ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: ROYAL SUBJECTS, IMPERIAL CITIZENS: THE MAKING OF BRITISH IMPERIAL CULTURE, 1860- 1901 Charles Vincent Reed, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor Richard Price Department of History ABSTRACT: The dissertation explores the development of global identities in the nineteenth-century British Empire through one particular device of colonial rule – the royal tour. Colonial officials and administrators sought to encourage loyalty and obedience on part of Queen Victoria’s subjects around the world through imperial spectacle and personal interaction with the queen’s children and grandchildren. The royal tour, I argue, created cultural spaces that both settlers of European descent and colonial people of color used to claim the rights and responsibilities of imperial citizenship. The dissertation, then, examines how the royal tours were imagined and used by different historical actors in Britain, southern Africa, New Zealand, and South Asia. My work builds on a growing historical literature about “imperial networks” and the cultures of empire. In particular, it aims to understand the British world as a complex field of cultural encounters, exchanges, and borrowings rather than a collection of unitary paths between Great Britain and its colonies. ROYAL SUBJECTS, IMPERIAL CITIZENS: THE MAKING OF BRITISH IMPERIAL CULTURE, 1860-1901 by Charles Vincent Reed Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2010 Advisory Committee: Professor Richard Price, Chair Professor Paul Landau Professor Dane Kennedy Professor Julie Greene Professor Ralph Bauer © Copyright by Charles Vincent Reed 2010 DEDICATION To Jude ii ACKNOWLEGEMENTS Writing a dissertation is both a profoundly collective project and an intensely individual one. As goes the usual caveat, the strengths of this work can be attributed to the former and its weaknesses only to the latter. It has been produced with the assistance and support of countless people. These acknowledgements cannot fully express my gratitude to them, but I will do my best. Professor Richard Price has been a patient and able advisor, who has shared his enormous knowledge, insight, and experience while allowing me to intellectually venture out on my own and to develop my own worldview as a historian (occasionally intervening, pulling me out of the conceptual quicksand). He personifies the kind of academic humanism that inspired me to become a historian in the first place. Since the beginning of my time at Maryland, Professor Paul Landau has encouraged me to pursue my interest in African history. He has treated me, as a student and as a teaching assistant, with generosity and graciousness. I can only hope that this work can engage with Africanist scholars in a thoughtful and productive way that honors his intellectual influence. I have also been profoundly shaped by the teacher-scholars who taught me as an undergraduate or a Master’s student and have come to engage with me as a friend and scholar: John Cox, Dominick DeFilippis, Leslie Liedel, Donna Simpson, and John Whitehead at Wheeling Jesuit University; and Carla Hay, Tim McMahon, and Julius Ruff at Marquette University. I have also developed lifelong friendships with fellow graduate students, who have offered the emotional and intellectual support that has sustained me over the last seven years: Christopher Arnold, Jeremy Best, Andrew Demshuk, Reid Gustafson, Helena Iles, Andrew Kellett, Stefan Papaioannou, Amy Rutenberg, Michael Soracoe, and Monica Witkowski (among many others). I must also thank the many archivists and librarians who have helped make this dissertation possible: Pamela Clark at the Royal Archives at Windsor; the staff of the British Library, the National Archives at Kew, the Special Collections at the University of Nottingham, and Bodleian Library at Oxford University; Ruth Gibson at the University of Birmingham; Ian Sharpe at the Auckland Public Library; and Charles Wright and the staff of McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland. I also thank Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for permission to use materials from the Royal Archives; the Department of History and the Graduate School at the University of Maryland for funding my research and conference travel; my parents and Mary Jane Jackson for supplementing these grants; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Susan Pedersen, and my fellow seminarians for their support during the 2010 Modern British History seminar at Columbia University. The work has also been informed by the advice and insights of Dane Kennedy, as an outside reader of my dissertation; Robert Travers, as the seminar leader at the Folger Institute’s Fall 2009 program on “India and British Political Thought”; and Anne Rush, as a mentor and colleague. Professors Julie Greene and Ralph Bauer have also graciously agreed to serve as readers. iii Finally and most importantly, I must express my love and devotion to my family, who supported their first college graduate in an enterprise that sacrificed financial benefits for personal fulfillment. This dissertation is for my grandfather, who was raised on a farm during the Great Depression, served as a medic in the Pacific theater during World War II, and toiled in the coalfields and steel mills of southwestern Pennsylvania. He had an insatiable interest in the world, reading the local newspaper everyday from cover to cover, and it was he who first inspired and continually nurtured my interest in the past. This work is also for my parents and grandmother, who encouraged me to pursue my dreams, no matter how unreasonable they seemed to be; and for my wife and best friend, Tracy, who has offered more love and support than I ever could have asked for. It could not have been written without them. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication………………………………………………………………………………... ii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………... iii Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………… v Introduction………………………………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter One: The Great Queen and Imperial Culture…………………………………………………. 28 Chapter Two: Ornamentalism, Encounters, and Imperial Rule………………………………………... 79 Chapter Three: Britishness, Respectability, and Imperial Citizenship………………………………….164 Chapter Four: Settler Cultures and Britishness………………………………………………………...225 Chapter Five: At Home with Empire? The Royal Tours and Imperial Culture at Home……………...328 Conclusion…………………. ……………………………………………….………....390 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………....399 v INTRODUCTION During World War II, the Tswana-speaking peoples of Botswana explained their participation in the British war effort through the mythology of a long-dead queen: We were so frightened to hear that our husbands were going to war… We had no slight idea what the war was about, the thing is, we only heard that Queen Victoria has asked for help, so they are going to fight for the Queen. We then know that this involves us, if they [the Germans] are fighting the Queen, as we were her people. We were under her, and she helped us against our enemies and with other things, so we had to help her. We didn't know how long they were going to take there. Even if we were afraid we just encouraged them to go in the name of God, we will also pray for them whilst gone, so that they can help the Queen as she helped us. 1 Amongst the Tswana, Queen Victoria (r. 1837-1901) was, and is, remembered as Mmamosadinyana, “Mrs/the little woman,” a legacy of the nineteenth-century mythology of the Great (White) Queen. 2 Despite the obvious conceptual dissonance between these two imaginings of Queen Victoria, of the Great White Queen and the little woman, the proliferation of her image so profoundly informed the contours of British imperial culture that it shaped the mentalités of British colonial subjects decades after her death. While colonial administrators at home and abroad constructed and disseminated the myth of the Great (White) Queen, as a fundamental ideological apparatus of the nineteenth-century British Empire, Victoria’s subjects around the world appropriated, remade, and re-imagined this representation through sometimes overlapping, sometimes competing lenses of social class and status; political rights and citizenship; personal 1 Botswana National Archives, Gaborone, Tape 36. Miriam Pilane interview, undated. Translated from Setswana. Cited in Ashley Jackson, “Motivation and Mobilization for War: Recruitment for the British Army in the Bechuanaland,” African Affairs 96, no. 384 (July 1997): 401. Pilane confused Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II. 2 Jackson, 401; Neil Parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain through African Eyes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 1 experiences; and local histories, traditions, and mythologies. The powerful and lasting image of Queen Victoria demonstrates both the employment of cultural symbolism by British colonial states as a strategy of imperial rule and its appropriation by the Queen’s subjects, from colonial governors to “traditional” political elites, from settlers of European descent to Western-educated respectables of color. Moreover, its malleability and adaptability reflects the fragilities and instabilities of a British imperial culture, made in the movement of people, ideas, and commodities through the networks of the British world and through encounters with local people as much as, or more than, in the imperial