Introduction
1. Empire Tours: Royal travel between colonies and metropoles - Robert Aldrich and Cindy McCreery
2. Royal tour by proxy: The embassy of Sultan Alauddin of Aceh to the Netherlands, 1601–1603 - Jean Gelman Taylor
3. French imperial tours: Napoléon III and Eugénie in Algeria and beyond - Robert Aldrich
4. Something borrowed, something blue: Prince Alfred’s precedent in overseas British royal tours, c.1860–1925 - Cindy McCreery
5. Royalty, loyalism, and citizenship in the late nineteenth-century British settler empire - Charles V. Reed
6. The Maharaja of Gondal in Europe in 1883 - Caroline Keen
7. Performing monarchy: The Kaiser and Kaiserin’s voyage to the Levant, 1898 - Matthew P. Fitzpatrick
8. Colonial kings in the metropole: The visits to France of King Sisowath (1906) and Emperor Khai Dinh (1922) - Robert Aldrich
9. Tensions of empire and monarchy: The African tour of the Portuguese crown prince in 1907 - Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Inês Vieira Gomes
10. Belgian royals on tour in the Congo (1909–1960) - Guy Vanthemsche
11. Royal symbolism: Crown Prince Hirohito’s tour to Europe in 1921 - Elise K. Tipton
12. The Throne behind the Power? Royal tours of ‘Africa Italiana’ under fascism - Mark Seymour
13. Strained encounters: Royal Indonesian visits to the Dutch court in the early twentieth century - Susie Protschky
14. The 1947 royal tour in Smuts’ Raj: South African Indian responses - Hilary Sapire
Index

Royals on Tour explores visits by European monarchs and other members of royal families to overseas colonies, and by indigenous royals from the colonies to Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It presents case studies of travel by royals from Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium to the overseas possessions (and, in some cases, potential possessions) of their countries, and of visits to Europe by royals from Japan, the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. It shows how these tours served to project imperial dominion but also to assert the status of non-European dynasties.

The celebrity of royal figures, the increased ease of travel with new means of transport such as railways, steamships and aeroplanes, and the avid interest of both the public and the press in these visits make such royal tours key points of encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans, and between colonial masters and the subjects in their possessions. The promotion or criticism of tours and the receptions the visitors received illustrate the often fractious dynamics of empire and international relations.

The colourful processions, the anthems and decorations, the speeches and itineraries, official meetings and informal activities formed part of the popular culture of empire and of monarchy. The volume argues that mixed in with the pageantry and protocol were profound questions about the role of monarchs, the practice of imperial governance, the relationships between metropolitan and overseas elites, and evolving expressions of nationalism.