Colloque "Crowns and Colonies : Monarchies and Colonial Empires" (11-13 juin 2014, Sydney)

Le colloque "Couronnes et colonies : monarchies et empires coloniaux", co-dirigé par notre vice-président Robert Aldrich, se tiendra tout prochainement à Sydney !

An international conference convened by Robert Aldrich and Cindy McCreery

With a keynote address by Professor Miles Taylor, Director of the Institute for Historical Research, University of London, on Queen Victoria and India

Program

Department of History,
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry
University of Sydney
11-13 June 2014

"From the time of Alexander the Great and the Roman Caesars down to the empire of Queen Victoria and beyond, monarchism and imperialism have often been linked – indeed, republican colonial empires have been notable exceptions in international history. Napoleon III dreamed of constructing an ‘Arab kingdom’, Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, King Leopold created his own realm the Congo, and Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III was named Emperor of Ethiopia. Even today the Commonwealth of Nations is bound together by the figure of the British monarch, and the Danish queen reigns over Greenland and the Faeroe Islands.

Outside of Europe, as well, monarchs ruled over disparate peoples, their hereditary and often sacred positions bringing together under a crown the empires of China, Japan, the Ottoman state and several pre-colonial African empires. Non-Western monarchs – Zulu chieftains, Indian maharajahs, Emperor Haile Selassie, the king of Korea among others – were themselves often displaced by imperial conquest. Nationalist movements sometimes campaigned for the restoration of dynasties, at other times for abandonment of ‘feudal’ rule.

This international conference, and a proposed collection of essays commissioned from participants, explores the links between crowned rulers and their colonial possessions."