Ceremony, Conquest, and Conciliation: An Afterword

Abstract

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.