The publishing programme at Royal Collection Trust aims to create the highest-quality books, exhibition catalogues, guides and children's books to celebrate the royal residences and the works of art found within them. Our list includes beautifully produced printed books, apps and online catalogues and symposia. We also publish scholarly catalogues raisonnés, which demonstrate the highest standards of academic research.
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Royal College of Psychiatrists publish a wide range of books on mental health for both psychiatrists and the general public, along withtheir flagship journal the British Journal of Psychiatry.
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His world is that of the Royals – full of scandals and secrets. Falling in love with him was never part of her plan. Their paths cross at the royal stud farm... Greta just wants to get away: away from her school and away from the friends who have so endlessly disappointed her. The holiday job at the royal stud farm comes at just the right time for her. She might not have any interest in horses – and even less in princes and princesses – but the royal family’s palace still makes her heart beat faster. But on the very first day she quarrels with Edward, the horse trainer. He guesses that she is hiding a secret and wants to do whatever it takes to bring it out in the open. When, shortly afterwards, Prince Tristan appears at the stud farm, Greta’s life is completely turned upside down. She notices all too late that she is in the process of falling in love – and specifically with the boy that she actually wants to stay away from. Humorous and romantic, glamorous and exciting: ‘Royal Horses’ is the perfect love story for all readers from 12 to 99 years-old. Greta and Edward‘s story continues! Volume 2, ‘Crown Dream’ will be out in autumn 2020.
Local government today provides a comprehensive analysis of the structure, finance, management and democratic framework for local government in Britain. This new edition has been substantially rewritten to encompass the many changes to the structure and function of the system since 2000, including developments flowing from the 2007 Local Government Act. The study discusses how, during the Blair years, local governments came to be seen once again as centrally important institutions within Britain's political system. However, they are not seen as organisations that can function as separate agencies, undertaking all their duties 'in-house'. They are now required to work in partnership with the private, public and voluntary sectors to deliver local services and represent local interests. It is further argued that, for the first time in over a century, the barriers between civil servants and senior local government officers are being eroded as central government begins to incorporate leading local government officials into its decision-making processes. This established textbook also offers a comparative focus by showing how the British system differs from the structures for local governance in Western Europe and the United States. ;
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Local government in the UK is in crisis. It is now neither local in terms of the geography and populations of its principle units, nor does it truly govern in these areas. As this book reveals, over the previous 200 years local government has moved from a system in which local interests held governance over localities to one in which central government and national and multi-national agencies such as corporate businesses hold governance over local and community decision-making. These changes seriously undermine the important role that local government can play in liberal democracy in the UK. The book explains the nature of local government today and asks if there is any possibility of change.
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The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg has long been recognised as one of the most important sources for the history of the tenth and early eleventh centuries, especially for the history of the Ottonian Empire. Thietmar's testimony also has special value because of his geographical location, in eastern Saxony, on the boundary between German and Slavic cultures. He is arguably the single most important witness to the early history of Poland, and his detailed descriptions of Slavic folklore are the earliest on record. This is a very important source in the medieval period, translated here in its entirety for the first time. It relates to an area of medieval studies generally dominated by German scholars, in which Anglo-phone scholars are beginning to make a substantial contribution.
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Ireland and the Renaissance court is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring Irish and English courts, courtiers and politics in the early modern period, c. 1450-1650. Chapters are contributed by both established and emergent scholars working in the fields of history, literary studies, and philology. They focus on Gaelic cúirteanna, the indigenous centres of aristocratic life throughout the medieval period; on the regnal court of the emergent British empire based in London at Whitehall; and on Irish participation in the wider world of European elite life and letters. Collectively, they expand the chronological limits of 'early modern' Ireland to include the fifteenth century and recreate its multi-lingual character through exploration of its English, Irish and Latin archives. This volume is an innovative effort at moving beyond binary approaches to English-Irish history by demonstrating points of contact as well as contention.
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This book focuses on British efforts to suppress the traffic in female slaves destined for Egyptian harems during the late-nineteenth century. It considers this campaign in relation to gender debates in England, and examines the ways in which the assumptions and dominant imperialist discourses of these abolitionists were challenged by the newly-established Muslim communities in England, as well as by English people who converted to or were sympathetic with Islam. While previous scholars have treated antislavery activity in Egypt first and foremost as an extension of earlier efforts to abolish plantation slavery in the New World, this book considers it in terms of encounters with Islam during a period which it argues marked a new departure in Anglo-Muslim relations. This approach illuminates the role of Islam in the creation of English national identities within the global cultural system of the British Empire. This book would appeal to those with an interest in British imperial history; Islam; gender, feminism, and women's studies; slavery and race; the formation of national identities; global processes; Orientalism; and Middle Eastern studies.
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This book is our principal source for the history of the Kingdom of Sicily in the troubled years between the death of its founder, King Roger, in February 1154 and the spring of 1169. It covers the reign of Roger's son, King William I, known to later centuries as 'the Bad', and the minority of the latter's son, William II 'the Good'. The book illustrates the revival of classical learning during the twelfth-century renaissance. It presents a vivid and compelling picture of royal tyranny, rebellion and factional dispute at court. Sicily had historically been ruled by tyrants, and that the rule of the new Norman kings could be seen, for a variety of reasons, as a revival of that classical tyranny. A more balanced view of Sicilian history of the period 1153-1169 has been provided as an appendix to the translation in the section of the contemporary world chronicle ascribed to Archbishop Romuald II of Salerno, who died in April 1181. In particular the chronicle of Romuald enables us to see how the papal schism of 1159 and the simultaneous dispute between the German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and the north Italian cities affected the destiny of the kingdom of Sicily. In contrast to the shadowy figure of Hugo Falcandus, the putative author of the principal narrative of mid-twelfth-century Sicilian history, Romuald II, Archbishop of Salerno 1153-1181, is well-documented.
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The Complete Works of Yungang Grottoes is a collection of photographic materials reflecting different periods, different caves, different artistic styles and artistic characteristics of Yungang Grottoes. It contains 20 volumes, each presenting a single Yungang cave with more than 400 pictures and several professional academic papers on the cultural and artistic characteristics of caves. As a royal art project symbolizing the imperial power of Tuoba in the Northern Wei Dynasty, the Yungang Grottoes are large in scale, rich in content, exquisite in carving, and vivid in appearance. They absorb and integrate the diverse cultures of ancient nationalities, and represent the highest level of carving in the world in the 5th century. In 2001, the Yungang Grottoes were listed on the World Heritage List. The Complete Works of Yungang Grottoes displays the treasures of the Yungang Grottoes in an unprecedented scale, high-definition, and panoramic view, which is regarded as a recording and preserving archive of great values. For more than 1500 years, the statues of the Yungang Grottoes have been weathered and ruined by wind and rain. In the past, most of the photography focused on the contemporarily perfect Buddha statues, but the remaining statues, even the best-preserved ones, are disappearing year by year from people's sight. The Complete Works of Yungang Grottoes collects image data of them, makes the documentary files, and has them published to the public, in this way retaining the perfect art in changes.
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From the late 1800s to the early 1900s, Australian settler colonists mobilised their unique settler experiences to develop their own vision of what 'empire' was and could be. Reinterpreting their histories and attempting to divine their futures with a much heavier concentration on racialized visions of humanity, white Australian settlers came to believe that their whiteness as well as their Britishness qualified them for an equal voice in the running of Britain's imperial project. Through asserting their case, many soon claimed that, as newly minted citizens of a progressive and exemplary Australian Commonwealth, white settlers such as themselves were actually better suited to the modern task of empire. Such a settler political cosmology with empire at its center ultimately led Australians to claim an empire of their own in the Pacific Islands, complete with its own, unique imperial governmentality.
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Imperial power, both formal and informal, and research in the natural sciences were closely dependent in the nineteenth century. This book examines a portion of the mass-produced juvenile literature, focusing on the cluster of ideas connected with Britain's role in the maintenance of order and the spread of civilization. It discusses the political economy of Western ecological systems, and the consequences of their extension to the colonial periphery, particularly in forms of forest conservation. Progress and consumerism were major constituents of the consensus that helped stabilise the late Victorian society, but consumerism only works if it can deliver the goods. From 1842 onwards, almost all major episodes of coordinated popular resistance to colonial rule in India were preceded by phases of vigorous resistance to colonial forest control. By the late 1840s, a limited number of professional positions were available for geologists in British imperial service, but imperial geology had a longer pedigree. Modern imperialism or 'municipal imperialism' offers a broader framework for understanding the origins, long duration and persistent support for overseas expansion which transcended the rise and fall of cabinets or international realignments in the 1800s. Although medical scientists began to discern and control the microbiological causes of tropical ills after the mid-nineteenth century, the claims for climatic causation did not undergo a corresponding decline. Arthur Pearson's Pearson's Magazine was patriotic, militaristic and devoted to royalty. The book explores how science emerged as an important feature of the development policies of the Colonial Office (CO) of the colonial empire.
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Gold bricks produced by the imperial kiln in Suzhou in eastern Jiangsu Province are not actually made of gold. The smooth, shiny bricks are big and square. They got their name from their quality, the tedious manufacturing process and the high cost involved. The bricks, which have long been used to build imperial palaces, are a specialty of Lumu, a small village near Yangcheng Lake in Suzhou. In the early 15th century when the Forbidden City began to be constructed, the bricks made in Lumu were recommended to the Ming government (1368-1644). Central government officials assigned to Lumu found the yellow earth in Lumu was especially good to make bricks. Besides the special material, the advanced firing technique and the strict firing procedures of the Lumu kiln also contributed to producing the high-quality gold bricks. Thus the Lumu kiln was named the Imperial Kiln by the Ming emperor.
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Invoking Empire examines the histories of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand during the transitional decades between 1860-1900, when each gained some degree of self-government yet still remained within the sovereignty of the British Empire. It applies the conceptual framework of imperial citizenship to nine case studies of settlers and Indigenous peoples who lived through these decades to make two main arguments. It argues that colonial subjects adapted imperial citizenship to both support and challenge settler sovereignty, revealing the continuing importance of imperial authority in self-governing settler spaces. It also posits that imperial citizenship was rendered inoperable by a combination of factors in both Britian and the colonies, highlighting the contingency of settler colonialism on imperial governmental structures and challenging teleological assumptions that the rise of settler nation states was an inevitable result of settler self-government.
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Looking at royal ritual in pre-revolutionary France, Death and the crown examines the deathbed and funeral of Louis XV in 1774, the lit de justice of November 1774, and the coronation of Louis XVI, including the ceremony of the royal healing touch for scrofula. It reviews the state of the field in ritual studies and appraises the status of the monarchy in the 1770s, including the recall of the parlements and the many ways people engaged with royal ritual. It answers questions such as whether Louis XV died in fear of damnation, why Marie Antoinette was not crowned in 1775 and why Louis XVI's coronation was not held in Paris. This lively, accessible text is a useful tool for under- and post-graduate teaching which will also be of interest to specialists on this under-researched period.
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Colonial governments, institutions and companies recognised that in many ways the effective operation of the Empire depended upon sexual arrangements. For example, nuclear families serving agricultural colonization, and prostitutes working for single men who powered armies and plantations, mines and bureaucracies. For this reason they devised elaborate systems of sexual governance, such as attending to marriage and the family. However, they also devoted disproportionate energy to marking and policing the sexual margins. In Sex, Politics and Empire, Richard Phillips investigates controversies surrounding prostitution, homosexuality and the age of consent in the British Empire, and revolutionises our notions about the importance of sex as a nexus of imperial power relations.
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The new activity of trans-continental civil flying in the 1930s is a useful vantage point for viewing the extension of British imperial attitudes and practices. Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation examines the experiences of those (mostly men) who flew solo or with a companion (racing or for leisure), who were airline passengers (doing colonial administration, business or research), or who flew as civilian air and ground crews. For airborne elites, flying was a modern and often enviable way of managing, using and experiencing empire. On the ground, aviation was a device for asserting old empire: adventure and modernity were accompanied by supremacism. At the time, however, British civil imperial flying was presented romantically in books, magazines and exhibitions. Eighty years on, imperial flying is still remembered, reproduced and re-enacted in caricature.
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This book provides an accessible collection of translated legal sources through which the exploits of criminals and developments in the English criminal justice system (c.1215-1485) can be studied. Drawing on the wealth of archival material and an array of contemporary literary texts, it guides readers towards an understanding of prevailing notions of law and justice and expectations of the law and legal institutions. Tensions are shown emerging between theoretical ideals of justice and the practical realities of administering the law during an era profoundly affected by periodic bouts of war, political in-fighting, social dislocation and economic disaster. Introductions and notes provide both the specific and wider legal, social and political contexts in addition to offering an overview of the existing secondary literature and historiographical trends. This collection affords a valuable insight into the character of medieval governance as well as revealing the complex nexus of interests, attitudes and relationships prevailing in society during the later Middle Ages.
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With original case studies of a more than a dozen countries, Monarchies and decolonisation in Asia offers new perspectives on how both European monarchs who reigned over Asian colonies and Asian royal houses adapted to decolonisation. As colonies became independent states (and European countries, and other colonial powers, lost their overseas empires), monarchies faced the challenges of decolonisation, republicanism and radicalism. These studies place dynasties - both European and 'native' - at the centre of debate about decolonisation and the form of government of new states, from the sovereigns of Britain, the Netherlands and Japan to the maharajas of India, the sultans of the East Indies and the 'white rajahs' of Sarawak. It provides new understanding of the history of decolonisation and of the history of modern monarchy.
