This article gives some good context to the atrocities that occurred during her reign.
The questions over the queen’s role in Britain’s violent empire, explained by a historian
An expert on the British Empire explains “Her Majesty’s government” in the 20th century.
By
Caroline Houck@carolinehouck[email protected] Sep 13, 2022, 11:10am EDT
Queen Elizabeth II’s death last week has prompted both an outpouring of grief and
complicated reactions across the globe — in large part because during her 70 years on the throne, she ruled over the twilight of the British Empire.
At the height of that empire after the First World War, the United Kingdom had colonies on every continent save Antarctica, ruling one out of every five people in the world. Over the centuries, Britain extracted wealth from those colonized lands — by one estimate,
$45 trillion in today’s dollars from India alone.
“All empires were violent,” said Caroline Elkins, whose second book,
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, came out earlier this year. “And the British Empire was no exception to that.”
And decoupling the monarchy from that legacy is in some ways impossible.
“The monarchy very much wraps itself up into the empire — deploying its symbols, its images, its familial language,” Elkins said. “There’s no question that serious, systemic violence and crimes happened in her name, during her period of reign.”
At the same time, there’s “absolutely no extant documentary evidence directly linking [Queen Elizabeth II] to knowledge of systematic violence and cover-up in the empire,” Elkins said, and what little evidence does exist indicates that some of Britain’s highest-ranking officials lied to the queen to cover up atrocities, “just as they did with the public and Parliament.” And yet, she acknowledged, for some it might seem implausible that a monarch “renowned for her incredible knowledge about foreign affairs ... really was completely in the dark.”
Vox spoke to Elkins, a professor of history and African American studies at Harvard University, to dig into those questions about the legacy of British colonialism and the role of the monarchy — then and now.
(It's fairly long, please see link below)
Link:
https://www.vox.com/world/2022/9/13...rwqC9EdLuWWCCpcv9Xlbilr_1RMI5EhUnd9VcATItiYvs