Search

British royal tours to the empire’s settler dominions of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand reached their zenith in the early- to mid-twentieth century during a period of wilful amnesia and lack of engagement with the legacies of violence and dispossession brought about by colonial rule. This afterword considers royal tours in the light of the systemic racial inequality inherent within settler colonialism and its narrative of nationhood and British loyalism. The discussion draws on the articles in this special issue, but also on new examples: Mark Twain, the American author and anti-imperialist, demonstrates a different type of touring celebrity to visiting royals and their role as defenders of empire, with Twain critical of empire in his literary works and travels; Sol Plaatje, the black South African journalist, politician and one-time translator to the Duke of Connaught, reveals the ineffectiveness––and reticence to intervene––of touring royals as mediators between settlers and colonial subjects robbed of their land and liberties. The article concludes by noting improvements in the speed of travel and telecommunications as crucial for the increase in royal tours to settler dominions, an increase that proved critical in facilitating the affective power of royal performance for the solidifying of settler nationalisms reliant upon loyalism to the Crown.

Modern historiography often presents Austrian Bukovina (1775-1918) as a model for the management of a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional territory. Many researchers have noted that, due to the policies promoted by the House of Habsburg, this province of the empire did not record religious and ethnic conflicts between national communities. On the other hand, at the end of World War I, all ethnic groups, except the German and Jews, adopted hostile positions against maintaining the integrity of Austria-Hungary. This has also been noticed by other historians to highlight the irredentism of non-German nationalities in Bukovina. This study attempts to analyse whether the dominant mood in the province at the end of the Great War was specific to non-German elites around and in the beginning of World War I, or it is the result of population adapting to the aftereffects of the world conflagration. The analysis is based on unpublished archival sources, testimonies of contemporaries and 1913-1914 local press articles.