Volume 49, Number 17 · November 7, 2002
Nobs & Nabobs
By David Gilmour
Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire
by David Cannadine
Oxford University Press, 264 pp., $25.00; $15.95 (paper)
At one of Lady Spencer's parties in 1881, King Kalakaua of Hawaii was given precedence over the crown prince of Germany. When the prince (the future Kaiser Friedrich III) objected, his brother-in-law (the future King Edward VII) told him that Kalakaua was either 'a common or garden nigger,' in which case he would not have been there, or he was a king. And kings, however minor, were ranked higher than princes, even the heir to the world's strongest military power.
Review, 3553 words
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