How Queen Elizabeth II And Her Reign Are Being Remembered Matters

Queen Elizabeth II inspects men of the newly-renamed Queen’s Own Nigeria Regiment, Royal West African Frontier Force, at Kaduna Airport, Nigeria, during her Commonwealth Tour, Feb. 2, 1956. | Source: Hulton Deutsch / Getty

From the very beginning, Queen Elizabeth II’s reign was deeply connected to Britain’s global empire and the long and bloody processes of decolonization.

Indeed, she became Queen while on a royal visit to Kenya in 1952. After she left, the colony descended into one of the worst conflicts of the British colonial period. Declaring a state of emergency in October 1952, the British would go on to kill tens of thousands of Kenyans before it was over.

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Is it possible to disentangle the personal attributes of a gentle and kindly woman from her role as the crowned head of a declining global empire that waged numerous wars and resisted those demanding independence across the globe?

Even though she was a constitutional monarch who generally followed the lead of her parliament, many of Britain’s ex-subjects don’t think so, and some historians agree, with one commenting that “Elizabeth II helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged”.

Here in Australia, too, while some Australians remember with nostalgia the time they waved small flags along the route of royal tours as children, one Indigenous scholar has pointed out that the queen “wasn’t a bystander to the effects of colonization and colonialism”.

It depends who’s remembering

How the queen and her reign is being remembered depends on where the remembering is taking place and by whom.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Unforgettable is the royal tour of the Caribbean in March 2022, when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were bluntly told by the prime minister of Jamaica the region was “moving on” from the British monarchy.

Others, too, noted the British monarchy was a constant reminder of the period of slavery, with a government committee in the Bahamas urging them to offer “a full and formal apology for their crimes against humanity”.

This ongoing process of national distancing from a British royal past is continuing today, even in the week of the queen’s death.

In India, for example, only days ago the once grand boulevard of the empire, Rajpath (and before that Kingsway in honor of the British Emperor of India, George V) has been renamed Kartavya Path and headed with a giant statue of Subhas Chandra Bose, one of India’s most strident (and controversial) anti-British nationalists.

At the unveiling of this statue, India’s nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that “another symbol of slavery has been removed today” and urged all Indians to visit the site.

Source: How Queen Elizabeth II And Her Reign Are Being Remembered Matters