ELIZABETH II, MONARCHY AND EMPIRE: DEATH OF A QUEEN AND THE HISTORY OF A MOMENT
Introduction: Death of a queen and the history of a moment
As the earth completes another journey around the sun, the sun no longer shines on a British empire on which, they once said, it never did set. The decline began much earlier in the French, German, Spanish, Italian and other western European empires based in Europe. The signs are that it is well past its noontime and dimming fast on the empire of the United States, the youngest and by far the largest of them all. But while the sun sets in the west, it is rising fast in the East, and also, but more slowly, in the Global South.
2023 will mark the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, a perfidious statement of US arrogance in claiming the entire western hemisphere as its backyard. Since then, the US has attempted to extend its dominance to the entire planet. The year will also mark the 200th anniversary of a major insurrection by enslaved Africans on the East Coast of Demerara in Guyana against British enslavers. Africans and other oppressed peoples always opposed their oppressors, for wherever there is oppression, people will resist. A surge of people’s victories across Latin America in 2022 portends much for the rise of the Global South.
2022 was a year of much turbulence in the leadership of the United Kingdom and what remains, if anything remains, of its once mighty empire. The country witnessed the death of a queen and the political demise of two prime ministers. But it is the death of Elizabeth, the queen, that ignited a great debate and much commentary about royalty and empire. Some of the commentary was uninformed and others even ill informed. Others were ungracious. But all are relevant to our understanding of this monarch and the monarchy, the shape of the world in which we live, and how all of these are related pieces in the geopolitical puzzle of our collective lives.
The queen had come to symbolize the monarchy through the role she played in keeping that increasingly outdated institution alive. The major trend in the ensuing commentary identified gold, greed, glamour, violence, genocide, mental and physical enslavement, famine, colonialism, underdevelopment, and other ills as the predominant characteristics of empire. A minor trend touted prestige, and even development, progress, and enlightenment. These are not merely features of contending versions of empire; they are mostly true of most empires, for the reality of empire has usually been an unhealthy mix of them all. The fundamental truth of empire has always been that some people, a majority, are oppressed and exploited for the enrichment of others, a minority. In empire there has always been rich and poor and misery, gore, and glory. This has been dramatically true of western European empires, which are still a major collective influence on the shape and shaping of the world today.
Who commented is as much of significance as of what they did say, and most of all, what this reveals about the changed image of the British empire, and of empire in general, among different groups in many societies around the world. Special attention is devoted here to those who were once dominated or are still dominated by the British. They and their lands are the major focus of this essay. The idea of empire is now roundly rejected by most people. Elizabeth represented empire for most of her life. Her death occurred at a peculiar conjunction at which it is becoming clearer that the world dominated by empire is changing, and the shape of the future is no longer in the hands of western Europeans or their obsolete idea of empire. Humanity is at a great transformational moment in its history. A new multipolar and multicivilizational dispensation is at hand. An open question that lingers large at this historical juncture is whether and to what extent this queen’s demise is symbolic of something bigger and more profound than her own passing. The full meaning of these events and processes, somewhat discernable in the world today, may well have been things foretold in the history of this moment.
A monarch dies, the people rise
Some of the leading voices among the working people and the national leadership in former colonies of the British empire were very vocal. For example, in the Caribbean, Dr. The Most Honorable Anthony Gabby Carter, kaisonian extraordinaire, Barbados’ Cultural Ambassador, nationalist, and actor, published a poem entitled “Good Riddance to Rubbish.” In Jamaica, Dr. Oliver Samuels, a leading comedian and actor who possesses the intellectual pulse of the people, questioned Jamaica’s allegiance to the British monarchy and voiced strong disagreement with the Prime Minister’s announcement of twelve days of mourning for the queen. Academics, political leaders, and many of the working people delivered their opinions of the queen and the monarchy. Very few were royalists. But the recent rejection of the British monarch as head of state by Barbados, which became a republic in 2021, and the current contemplation of similar change by Jamaica, as well as by Antigua and Barbuda, provide part of the context for the debate about the queen, and furnish valuable evidence about how most people in these countries feel about this figurehead of their oppressors and exploiters. Guyana became a republic in 1970, Trinidad and Tobago in 1976. Other Caribbean states that were formerly part of the British empire, and doubtless people elsewhere, are increasingly discussing this possibility. There were other signals that the public mind of dominated lands is no longer totally subverted by royal myth. For example, early in 2022, formerly enslaved people in Belize and Jamaica roundly rejected the colonial narrative and publicly rebuked British atrocities when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visited as part of a royal tour of the Caribbean. The death of this queen became an occasion for renewed calls for the end of the monarchy, the return of the crown jewels, (some of them original blood diamonds, all objects of incalculable cultural and economic value), to the people from whom most of them were looted, or otherwise immorally obtained, and for reparations and restorative justice across the devastated lands subjugated by the British empire. There were also countless assessments of Elizabeth and the monarchy. The outpouring of comment signals concern from a great number of people. The origins of this volume of concern and condemnation: the Caribbean, Africa, Ireland, India, Pakistan, USA, Canada, the UK itself, — all around the former colonized world — tells a tale about the great extent of concern alive in those countries. The nature of the comments signals awareness and understanding of the significance of the monarchy and of empire, of which monarchy has always been a part.
Yet few of these views were dominant in the public spaces of empire when Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1952. In fact, it was not normal then for the views of the oppressed majority, Africans, and other peoples of color, to be either heard or represented in the sacred halls of empire, which were reserved for white people, especially the ruling class of Britain. Very few ‘others’ were permitted in those hallowed spaces, and then not because they were ever thought about as equal to white people, but only because they were convenient tools as local accomplices in empire and its crimes against humanity. To think or do otherwise; that is, to even speak for freedom, democracy, equality, or any other form of dignity, was a capital crime during the time of enslavement and indeed for almost the entire life of the empire. Fighting for any of these fundamental human rights became ‘sedition’ after the legal termination of some of the physical aspects of enslavement. But such a charge could still bring forth the imposition of judicial murder or a lengthy term of imprisonment in the name of king or queen and church and empire. Hardly anything had changed for the mass of the people in the empire. What enslavers did with impunity before was now conducted with ‘due process’ and the same degrees of frequency, severity, and impunity, and still in the name of king or queen and church and empire. Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi were hanged, and the latter decapitated after that deed, for fighting for freedom in the First Chimurenga in Zimbabwe in 1897-97. Skulls and other body parts of victims were regularly shipped to Europe. The current Bring Back Our Bones Campaign in Zimbabwe highlights the struggle of this nation and many others to obtain partial liberation from this and other ghoulish practices of western European enlightenment. ‘Due process’ or any semblance of law were banished as often as peoples’ rulers who refused to be corrupted to service the interests of empire against those of their people. The British empire introduced concentration camps, mass rape of women with various objects including bottles and bayonets, executions without trial, and various other “refinements” of western civilization as numerous people in the empire experienced them. Countless others around devastated lands suffered inhumane fates as Britain, and other western empires, imposed progress and even development in the centuries of their empires over Africans and other peoples of color. The legal end of certain forms of the physical aspects of enslavement is an event that is usually termed ‘emancipation’ in the dominant and deceitful narratives aimed at cleansing crimes of empire, as well as in the optimistic vision of oppressed people who were determined to build something shiny from the shattered pieces of their lives, in ‘post emancipation’ colonial existence.
The presence of judicial murder, usually termed execution, or the death sentence, in both the cleansing narratives of oppression as well as in the annals of liberation, attest to a particular fact about the human condition. It is that wherever there is oppression, people will resist. The presence of this most extreme and inhumane form of punishment, from the inception of western European empire, therefore attests to resistance among oppressed people from the very beginning of that evil system. The vision and voices of those acting in the name of liberation were present in the British empire at the time of Elizabeth’s coronation. But at that historical moment these were usually drowned by the valorizing chorus of empire. Popular understanding of empire, awareness of its crimes, and resistance to its continuation, in any form, had changed remarkably between the time of Elizabeth’s ascension and that of her demise. The volume of comment is therefore hardly surprising about that recent event, which many say was timely and some view as untimely. It is clear though, that the death of this monarch furnished unmistakable evidence of the rise in knowledge, understanding and awareness of the monarchy among people whose voices were consciously, deliberately and brutally muted by the horrors of empire.
The Beginning: Colonial depredations — Stolen artefacts, original blood diamonds, and other loot
Six centuries ago, Europe, the western most part of the supercontinent of Asia, was characterized by resource challenges, cultural backwardness, male dominance and the subordination of women, class oppression, religious intolerance, mass poverty, disease, and continuous inter-ethnic and religious warfare and other forms of social strife. Today in western Europe, (the western peninsula of the land mass), mass poverty and disease have been all but eliminated, and many of the other contradictions in society have been significantly attenuated. In less than five centuries, the people of this part of the Asian supercontinent have made themselves materially rich, but they did it at the cost of making millions of other people and their societies poor, materially and in most other measures. This is generally true wherever western Europeans live or dominated, whether on their own peninsula, or in the Americas, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and other parts of the world that they have occupied by armed conquest. They indulged in mass pillage and genocide, the rape of people, their land, their culture and other valuables, and carted off much of the loot to western Europe, or shared it among themselves in their settler colonies established in those places. They have also set up systems of domination, oppression, and exploitation to organize, regularize and normalize the continuous extraction and transfer of wealth from exploited and impoverished people to themselves.
One of the most important questions asked by history is - how did this happen. The answer is that western Europe became materially rich as the regions of the world upon which it violently imposed itself became poor. It is of the greatest importance to recognize that the two differing conditions, a prosperous Europe and an impoverished periphery of colonies and former colonies of empire, are deeply related. The prevailing conditions among both colonized and colonizer are substantially the outcomes of the crimes of western European empire.
John Hawkins left England to begin the British aspect of the enslavement and underdevelopment of Africans and Africa in October of 1652, just short of two hundred years after the Portuguese initiated that inhumane process. Hawkins was considered by prevailing authorities to be a most ‘religious gentleman’. He sailed in a ship that was lent to him by Elizabeth, the first queen of England by that name. The ship was named The Good Ship Jesus, formerly the Jesus of Lubeck. Christian services were held abord at least twice daily on this doom-laden voyage to Africa. The British monarchy, the British Church and British private capital were therefore partners in this most ungodly ‘business’ from the beginning. They have remained partners in these and succeeding acts of empire against humanity, even though the links among them have become less open and less visible as governance, propaganda, media imaging, and other devices of deceit were developed over the life of empire and became more effective at hiding truth. Other western European empires were not at all different in these and other respects.
The abuse of terminology is part of the epistemology of oppression. European attempts to obfuscate crimes by presenting their trade in African human beings as ‘business’ raise fundamental questions about their ethics and morality and severely undermine their increasingly shrill claims to being Christian, democratic, enlightened, and other conditions that usually offer evidence of a striving for human decency. It was not superior values or ideas, but more advanced military technology and a mindset to deploy that advantage indiscriminately, that explains the conquest and maintenance of western Europe’s dominance over large parts of the world. Such conquests were ungoverned by law, ethics, or morality. Part of the essence of empire is that it is devoid of morality.
Among the niceties these civilized, Christian and superior western Europeans introduced to Africa and elsewhere were these: Enslaved Africans were branded like cattle, sometimes with royal initials. African culture was demeaned and criminalized. It was a policy to break up and separate families, to prevent family life so that, for example, fathers were prevented from becoming active fathers. Females as well as males were regularly raped. Collective ritual terror was regularly imposed and intensified by public beatings, hangings, decapitation, the chopping off of limbs, public rape of leaders, and other “refinements” of European civilization as the great mass of people of the empires experienced this progress, development and enlightenment imposed by western Europeans. People were forced to work for no pay or low pay. Racism was endemic, for society in conquered lands was reorganized along racial lines. These and countless other barbarities were committed in the knowing and willing name of church, monarch, and empire. There has been no attempt by empire to alleviate in any way the living consequences of its actions. In fact, when the British decided to end some of the physical aspects of enslavement, partly because they were forced to do so by increasingly effective African rebellion, and partly in their own economic self-interest, they compensated only the enslavers among themselves. Their historical victims received nothing. African Reparations in particular, and Restorative Justice in general, aim at the compensation and restoration to wholeness, long overdue to people and environments that suffered, and continue to suffer, from these and other crimes of empire against humanity.
The consequences of these and other depredations, undertaken, it must be remembered, in the name of king or queen and church and empire, are still alive in the lives of millions of the victims of the British and other western European empires. Trans-generational suffering, spiritual and psychological trauma, economic distress, social discord, and other mass ills that affect African people as individuals as well as families, clans, communities and as a people around the world, have been inherited and passed down through generations unto today. Economic impoverishment, low self-image, and other results of centuries of barbarity usually translate in poor achievement that challenge many African communities to this day. The high incidence of hypertension, diabetes, and other illnesses in African Diasporic communities is apparent especially when viewed alongside the comparatively low incidence of these very diseases among the African population from which most enslaved Africans were kidnapped. The frequency of these diseases also attests to the continuing effects of these crimes against humanity. These are crimes that were perpetuated on a grand scale, by people who succeeded for a long time in presenting themselves as ‘civilized’, ‘Christian’, ‘democratic’, ‘freedom loving’ and so on. For more than half a century the British queen, Elizabeth, was a lynchpin in this studied and persistent misrepresentation of this system of evil as something good. Monarchy in general is integral to the brand of deceit developed to try to obfuscate, diminish and disappear myriad crimes against humanity. This monarch, the longest reigning of them all, is distinguished among her family as perhaps the most skilled practitioner to date of this diabolical deceit.
It is this very armed violence that was employed to seize the land of Indigenous America. Later on it was deployed to destroy Black Wall Street and other examples of African self-organization and economic, social, and educational improvement. It is this violence that is still expressed in regular police murder of African and other people of color in America. Economic violence that was often organized and institutionalized, for example in redlining, are also aspects of this system within America.
Western Europe has exported and imposed most if not all its pre-colonial characteristics upon the people it conquered. Subjugated communities are riven by endemic material poverty, disease, incessant internecine warfare, and social and psychological strife. These behaviors were driven and imposed by a mentality that is concerned primarily with immediate material accumulation, and will do literally anything to achieve that goal, and does not care for humanity. This root of the horror of western empire is attested by the treatment of women, the working class and differently abled people who have been thus labelled and accordingly treated at various points of western European history, both internally, and in its oppression and exploitation of other peoples around the world. Examples abound in Eugenics, Social Darwinism, Christianity, capitalism, and especially its variants in National Socialism (Nazi Germany), segregation in the USA and apartheid, its counterpart in Azania (South Africa) and other forms of white supremacy and exploitation that have been the dominant experience of the peoples of the empire.
The continuous enrichment of western Europe and western Europeans is part of an equation that also includes the continuous impoverishment of and prevention of progress and development among other peoples. That is the basic aim of the system of international relations imposed and maintained by western European empires over the last six hundred years of the history of the world. The US empire, which succeeded the British empire, imposed its own formula of regulations to maintain itself as the dominant power in the world at the end of the conflict usually termed the Second World War. The Bretton Woods institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and more lately Aid Agencies and Civil Society groups, function to maintain this system. Conditionalities imposed upon certain countries, usually outside of western Europe, often illustrate this policy. The so-called Structural Adjustment Programs that prevented economies from educating their people or providing health delivery systems, are examples of this diabolical strategic aim.
Armed violence, deployed internationally and internally, has also persisted as a last resort in the maintenance of a system it was first employed to erect. The murder of transformative African leaders, such as Patrice Lumumba, Steve Biko, Thomas Sankara, Chris Hani and a long list of others in countries outside of the USA, and of Fred Hampton, other Black Panther leaders and Malcolm X within the USA, are examples of this practice of empire. The overthrow of progressive and revolutionary governments to prevent human development and transformation is a related feature of empire. Again, examples are, tragically, numerous: Mommahad Mossadeq in Iran (1953), Cheddi Jagan in Guyana (1953), Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana (1966), Salvador Allende in Chile (1977), and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya (2011), amount to a very small part of a very large number of such actions of empire. The overthrow of transformative leaders and governments is usually followed by the imposition of dictators and other forms of undemocratic governments, as well as policies that cause tremendous harm and suffering to most of the people in the countries targeted. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 is one of the most known failures of this policy of armed intervention. The failures in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are more recent examples of successful local resistance to the armed depredations of empire. Each of these acts is contrary to the very ethics, democracy, Christianity, and other declarations of morality with which empire usually seeks to clothe itself.
Tyrannical government in the form of monarchy was a key aspect of the arrangement of empire from the very beginning. As local opposition to western European empire grew, the more obvious aspects of empire were retired as realization about the hideous nature and evil purpose of the system increased, and resistance bloomed. Western European elites began a long strategic retreat. Some measure of independence was won, usually by nationalist forces, and simultaneously surrendered by the retreating colonialists, who gave up in name what they thereby preserved in substance. But the strategic withdrawal of western colonialism/imperialism from other peoples’ land was not always a process within their control. China, Vietnam, and Algeria are some of the witnesses. Besides, the retreat from other peoples’ land did not mean a withdrawal from other peoples’ lives. Economic bondage as well as mental enslavement and various other forms of ideological corruption and confusion persisted. The coup plotters who overthrew Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966, the role of Mobutu in Congo, the rule of the comprador bourgeoisie in Africa and the continuing failure to grasp the strategic realities of Africa and the world, and to integrate and unite the continent and its people, are stark attestations to weaknesses that proclaim the continuation of malign western influence and control of the most strategic African resource, the African mind, and therefore of other African resources.
The death of Elizabeth II provided an opportunity for the growing number of people from among the traditional victims of empire who now understand empire, to voice their views of Elizabeth and of empire. Those who were rendered untutored, uninformed, and voiceless by empire for most of the life of empire, could now speak openly about empire. The results were bound to be both informative and interesting.
The defense of empire
It is relatively easy for the observer who is not fully armed with an adequate understanding of the deep history and the nature of empire to be taken in by what the practitioners of empire say about themselves. The risk may be greater at this point when there is a race to moralize Elizabeth as a part of memorializing this well-known and knowing representative of empire. But Elizabeth, her ancestors and her successors are inheritors of both the assets and the liabilities of empire, the stupendous riches as well as the tremendous harm of their family business of empire. Proper understanding of Elizabeth and empire, and indeed western Europe as a generality, is further endangered by the shrill and excessive attempts of western European leaders at lecturing other peoples and their leaders on such subjects as democracy, freedom, the rule of law, human rights, and other human values that western nations have spent the last six centuries denying other peoples, usually with armed violence, the threat of armed violence, and other forms of undemocratic, immoral and reprehensible actions.
Apart from military violence, another significant part of the practice of empire has been its attempt to cover itself in morality through a variety of devices, including its own propaganda. This has been very effective for most of the life of empire, primarily because the ruling elite of empire controlled the instruments and means of education, socialization and general awareness and deployed these to shape the public mind. But peoples’ resistance to this and other theatres of struggle have resulted in growing success. The birth of the age of information technology in recent decades has ushered in an explosion of social media, instant communication, and the global village. These developments have had a democratizing effect upon information and even news. A decade after Elizabeth was crowned US television provided a foretaste of what is now current with live coverage of police racism and physical brutality against Civil Rights marchers. It was an embarrassing moment for the white ruling elite of the country. The recent recording and publication of the police murder of George Floyd, in slow and deliberate motion, signifies this erosion of strategic control of information by western elites.
Intellectual violence was an early practice of western Europeans. This was achieved mainly through rigid control of the educational and popular curriculum through control of the press, the church, and the school curriculum. The indigenous knowledge systems, intellectual, cultural, and philosophical traditions, history, and popular culture of oppressed peoples were usually demonized and often criminalized and banned. An ideological monopoly was imposed across empire. The intellectual horizon was usually limited to specific interpretations of European history. The intellectual traditions of Afrika, China, Indigenous America, and India, places where humanity achieved civilization and invented writing millennia before Europe, were demonized, disappeared or subject to identity theft, as has been the case with the African civilization of Kemet, ancient Egypt. Western European empire’s account of itself amounts to a meta narrative of “emperors, soldiers, imperial civil servants and glorious deeds earmarked for eternal valorisation … in which mass murder, plunder and other forms of barbarism are usually disguised as something decent.”
The role of the monarchy
The monarchy had a very important role in this colossal fraud that tries to sanitize excesses. It was to put a good face on western European atrocities around the world. Royal tours, parades, and other ways of ‘showing the flag’, instilled obedience and fear — less often respect — among the subjects. A system of titles and honors, commemorative coins, and cups and this and that, also helped to bind the unsuspecting, the greedy and the bewildered to the tainted standard of empire.
The beneficiaries of empire, including the royals, have achieved their share of learning modern techniques of public relations management. Their ‘acknowledgement’ of the horror and expressions of ‘regret’ of the sins of empire are mere words, meaningless sounds to those who still suffer from the continuation of the system established by centuries of dirty deeds presided over by the royal ancestors. Where the living royals continue to live large on the gains from past and continuing atrocities, the daily lives of hundreds of millions of disaffected people in parts of the former empire continue to be shaped by the same system that daily delivers self-ignorance, mental enslavement, disempowerment, lack of opportunity, poverty, disease, and other continuing ills of empire.
Beyond the glitter and the meaningless words is the loot of empire. British royal loot includes huge amounts of priceless jewels: famous diamonds from Africa, India and elsewhere; gold, vast property portfolios and other forms of wealth that is usually untaxed. These are their proceeds from the enslavement, plunder, and other atrocities committed for centuries in their name as the leading family of empire.
Elizabeth’s tenure: An effective management of appearances
Elizabeth became an accomplished practitioner of the management of appearance in the knowing service of these deeds: the spin, the PR, the strategic silences, and other modern incantations of the old practices of misrepresentation. She has been substantially successful in projecting a positive image of the royal family amidst scandal and other challenges. Her demise has shone new light upon her activities and created challenging expectations of her successor, especially in the context of increasing knowledge, understanding and awareness of the family history, in a world that appears set to change in fundamental ways.
The Tides of these Times: Popular Intellectual Resistance
Wherever there is oppression people will resist. As the centuries of western European imperial oppression unfolded, the subjects of empire became increasingly adept in their understanding of empire and in their ability to fight it to the end. The world has changed remarkably from the time Elizabeth inherited the British crown seventy years ago. Nineteen fifty-two was the heyday of empire and the effects of empire held a far more vulgar sway over the lives of millions than they do today. People were ignorant, prey to propaganda masquerading as history, literature, religion and other hallmarks and highpoints of humanity. Though European empires linked many previously disconnected regions and peoples of the world, people were substantially less aware than they are now, at this time of the demise of this queen. Times have changed with the rise in life expectancy, the spread of education and knowledge, aided by the introduction of radio television, satellites, information technology, the worldwide web, and other forms of communication that were not yet invented or made popular when Elizabeth inherited the throne.
The informed nature of much of the commentary shows a decisive shift in the understanding of the monarchy among a vast number of people in Britain’s former empire. The British elite, the elite of empire and their defenders and hangers-on in the empire’s neo-colonies have lost the propaganda war for the minds of the people. This much is revealed by the tide of comments occasioned by the death of Elizabeth.
The movements and organization for Reparative Justice are genetically related to the atrocities of western European empires. Increasing public knowledge and awareness around the world have been enhanced by a symbiotic relationship with the movement for African cultural and historical reclamation, the anti-racist movement, the feminist movement, Black Lives Matter, Afrocentricity and Africology, Critical Race Theory, environmentalism, and other sites of intellectual and cultural resistance to empire. In the light of these movements, the increasing self-knowledge and awareness of history and its meanings in the African world, and other contemporary expressions of opposition to the currently dominant system of oppression in most of the lands of former empires, large numbers of people have been empowered to critique their world from a position of more adequate knowledge and understanding. It is now clear that a holistic response is needed to the multiple world-wide devastations of the hydra headed western empire. The informed critique of the British queen and the British empire is a concrete expression of the changing world in which we exist.
The world is significantly different today from the glory days of European empire when Elizabeth ascended the British throne in 1952. But western control of the succeeding neo-colonies and statelets through the ‘international system’ referred to above, expresses the existing stage in the struggle between the historical victims of western European empire and the inheritors of those empires. The rise of the East and the threat of the South portend the greater self-organization and integration of the rest of the world. The increasing consciousness of a growing number of still-oppressed people in western European neo-colonies is proclaimed in the movement for Reparative Justice. Eurocentrism is also on the retreat on the intellectual front. Africology and its more recent expression as Afrofuturism have exposed the great intellectual gap between racist and sexist Eurocentric fantasies that the British empire has long masqueraded as history, literature, social science, and other forms of knowledge. A new world order is emerging. The place of the British monarchy and the ruling elite of western Europe in general, of which this monarchy has always been a significant aspect, appear far less secure than seventy years ago when Elizabeth assumed the English monarchy.
The death of Elizabeth is not the end of the monarchy, nor the end of the system of enrichment. It may be necessary to acknowledge the grief of a tiny minority: her mourning relatives, the emotional distress of monarchists across the former empire and fellow elites around the western world, and the anxiety among some Britons who are challenged by a sense of uncertainty and insecurity by the loss of what they regard as an important aspect of their identity. It is equally important to recognize that it is not only the queen and her family who are linked to the old British empire, and that those links did not disappear with her death. Sentiments to the contrary are in defense of the empire of greed, mass murder, and other offences against humanity. Britain is still linked to the continuing condition of hundreds of millions of people, the great majority of the world’s peoples, both within the ‘homeland’ and across the sprawling lands once brutalized and dominated.
Conclusion
The death of a queen and the avalanche of commentary it occasioned, reverberate beyond the walls of the palace and the boundaries of Britain. Who commented and what they said are important because of the tremendous significance of royalty in the making of the British empire, and latterly, in the maintenance of British dominance in the space it used to call its empire. That empire became mostly dust after 1918. Royalty, from the outset an important embodiment of empire, staggered on as an important representation of empire in new clothes. But as the significance of empire became increasingly clear and its demise more apparent, the importance of the monarchy has become more and more contested. As empire disintegrated, the power, mystique and role of royalty, its chief embodiment, became increasingly revealed, increasingly understood, and increasingly tarnished for the discovery of what it has always been: the rotten core of a vast inhuman, immoral, network of western European barbarity that was violently imposed upon other peoples, mostly people of color, for the benefit of Europeans and the detriment of these other people.
Increasing numbers of people now know that beneath the titles, the honors and the heroes, the pomp and pageantry, the glamor, and the glory, lies a vast web of international deceit, suffering and indignity. This is the underside of empire, the gore that has kept afloat the glory and the god of empire. Elizabeth and the monarchy she symbolized were indispensable aspects of this evil from the inception.
Notes
“No Apology!” Barbados Today. September 13, 2022. barbadostoday.bb [Accessed 1/21/2023].
Yasmine Peru, “Oliver Samuels Shares Disenchantment with 12 days of mourning for Queen Elizabeth II in viral video.”
Jamaica Gleaner. September 14, 2022. jamaica-gleaner.com. [Accessed 1/21/2023].
Trevor Burnard, “As a historian of slavery, I know just how much the royal family has to answer for in Jamaica.” The Guardian. 25 March, 2022. theguardian.com [Accessed 1/20/2023].
A small sample of this avalanche includes:
Horace G. Campbell, “Queen Elizabeth II and the Weight of History.” Counter Punch. September 23, 2022. www.counterpunch.org [Accessed 1/21/2023].
Kali Holloway, “Queen Elizabeth Was No Mere Symbol.” The Nation. September 29, 2022. www.thenation.com [Accessed 1/21/2023].
Catherine Garcia, “Returning the Crown Jewels.” The Week. September 27, 2022. [Accessed 1/21/2023];
Atalia Nyx Chua, “Why is the world fighting over Queen Elizabeth’s royal jewels? …” South China Morning Post. September 25, 2022. scmp.com [Accessed 1/21/2023].
Avani Dias and Som Patidar, “Indians want King Charles III to return Kohinoor, a massive 105-carat diamond worth $591 million.” RNZ News. 18 September 2022. rnz.co.nz [Accessed 1/21/2023].
Linda Thorpe, “Don’t ask me to give the Queen a minute’s silence, ask me for the truth about British colonialism.” The Guardian. 13 September 2022. theguardian.com. [Accessed 1/21/2023].
Praveen Menon and Anna Mehler Paperny, “Queen's death shines spotlight on wrongs suffered by indigenous people.” September 17, 2022. reuters.com. [Accessed 1/21/2023].
For example, the Sedition Act in Trinidad, see Tye Salandy, “Of Independence, sedition and legislative violence: how elitist laws have damaged the nation.” Wired 868.com. [Accessed 1/20/2023].
#BringBackOurBones (@BBOB_Zimbabwe) / Twitter [Accessed 1/20/2023];
Bella Shorrock, “University pledges to return Zimbabwe warrior skulls ‘taken as trophies.’ Varsity. November 25, 2022. [Last accessed 1/20/2023].
Walter Rodney. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. (Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972) ;
Kimani Nehusi. “Forty-Seven Years After: Understanding and Updating Walter Rodney.” Biko Agozino (Ed.) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: A Tribute to Walter Rodney.
Africa Update. Vol. XXVI, Issue 3 (Summer 2019). www2.ccsu.edu/africaupdate//afstudy/africaupdate/article-44. See, for example, Harry Kelsey. Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader. Yale University Press, 2003.
Maulana Karenga, “The Ethics of Reparations: Engaging the Holocaust of Enslavement." ncobra.org [Accessed 1/20/2023]. This is an extract from Karenga, “"The Ethics of Reparations: Engaging the Holocaust of Enslavement," presented at The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA) Convention, Baton Rouge, LA, 2001 June 22-23; Chinweizu, “What ‘Slave Trade’? (Toward an Afrocentric Rectification of Terms).” saharareporters.com. [Accessed 1/19/2023]. Katarina Schwarz. Reparations for Slavery in International Law: Transatlantic Enslavement, the Maangamizi and the Making of International Law. Oxford University Press, 2022.
Shashi Tharoor. An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India. (Aleph Book Company, New Delhi, 2016); Carol Elkins. Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. (Alfred K. Knopf, New York, 2022); Elkins. Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. (Pimlico, 2005); Pinkraj Mishra. Age of Anger: A History of the Present (St. Martin’s Press, 2018).
Mogobe B. Ramose. “An African perspective on justice and race.” them.polylog.org [Accessed 1/19/2023].
Pius Onyemechi Adiele. The Popes, the Catholic Church, and the Transatlantic Enslavement of Black Africans, 1418-1839. Georg Oems Verlag. Hildersheim. Zürich and New York, 2017; Rachael A. Feinstein. When Rape was Legal: The Untold History of Sexual Violence during Slavery. Routledge, 2018; Thomas A. Foster. Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men. University of Georgia Press, 2019. “Family separation among slaves in America was shockingly prevalent.” The Economist. June 18th, 2022. www.economist.com [Accessed 1/20/2023]; Joy DeGruy Leary . Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Joy DeGruy Publications Incorporated, 2017.
Hilary McD. Beckles. Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide. (University of the West Indies Press, 2013).
J. Kaufman, M. Khan, and J. Mancini, “Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance and Systemic Racism in the United States: A Report Prepared for the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA).” Center for Child and Family Traumatic Stress, Kennedy Krieger Institute; Department of Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, 2021.
Michelle Alexander. (rev. ed.) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2012.
Howard W. French, “Queen Elizabeth II Wasn’t Innocent of Her Empire’s Sins.” September 12th, 2022. foreignpolicy.com [Accessed 1/20/2023];
Padraic X. Scanlan. Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain. Little, Brown Group Book Limited. 2022;
Amanda Yee, “Five of the British empire’s worst atrocities under Queen Elizabeth’s reign.” liberationnews.org. September 9, 2022 [Accessed 1/20/2023];
Gideon Polya. “Queen Elizabeth II & 70 years of UK colonialism, neo-colonialism, wars, mass mortality & genocide.” countercurrents.org. 18 September, 2022. [Accessed 1/20/2023].
K. Nehusi, A People’s Political History of Guyana: 1838-1964. (HANSIB: Hertfordshire, UK, 2018), pp. 37-38.
Esther Stanford-Xosei. “Why we still need holistic reparations for slavery.” The Independent. 30th October, 2022. independent.co.uk [Accessed 1/20/2023].