Robert Aldrich - Banished potentates: Dethroning and exiling indigenous monarchs under British and French colonial rule, 1815–1955

General editor: Andrew S. Thompson

Founding editor: John M. MacKenzie

When the Studies in Imperialism series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than thirty years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. Studies in Imperialism is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

Banished potentates

SELECTED TITLES AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES

WRITING IMPERIAL HISTORIES

ed. Andrew S. Thompson

EMPIRE OF SCHOLARS

Tamson Pietsch

HISTORY, HERITAGE AND COLONIALISM

Kynan Gentry

COUNTRY HOUSES AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE

Stephanie Barczewski

THE RELIC STATE

Pamila Gupta

WE ARE NO LONGER IN FRANCE

Allison Drew

THE SUPPRESSION OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

ed. Robert Burroughs and Richard Huzzey

HEROIC IMPERIALISTS IN AFRICA

Berny Sbe

Banished potentates

Dethroning and exiling indigenous monarchs under British and French colonial rule, 18151955

Robert Aldrich

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

All images are from the authors collection

Research for this book was greatly facilitated by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council, for which I am extremely grateful. In particular, it made possible work in archives and libraries in Britain and France, and visits to some of the countries from which the rulers were deported and countries to which they were sent. Work for the project began during a visiting fellowship at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Wolfson College at Cambridge University, for which I also express my warm appreciation, and encompassed another sabbatical from the University of Sydney, where the Department of History has provided a continuing source of collegiality and stimulation.

I would like to give particular thanks to Briony Neilson for her research assistance, and acknowledge with appreciation Linh Do for reading and summarising material from Vietnamese sources, and W. Matthew Kennedy for research assistance in the British National Archives. Nicholas Keyzer did great service in digitising and enhancing the illustrations. Trevor Matthews prepared the index. The staff of the British Library, the Bibliothque Nationale de France, the Archives Nationales dOutre-Mer, and the Archives Dpartementales de La Runion provided invaluable access and assistance to their resources. I owe much merited thanks, too, to the staff of my home library at the University of Sydney. Emma Brennan, the commissioning editor at Manchester University Press, and Andrew Thompson, the general editor of the Studies in Imperialism series, have shown much appreciated enthusiasm for this project. I have had valuable and enjoyable conversations with many scholars who are far more knowledgeable about particular colonial situations than I will ever be. I will forbear naming names, in the hopes of personally thanking them and in an effort to avoid neglecting any by inadvertent omission. However, for reading and commenting on various chapters, I would especially like to thank Eric Jennings, Harshan Kumarasingham, Brad Manera, Jim Masselos, Cindy McCreery, Kirsten McKenzie and Mark Seymour.

Earlier versions of some of these chapters have been presented at seminars and have benefited from the comments from other participants. A conference on Exile in Colonial Asia organised by Ronit Riccit was especially enriching, and I contributed a chapter on Sri Lanka to the resulting collection published under the same title. Another chapter on Sri Lanka appeared in a volume I co-edited with Cindy McCreery, Crowns and Colonies: European Monarchies and Overseas Empires, and an article on the Vietnamese emperor Duy Tan was published on H-France in a collection of papers from the George Rud Seminar.

The names of non-European people and places discussed in this book have been transliterated in many different forms, and are still rendered in varying ways. I use forms for individuals names that have wide currency, and have generally referred to places as they were known during colonial times. The sovereigns who are my subjects held a variety of titles; I often use king or monarch in a generic sense. Titles, in general, are not put in upper-case, except for Resident the colonial official at a feudatory court solely to differentiate that figure from residents referring to inhabitants in general. For convenience, I frequently refer to a deposed ruler by his or her reign title without the prefix ex- or former. Since almost all of the deposed rulers were male, he rather than he or she sometimes suffices.

The first chapter explores confrontations and accommodations between European colonisers and indigenous monarchs in a general sense. Three chapters examine particular cases of the deposition and exile of rulers: King Sri Vikrama Rajasinha in Ceylon in 1815, Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar in 1897, and Emperors Ham Nghi, Thanh Thai and Duy Tan in Vietnam over the period 1885 to 1916. Two other chapters provide more composite accounts of Asia and Africa: the British ouster of Indian princes, the last Burmese king and a sultan in Malaya, and then British and French removal of a host of chieftains in sub-Saharan Africa. The final chapter looks at the French colonial removal of rulers in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia and the restoration of a Moroccan sultan on the eve of decolonisation.

Deposed and pensioned off kings ran the headline over a two-page article in Frances popular