Global Royal Families

T he conference ‘Global Royal Families’ that took place in London, as a collaboration between the German Historical Institute and the University of Sydney, was a timely intervention into a very active field of research that, in the last few years, has widely profited from the rising academic interest in the global dimensions of monarchy and the monarchical dimensions of globalism. While the truly global diversity of case studies and the inspiring variety of analytical perspectives presented at the conference make it impossible to give a detailed account of all arguments in this review, the different papers spoke to each other extremely well and therefore offered enlightening intersections. Recurring themes of the conference included the logistics of royal travel, the difficult relationship between royal visibility and remoteness, and the political facets of transnational family connections, as well as the global dynamics of colonial monarchy and cultural transfer. In modern times, as several papers illustrated, members of royal families travelled all over the world with a variety of motivations and under many different formal configurations. A world tour, featuring visits in numerous countries on different continents was a very common endeavour. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many royals undertook such a journey for educational as well as domestic and foreign political reasons, which was well illustrated by Aglaja Weindl’s (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich) paper discussing Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s world cruise in the s. Thereby, the character of the reception on the stops of these tours could ranged from informal or incognito travels to a resplendent, formal state visit depending on financial, diplomatic, hierarchical or race issues that were not only defined by the likes of the travelling royals but also by the interests of the welcoming states and societies. This was made very clear by Cindy McCreery (University of Sydney) through an instructive comparison of the visits of King Kalākaua of Hawai’i and the British princes Albert and George to Japan in . The diplomatic benefits of royal travel stood at the centre of Michael Kandiah’s (King’s College, London) paper, which explored the royal diplomacy of the British Monarchy in the second half of the twentieth century. In this context, the participants controversially debated the advantages and difficulties of oral history sources in the history of monarchy, looking specifically at the example of witness interviews with British diplomats on the state visits of Queen Elisabeth II. Christian Oberländer (MartinLuther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg) argued that this use of royal soft power was a global phenomenon and explained how the journeys and appearances of the British royal family influenced the performance of the Japanese monarchy after . During these journeys, but also at home, the technological, stylistic and visual innovations of modern mass media strongly affected the behaviour and perception of monarchs and their families on a global scale. Judith Rowbotham (University of Plymouth) highlighted this in