David Motadel, Globale Monarchie: Royale Begegnungen und die Ordnung der Welt im imperialen Zeitalter, Wallstein Verlag, €18

Monarchy is such a familiar part of British life that the British have struggled to take it seriously. The most successful studies of modern monarchy, such as Jane Ridley’s lives of Edward VII and George V, or Anne Somerset’s recent account of Queen Victoria’s relations with her prime ministers, tend to be shrewd assessments of individual sovereigns and their quirks. Historians have rarely rendered, still less theorised, the monarchy’s power in a comparative way. David Cannadine’s attempt to explain the elaboration of ceremonial in the later 19th and early 20th centuries was the exception that proved the rule. Flummery, his argument went, was the opposite of clout: the stateliness of coronations, jubilees and funerals became a graceful and peculiarly British attempt to hide the erosion of royal power.

German historians, who live in the wreckage of vanished kingdoms, have not made the same mistake. The ghosts of Hohenzollerns, Wittelsbachs and Habsburgs whisper to them that the game of thrones can be of existential significance for states. They have as a result given us sweeping accounts of monarchy’s surprising resilience in the long 19th century. Europe’s crowned heads toppled Napoleon – an upstart emperor himself – then banded together to police liberalism. They bounced back from the 1848 Revolutions, reinventing themselves as representatives of the bourgeois public and even of the democratic nation. State visits of monarchs, which increased in ease and frequency with the industrialisation of transportation, maintained European peace but then contributed to its disastrous collapse in 1914.

David Motadel has extended this fine tradition of German scholarship in a crisp study of ‘global monarchy’ – Harvard will publish an English translation next year. Motadel, who teaches at the London School of Economics, has written and edited some excellent books on globalisation and on European attitudes to Islam. The legacy of monarchy has also loomed large in his thought: he has doggedly pursued the descendants of the Hohenzollerns in print for glossing over their misdeeds and trying to claw back the property they forfeited to the German state. His varied interests fuse in this short book, which shows how extra-European monarchs sought to shield their realms from the relentless aggression of European imperialism. They hoped that by fraternising with the cousinhood of rulers who made up the ‘monarchical international’, they could gain enough authority to fight off subjugation or colonisation.

This was a daring hope. In the course of their expansion, European empires killed or exiled monarchs across the globe, from Tipu Sultan of Mysore (1799) to Thibaw of Burma (1886). Although the British notably allowed many an Indian prince to retain the trappings of statehood, they only did so to extend their power on the cheap. Queen Victoria’s sedulous concern for the dignity of native princes was what Cannadine called ‘ornamentalism’, a device that both camouflaged and enabled Britain’s often brutal pursuit of imperial hegemony.

Motadel turns from this mournful tale to focus on the rulers who did fend off the decapitation, dismemberment or subjugation of their states – at least for a time. Hawaii lasted until 1898, when a coup set in train the abdication of its ruling dynasty and its annexation by the United States. After a near-death experience in 1893, when French gunships trained their cannon on Bangkok, the Kings of Siam remained independent. So did the Ottoman Sultans and the Shahs of Persia. The Meiji emperors capitalised on the forced opening of Japan to European trade to modernise and militarise their kingdom. They struck an alliance with Edward VII in 1902 and three years later humbled the Russian Tsar in war.

The crowned survivors felt that meeting European peers was an integral part of their survival strategy. They knew that in European eyes their lands were only ‘half civilised’ and therefore ripe for exploitation and domination. They counteracted this charge by making a beeline for London, Paris and Berlin, where they – or in the case of Japan, junior members of the house – swapped presents and honorifics with their peers. The kings of Hawaii, who were most vulnerable to Anglo-American encroachment, were especially anxious to build up such soft power, establishing 90 consulates and embassies around the world. That is not to say symbolic capital was the only point of visits to Europe. They also allowed for health-giving visits to spas and bouts of geostrategic horse trading. When Sultan Abdülaziz I toured Paris and London in 1867, Greek Christians in Crete had just risen up against Ottoman rule. He took the chance to persuade other powers from joining the predatory Russians in championing their claims. The Shah of Persia used his visits to ink the trade deals that would modernise his country, such as the Reuters concession of 1873 that built a railway from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf.

The visitors showed themselves to be quick students of civilisation. They disappointed the local newspapers by turning up in European costume. The sultans wore drab uniforms, topped off with the fez. Although the language barrier was often a serious obstacle, differences of mores and religion rarely obtruded. Muslim Sultans and Shahs gladly drank wine – as they did at home – and attended balls and concerts at which the sexes mixed freely. In 1867, Queen Victoria bestowed the Order of the Garter on Abdülaziz, despite making plain her view that it was inappropriate for a non-Christian potentate. Polygamous rulers were careful not to shock Victorian sensibilities: King Chulalongkorn of Siam might have had 77 children by 150 women, but in 1897 he travelled to Europe with just one consort. At the same time, he privately considered his civilised hosts to be pretty barbaric. The British passion for slaughtering pheasants and rabbits shocked his Buddhism and European food dismayed him: visiting Italy in 1907, only the addition of chili flakes and lime made the oily spaghetti palatable.

The Europeans were no less conscious of being on display. In 1867, British statesmen did their best to match Napoleon III’s lavish reception of the sultan, for fear that he would be won over to his designs in the East. They even dragooned Queen Victoria, still truculently mourning her dead husband Albert, into meeting him. The French, too, were at pains to impress eastern visitors: the presidents of the Third Republic happily arrayed themselves in the trappings of France’s defunct monarchy, much as Emmanuel Macron does today. In 1897, they hosted Chulalongkorn at the Palace of Versailles, in a nod to the Siamese envoys that Louis XIV had once received there.

Although European sovereigns shared in the ambient and hardening racism of their peoples, they shielded their guests from it. Crown, as Cannadine once put it, came before colour. When Prince of Wales, Edward VII gave the King of Hawaii precedence over a Prussian prince at a function, grumbling that ‘either the brute is a king or he’s a common-or-garden n––––; and if the latter, what’s he doing here?’ Such ambiguous politeness did not extend to the peoples of their guests. Now king, Edward dispatched his brother Arthur to Tokyo in 1906 to bestow the Garter on the Meiji Emperor in exchange for the Order of the Chrysanthemum he had received from Prince Komatsu. Despite these Mikado-ish proceedings and the alliance between their countries, Edward said nothing when a year later his Canadian subjects rioted against Japanese immigration into Vancouver.

When European rulers were convinced that it suited their interests to bully rather than to charm, the mask of civility quickly slipped. In September 1901, Kaiser Wilhelm II bumptiously demanded that the Qing Emperor’s envoy, who had come to Germany to apologise for the killing of some German officials, should kneel in obeisance to him at Potsdam. Although Prince Chun avoided that humiliation by feigning illness, the Kaiser rudely refused to receive his presents: his trip was to be a punishment, not a social call. Prince Chun had to save face by donating his spurned gifts to the imperial museums in Berlin.

Honour among kings therefore structured, but hardly constrained the doings of European powers in the extra-European world. Motadel is right that monarchs became a ‘global class’, a dense if necessarily thin network of people who slept in one another’s palaces and wore one another’s medals. But if their relationships are interesting, were they important? It is difficult in writing on monarchies not to be seduced by your sources. The gossip of courtiers and the blow-by-blow coverage of contemporary papers invests trivialities with outsized significance. Chulalongkorn was put out when Edward VII handed him a costly cigarette case, only to hustle him along to lunch in the dining room before he could thank him properly. He need not have worried: gaffes rarely matter. It was Britain’s reluctance to see its economic interests in Siam harmed by a French takeover that preserved its independence, rather than what went on in Buckingham Palace.