If a country’s greatness can be measured by its enemies, Britain can set fears of national decline aside: we’re still doing pretty damn well. Now that the Queen’s funeral has taken place, the dignitaries have been despatched, and the corgis are in good hands, it seems like the right time to take stock.
Most of the world’s leaders, from president Biden to president Putin, have paid their respects to Britain’s late monarch, and sent their sorrow to Britain’s mourning people. The exceptions have been few, and noisily promoted by American media organisations desperate to make every world event somehow a commentary on domestic US politics.
The best response to this is simply to ignore it. Sometimes, however, bad ideas from across the pond threaten to embed themselves over here. On those occasions, it’s better to kill them off before they get a chance to take root. In this case, the big falsehood is the claim that Queen Elizabeth II was somehow personally culpable for – or at least played a part in covering up the effects of – colonialism, slavery, empire, decolonisation, and indeed all of its associated costs and benefits.
Britain did not become wealthy because it had an empire, but had an empire because it was wealthy
In the New York Times, Maya Jasanoff declared that the Queen ‘helped obscure a bloody history of decolonisation’, before grudgingly admitting that ‘we may never learn what the queen did or didn’t know about the crimes committed in her name’. Hari Kunzru, meanwhile, described her as ‘a sort of living ghost of a system of rapacious and bloodthirsty extraction’, and predictably part of Britain’s ‘dependency on imperial nostalgia for self-esteem’.
Washington Post writer Karen Attiah announced that: ‘Black and brown people… who were subject to horrendous cruelties… are allowed to have feelings about Queen Elizabeth’. Carnegie Mellon professor Uju Anya expressed those feelings about ‘the chief monarch of a thieving and raping genocidal empire’, wishing that ‘her pain be excruciating’.
And, of course, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour (CBE) asserted that ‘the wealth of this empire was derived on the back of the people of the empire’, on display in the palace, and that the generation of ‘multicultural and diverse Britons who want this answered’ would want to see discussion of ‘reparations’.
These ideas are so wrong that they are relatively simple to dispel: the Queen had nothing to do with any of these decisions, because the Queen did not make them. The mistake of viewing the British monarch as in some way equivalent to a president is an easy trap for Americans to fall into; see NBC News citing royal assent for gay marriage as proof of her pro-LGBT views, but is still nonsense.
The British monarch is a figurehead for the nation, a repository for human emotions and feelings that need somewhere to vest that keeps them away from political figures, a connection to our deep past, and a guarantor of a constitutional settlement that has proven remarkably stable. What they are not is an active part of our political process. This means that any analysis of the Queen’s legacy which credits or debits her on the basis of government policy displays a fundamental lack of understanding of our great country.
But of course, that’s not really the point. All of this is written for the consumption of a domestic US audience. Great empires care for the activities of provincial peoples only insofar as they infringe on the interests of the core. Nobody is really discussing Britain here; they’re discussing American racial neuroses, and American policy prescriptions. The death of the British monarch is just another opportunity to relitigate reparations, make sweeping statements about the derivation of Western wealth, and in doing so lay claim to a moral right to make policy, in areas ranging from foreign aid to criminal justice to immigration.
With this in mind, it’s worth returning to one simple core fact: Britain did not become wealthy because it had an empire, but had an empire because it was wealthy. By the time Jamestown was founded in 1607, British people were some 30 per cent better off than their Indian or Chinese equivalents, twice as wealthy as the indigenous Mexicans. What else would we expect? A poor backwater country doesn’t project power around the world and topple great empires. Wealth and technology is a precondition for empire, rather than an outcome.
If Queen Elizabeth II really had single-handedly created, maintained, and subsequently dismantled the British empire, as certain commentators seem to think, it would frankly only increase my respect for her life. But it can’t. And just as the Queen can’t be credited or condemned for the British empire, the empire in turn can’t be credited with British prosperity.
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