zlacker

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.

>>Emma_G+(OP)
The Queen would still have been filthy rich without the British Empire. Ask the Swiss and the Danes.

I think you're choosing to couple the British monarchy with the Empire.

>>ogogma+HV1
I never said anything about her lucre.

The Queen willingly became head of a Commonwealth that included dependent colonies, and a British state that was actively repressing several independence movements. That the head of the Commonwealth is coupled with it is obvious, not my 'choice'.