalia, biographies of members of the royal family, a piece on the ‘spiritual significance of the Coronation’, and recollections of the grand Delhi Durbar of 1911. Indians themselves remained almost completely absent in the pictures and among the authors, though the publication contained advertisements for an Ayurvedic doctor, the Jewel of India Perfume Company, Ajanta Beauty Products (‘hundred per cent Indian’) and ‘Squibb’s Ague Specific – a gift from Heaven to fight the fevers, malaria & influenza’.²

Few who cheered at the coronation of King George VI would have foreseen that just over a decade later Britain would quit India and that the monarch would thus lose his title of ‘Emperor of India’. Soon Burma and Sri Lanka would follow India and Pakistan into independence. Finally, the reign of the King’s daughter and successor, Elizabeth II, would see Britain withdraw from most of its remaining colonies by the mid-1960s. Still, at Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, the mood was imperially festive. Churchill, now Prime Minister, provided a link to the interwar years, and the engaging young monarch was lauded as the perfect figure for the dawn of a new Elizabethan age. The Queen, in an address, evoked ‘the living strength and majesty of the Commonwealth and Empire: of societies old and new, of lands and races different in history and origins, but all, by God’s will, united in spirit and in aim’. On her coronation day, the prime ministers of the newly independent countries, such as Jawaharlal Nehru from India and D. S. Senanayake from Ceylon, joined those from the old dominions. Once again, there were other royals in Westminster Abbey. In the procession across London, a particular favourite was the tall Queen Salote of Tonga, who declined to have the roof of her carriage raised despite the rain (perhaps to the dismay of the Malay Sultan of Kelantan, who shared the carriage with her).³ And once again there were commemorative publications, the Official Souvenir Programme from Penang, for instance, listing the English, Indian, Chinese and Malay names of the coronation celebration committee, giving the schedules of Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim services of thanksgiving, and recording an ‘all-community luncheon (by invitation) to prominent citizens’ at the exclusive Penang Club. There were school processions, the erection of a triumphal arch by the Penang Muslim Community, parades of the Royal West Kent Regiment and the Gurkha Pipe Band, a cocktail party hosted by the Royal Navy and a ball at the grand Eastern and Oriental Hotel. The souvenir noted that the dukes of Clarence, Connaught, Gloucester and Kent, as well as the Prince of Wales, had visited the Malay states and that the sultans of Johore, Selangor, Kelantan and Perak had made the journey to London for the coronation of Elizabeth II ‘and will, thereby, make even closer the personal ties which bind Her Majesty to the Rulers and the Malayan peoples’.⁴

Sixty years on, Queen Elizabeth’s abiding dedication to the Commonwealth is well known, but the ‘realms and territories’ (in the current formulation of the monarch’s title) over which her successor shall be crowned will constitute a diminished portfolio of imperial holdings. He will become the sovereign not of the catch-all ‘domains beyond the seas’ but, more specifically, will be proclaimed King of Canada (the title was a Canadian innovation already in 1937) and King of Australia – a title instituted in 1973 – that is, unless these two former dominions and New Zealand do not first become republics. The British monarchy has survived the virtual end of empire, but it would be hazardous to predict whether the formal ties that make the sovereign the head of state of such diverse countries as Australia and Papua New Guinea will endure into the reigns of Elizabeth II’s heirs. Nevertheless, for a very long time, not only in Britain but also in other countries, the institutions of monarchy and overseas empire have gone together.

European monarchs and their overseas empires

In the mid-1700s, virtually every polity in the world was, in some way, organised according to monarchical principles, with rule exercised by a figure who inherited his or her rights, or had wrested them from a predecessor and hoped to pass them on to family members of the dynasty. Even in the late nineteenth century, republican governments remained an exception (largely in the Americas and in France, Switzerland and San Marino) in a world where crowned heads reigned and ruled. Many monarchs ruled extensive domains, either continental or overseas, that encompassed a wide variety of peoples, cultures and territories. In the early years of the twentieth century, the Russian Emperor ruled over Baltic, Central Asian and Siberian peoples, the Chinese Emperor’s administration extended to the lands of the Uighurs and Tibetans, and the Japanese Emperor claimed the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan and Korea. Though he had no overseas empire, the Habsburg ruler established his rights over a quasi-colonial Bosnia. The British, Dutch, Belgian, German, Italian, Danish, Portuguese and Ottoman rulers claimed overseas territories. Some empires had existed, in varied configurations, for centuries, while others, such as the German, Italian and Japanese overseas empires, were recent acquisitions but, their leaders hoped, were destined for eternity. If, as Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper have remarked, most polities in world history could be seen as empires, so too most, even in the early 1900s, were monarchies.⁵

In fact, by the late 1800s, having an empire appeared to be a necessity for a country to achieve great-power status, whence the expansionism of newly unified Germany and Italy and renascent Japan, and the aspirational expansion of the King of the Belgians. Having a monarch was also a sign of being a ‘proper’ country, as shown with the appointment of kings (often in the first instance German princes, some of whom were relatively poor with little if any remaining territory of their own) for such European countries that gained independence in the nineteenth century as Greece, Belgium, Romania and Bulgaria. Even after the turn of the century, new dynasties assumed thrones in Norway, Yugoslavia and, as late as 1928, Albania. The republicanism of France, Switzerland, San Marino, the USA and the countries of Central and South America (though both Mexico and Brazil episodically had emperors and several European monarchies still held territory in the Americas) was an anomaly, though it is noteworthy that all of the American republics had emerged from colonial wars of independence. In short, colonies were, for the most part, the territories of monarchical states. A monarch was not necessary for colonial rule, as the cases of France and the USA and their overseas domains prove, as does the continued existence of overseas empires after the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter one European sovereigns and their empires ‘beyond the seas’
• Chapter two The British royal family and the colonial empire from the Georgians to Prince George
• Chapter three Two Victorias? Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria and Melbourne, 1867–68
• Chapter four Kaiser Wilhelm II and the limits of the royal prerogative in German South-West Africa
• Chapter five Orangists in a red empire: salutations from a Dutch queen’s supporters in a British South Africa
• Chapter six Sultans and the House of Orange-Nassau: Indonesian perceptions of power relationships with the Dutch
• Chapter seven The return of the throne: the repatriation of the Kandyan regalia to Ceylon
• Chapter eight Kingitanga and Crown: New Zealand’s Maori King movement and its relationship with the British monarchy
• Chapter nine The Maharani of Kutch and courtly life before and after Indian Independence
• Chapter ten Colonies, monarchy, empire and the French ancien régime
• Chapter eleven Napoleon III and France’s colonial expansion: national grandeur, territorial conquests and colonial embellishment, 1852–70
• Chapter twelve The British, the Hashemites and monarchies in the Middle East
• Chapter thirteen An empire for a kingdom: monarchy and Fascism in the Italian colonies
• Chapter fourteen ‘So brave Etruria grew’: dividing the Crown in early colonial New South Wales, 1808–10
• Chapter fifteen A new monarchy for a new commonwealth? Monarchy and the consequences of republican India
• Chapter sixteen Waiting to die? The British monarchy in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, 1991–2016
• Index