This excellent book is published in the Manchester University Press 'Studies in Imperialism' series. Reed provides deep and also wide-ranging scholarly coverage of the highly symbolic, planned, stage-managed and mediated official visits that were undertaken by members of the British monarchy to the Empire, Dominions and Commonwealth during the period identified in the title and their reception by those visited.Through thorough research in archives and contemporary media sources, Reed provides a rich picture at several levels in his exploration of the detailed planning and organisation of the royal tour arrangements, their progress and reception. These levels include an assessment of the at times competing roles of colonial administrators at home and abroad and their tensions with local elites surrounding the specific details of the programme, and importantly the personal disposition of the royal 'tourist' in question.The reception and encounters of royal tours and personages by 'native' princes, chiefs and 'respectable people of colour' in Africa, South Asia and New Zealand in seeking symbolic appropriation of and/or resistance to British power is also addressed in interesting detail. In addition, there is coverage of the reported perceptions of 'ordinary colonial subjects of colour' (xx) and how those who imagined themselves as members of a British imperial community sought to use royal tours in making claims on Britishness, loyalty to the Crown and imperial citizenship.The content of this volume also provides in the words of the author, a 'conceptual space between the projection of Queen Victoria as a symbol of empire and nineteenth century royals' often ambivalent attitudes towards the empire and in particular their participation in more or less arduous royal tours (xxiv). Reed asserts that royal tours during this time were an essential and ritual function in the assertion of power and empire. To a lesser extent, this remains the case where members of the British royal family are regularly 'on tour' at home and overseas, if not now exclusively in the residual Commonwealth, with these travels continuing to excite media attention, public attendance and varying extents of ritual and deference. Reed also presents a nuanced and subtle discussion of the ways in which symbolic resistance to British appropriation of local political traditions in the Empire was exerted and/or how royal connections were used in attempts to accentuate status and authority locally.How colonial settlers imagined their relationship with a British 'homeland' and to a larger British world in the fashioning of communal mythologies, identities and claims to imperial citizenship through instruments of propaganda and social control also receives interesting attention. The 'pilgrimage' of colonial subjects 'home' discussed by Reed may tenuously be extended to the twenty-first-century travels of diaspora communities as manifest in 'homeland tourism' to the UK from the former colonies.This observation reveals that the reviewer approached Reed's boo...

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract