The Woman Elizabeth vs. The Queen

Elizabeth II at her coronation in 1953

In the four days since Queen Elizabeth II’s death, I’ve seen two contradictory opinions trending online; and neither is necessarily wrong. While lovers of tradition and continuity mourn Elizabeth’s person, less charitable critics, particularly from current or former colonies, excoriate her part in an imperial machine that devastated countless nations and crippled entire continents. Each side condemns the other for being unwilling to give ground, especially in time of mourning.

I’m unwilling to call either side wrong. The British imperial juggernaut bears massive responsibility for widespread damage. As historian Walter Rodney writes, Europe overall, and Britain particularly, orchestrated an economy of race-based deprivation from which Africa hasn’t recovered; the same broadly applies to South Asia and the South Pacific. Britain didn’t act alone, but no other European colonial power matched Britain’s reach.

However, by Elizabeth’s accession in 1952, that colonial enterprise was long over. Elizabeth’s distant cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, had already overseen Britain’s release of authority in India, Pakistan, and Burma. Egypt was already independent, and Britain would relinquish its other African colonies incrementally over the coming decades. They didn’t do so peacefully, sure, nor from simple big-hearted charity. But Elizabeth’s British “Empire” was broke, war-weary, and winding down.

It bears stressing that Britain’s monarchy survives, in no small part, because of its essential powerlessness. While French monarchs were frog-marched to the guillotine, while Kaisers were chased out of Germany in disgrace and Tsars were executed under cover of darkness, British monarchs held office remarkably peacefully, even through two world wars. And that office survives, substantially, because in real-world policy terms, it doesn’t matter that much.

The last British dynasty to actually set policy, the Stuarts, were chased from power in 1688. As Thomas Levenson writes, the two greatest royal prerogatives, the national army and the national purse, passed into Parliamentary control. While the French army and treasury remained the monarch’s personal possessions, the British state separated from the royal person. The throne retains titular authority, but the person holding the throne hasn’t mattered in nearly 350 years.

That’s why Britain triumphed in the Nine Years’ War, despite France’s greater wealth and population. It’s probably also why Britain survived the transition to industrial capitalism with fairly limited civil uprisings and the occasional testy William Blake poem. Nascent capitalism destroyed French and German monarchies, and precipitated the American Civil War. Britain, meanwhile, invented securities futures and kept going pretty smoothly.

The last photo of Elizabeth, taken
at Balmoral, days before her passing

Don’t misunderstand me. This transition to state-based rather than monarchical power wasn’t without consequence. British colonization in North America was a desultory, poorly organized enterprise, but the newly capitalized British state ransacked Africa and India with an industrial efficiency previously unseen in world history. British colonialism overtook the world because of, not in spite of, Britain’s weak monarchy; no other country could’ve done that.

I watch the dueling strains of aftermath unfold fully conscious of this history. There’s the woman, Elizabeth, who famously disdained royal frippery and shook hands with commoners. After catastrophes like the Grenfell Tower fire, while Prime Minister Theresa May issued toothless injunctions from inside Downing Street, Elizabeth actually met with survivors, and took point in gathering statements—acts of leadership frustratingly absent from recent British governments.

Contrary to the woman Elizabeth stands the Queen. Though the monarchical person hasn’t mattered since 1688, the monarchical role remains necessary to validate the ever-changing state. And that role bears responsibility for worldwide colonial devastation and postcolonial malaise. Even in former colonies that have relatively flourished, like the U.S., Canada, and Australia, that prosperity isn’t distributed equally, and few First Peoples enjoy much security.

The woman Elizabeth stands against her rank of Queen. The fact that colonized peoples continue blaming Elizabeth for postcolonial ruination reveals that they need a single, unitary individual to hold the narrative together. Other nations have sought a similar unitary individual: Bonapartism in France, the Führer in Germany, and contemporary strongman leaders like Trump and Putin. Even in postcolonial states, autocrats like Nigeria’s Abdulsalam Abubakar tie the story together.

Thus I can understand the contradictory desires. Some want to mourn Elizabeth, while others want to condemn the Queen. These two stories aren’t contradictory, because history would’ve wreaked a path of destruction even without the presence of Elizabeth’s person. But Elizabeth, unlike her Nazi-sympathizer uncle Edward VIII, chose to use her powerless title for ordinary British people’s betterment.

She wasn’t always successful, certainly. But, considering the alternative was more power to people like Margaret Thatcher or Boris Johnson, the world was arguably better with her in it.