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In the post-colonial era, both former colonizing and former colonized powers found themselves engaged in a dramatic renegotiation of diplomatic relationships. Against this backdrop, the access to, or withholding of, information and understanding about other states became a key asset in any mobilization of leverage and maintenance of agency. This article draws upon the case studies of the UK's diplomatic relationships with African states and India in order to emphasize the virtue of combining New Diplomatic History (NDH) and history-of-knowledge approaches. Competing knowledges, and the denying of access to knowledge to others, could be mobilized in pursuit of competing agendas, both across and within national governments. The fragilities and contingencies behind the availability of information, coupled with enduring colonial-era prejudices which others could exploit, created areas of ignorance, and rendered governmental knowledge processes vulnerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ways in which Māori met royal visitors to New Zealand. The New Zealand Government wished to present Māori as a loyal people who provided the country with a unique culture, and to show that New Zealand had excellent race relations. Māori had different concerns. They believed that Māori had a special relationship to the Crown because Queen Victoria was the other signatory to the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840. In honouring her descendants they would honour the Treaty. Some Māori also believed royalty might help challenge some of the actions of the settler government. After some difficulties on the three visits of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, in 1869-1871, these diverse aims were largely achieved on royal visits in 1901, 1920, 1927, 1934, and in the first visit of Elizabeth II in 1953 by one large gathering of the tribes at Rotorua. Not all Māori were happy about this policy, especially the Māori King, who wished to meet royalty on his own ground. From 1953 royal visitors did meet the Māori King at his home in the Waikato; and after that date the large Rotorua gathering ceased. Instead, gatherings of all the tribes began to occur at Waitangi, most notably when Elizabeth II visited for the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty in 1990.

In this article, the author aims at systematizing and analyzing the data from memoirs published in the last three decades in the Republic of Moldova about public events involving members of royal family, in order to contribute to the reconstruction of the image of the Romanian Crown, as it emerges from analyzed testimonies, to circumscribe the events and the main actors on the mental and emotional map of the memorialist's personality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]