The Wild Reed: The Queen and British Colonialism

Friday, September 09, 2022

The Queen and British Colonialism

Earlier today Democracy Now! hosted an insightful and informative roundtable discussion on the “deadly legacy” of British colonialism, a topic that’s very much in the spotlight given the recent death of Queen Elizabeth II.

One of the participants in this roundtable was Priyamvada Gopal, Professor of Post-Colonial Studies at the University of Cambridge and author of the award-winning book, Insurgent Empire: Anti-Colonial Resistance and British Dissent (2019). Following is part of what Gopal had to say about the Queen and British colonialism.

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I find myself appreciating the circumstances in which [the Queen] passed. She had good care. She had good medical supervision. She was in secure shelter in a place that she loved. And I am glad for that. I do wonder, given the state that Britain is in today, which is in a state of crisis, whether many British pensioners will have the same easeful passing this winter. I fear not. I think many people will be in insecure housing, without heat, potentially without food, and certainly without access to good medical care.

So I’m really struck by the difference between the circumstances of Queen Elizabeth’s passing and what many of her subjects may have to endure this coming winter in a country where the monarchy really has come to represent the deep and profound and grave inequality [that] is going to be a problem in the months to come.

. . . [T]he other thing I want to say is that we often talk about monarchy as an anachronism. [For example, people say] she came into a world where monarchy was normal, and now it’s an anachronism. Actually, we still have a world order in which, both in Britain and in the colonies, there is enormous concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. And monarchy really, in a sense, is not anachronistic. It represents exactly what we are ruled by across the world, in the U.S. as much as anywhere else: power and privilege and wealth in the hands of a few, which the rest of us are then invited to worship and think of as perfectly normal. The monarchy is really one aspect of plutocracy: the rule by the wealthy. And that is something that hasn’t essentially changed from 1952 to 2022. If anything, here we are again, ruled by a handful of oligarchs across the world, as ordinary people in Britain and beyond suffer deprivation. So, I slightly wonder if we do in fact live in a very different world from the one that she inherited.

And in terms of [her] knowledge of foreign policy, I think . . . she was very faithful and dutiful, as the word is often used in the British press, about representing the British state’s understanding of its own foreign policy. I have no evidence that she was knowledgeable about what was happening in the colonies, that she was knowledgeable about the enormous violence with which empire ended in many places. When she came to power, there were brutal counterinsurgencies not just in Kenya, but in Malaya and Cyprus. Many of the records of the crimes of the British state at that point have been destroyed willfully by the British state. So . . . how much did she know? We won’t know that. But did she speak on these matters? Could she speak on these matters? Was she knowledgeable about what took place? I’m afraid I have no evidence of anything other than that she, and the institution of the monarchy, perpetuated the British state’s and the British elites’ narrative of itself and of Britain.