An op-ed in the New York Times a week ago on June 4 by Caroline Elkins, entitled “The Imperial Fictions Behind the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee” debunks some of the myths of the British Empire. “For well over a century, Britain’s claims to global greatness were rooted in its empire. Sprawling over a quarter of the world’s landmass, the British Empire was the largest in history. After spear-heading the abolition movement, Britain emerged the purveyor of a liberal imperialism, or ‘civilizing mission,’ extending developmentalist policies, which cleaved to racial hierarchies, to its 700 million colonized subjects, purporting to usher them into the modern world.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/04/opinion/the-imperial-fictions-behind-the-queens-platinum-jubilee.html)
She wrote that the Queen’s Jubilee that week “was pregnant with meaning about the nation’s imperial past and the monarchy’s overdetermined role in it.” She also remarked that there were protests on the street and in Parliament calling for a reckoning with colonialism. “If Britain’s civilizing mission was reformist in its claims, it was brutal nonetheless…. Coercion would not just subdue these so-called recalcitrant children. Colonial officials and security forces wanted their infantilized subjects to see and feel their own suffering. British officials had a term for this: the ‘moral effect’ of violence.... British officials also obsessed over the rule of law, insisting this was the basis of good government. But in the empire, rule of law codified difference, curtailed freedoms, expropriated land and property and ensured a steady stream of labor for the empire’s mines and plantations, the profits from which helped fuel Britain’s economy.”
