zlacker

>>xd+(OP)
I realise she has just died and it's unbecoming to do anything but laud the person, but this is just moral obsequiousness.

She claims fealty by right of blood, reigned as the crown of an extraordinarily cruel empire, and frequently interceded in the democratic government of Britain to protect her private interests.

>>Emma_G+wd
> reigned as the crown of an extraordinarily cruel empire

Queen Elizabeth presided over its dismantlement. No famines occurred during her reign and no rebellions violently suppressed.

The Empire was cruel, but it's unfair to wash her with the cloth of empire.

>>dijit+Oh
That was not my intended emphasis, but I think you could make a good case for it anyway. It involved the dispossession and genocide of native peoples in North America and Australasia. It was built on slave plantations in the Caribbean, and led to state-engineered famines in India. The total human toll is enormous.

Yes, the Queen took the throne at the twilight of the British Empire. But it was in the midst of the Malayan emergency, the Mau Mau uprising, the Suez crisis was on the horizon, and South Africa had just launched the apartheid regime. Those were all, in different ways, attempts to stamp out democratic independence. Britain didn't relinquish its sub-Saharan African and Caribbean territories until the 1960s. You cannot cleanly separate the Queen from the empire which she crowned.