The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s tour of the Caribbean for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee has been criticised over the royals’ connection to colonialism and slavery.
An open letter by Jamaican public figures says: “We see no purpose to rejoice 70 years of the ascension of your grandmother to the British throne as a result of her management, and that of her predecessors, has perpetuated the best human rights tragedy within the historical past of humankind.”
However what has the monarchy received to do with slavery and colonialism? How has it benefited from these techniques of exploitation and expropriation?
1. Funding slavery voyages
The British monarchy was central to the institution, enlargement, and upkeep of the British empire and the transatlantic slave commerce. The declaration of English empire was first made by Henry VIII in 1532. Elizabeth I granted a royal constitution (an instrument of incorporation) to Sir John Hawkins, broadly thought of one of many first English merchants to revenue from the slave commerce. She additionally granted a constitution to the British East India Firm in 1600.
After Elizabeth’s dying, Charles II shaped the Royal African Firm in 1660, led by the Duke of York (later James II), which extracted items similar to gold and ivory from the Gold Coast, and transported over 3,000 Africans to Barbados. Many of those folks had the initials “DY” burned into their pores and skin to indicate their belonging to the Duke of York. Each males invested non-public funds within the firm.
Queen Victoria assumed the title of Empress of India in 1877, and by 1920 the empire was 13.71 million sq. miles. The British monarch’s international significance and energy stemmed straight from the enslavement of individuals of color.
2. The Commonwealth
The Commonwealth is an organisation of 52 “impartial and equal” member states. Regardless of this “impartial” declare, the Commonwealth has imperial origins. Most of the member states are former colonies of the British empire, and Commonwealth professional Philip Murphy describes the way in which imperial grew to become Commonwealth as “haphazard”.
The Commonwealth emerged from post-WWII decolonisation, as a method of reassuring the British public that the demise of empire wouldn’t diminish Britain’s international status.
The Queen is head of the Commonwealth, and Prince Charles was appointed as her successor in 2018. However the place isn’t hereditary, and there’s no constitutional or statutory purpose why Charles would take this function. The function of head of the Commonwealth permits the monarch to proceed their place of worldwide privilege and affect, which stems from colonial histories.
3. The Queen as head of state
The London Declaration, 1949, which addressed India’s place within the Commonwealth as a republic, set the precedent for Commonwealth nations to undertake republicanism. However right now, 15 stay constitutional monarchies with Elizabeth II as head of state, together with Caribbean islands like Jamaica, South American nations like Belize, African states like Ghana, and Canada and Australia.
Since 1842, every nation has nominated a neighborhood governor common because the Queen’s consultant, with the facility to suggest laws, (dis)show payments and dissolve parliament. Though the Queen has no “direct” political management in these realms, governor generals may very well be interpreted as ongoing monarchical administrative energy.
Many of those nations, together with Australia, Jamaica, Grenada, Saint Lucia and Tuvalu nonetheless use “God Save the Queen/King” because the nationwide or royal anthem. As sociologist Ty Salandy argues, such cultural texts had been used throughout empire to instil British values and subservience to colonial authority, and their continued use suggests an identical system of values.
In 2021, Barbados eliminated the queen as head of state, formally turning into a republic however remaining a part of the Commonwealth. There are stories that Jamaica is planning on doing the identical after the royal go to.
4. Property, land and items
Following the Nationwide Belief’s report into histories of slavery and colonialism in its properties, the chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces, Lucy Worsley, introduced an identical investigation into royal palaces in 2020.
Worsley mentioned that each one properties utilized by the Stuart dynasty within the seventeenth century had been “going to have a component of cash derived from slavery” inside them. This consists of Kensington Palace and Hampton Court docket Palace, which have connections to King William III, one other half proprietor of the Royal African Firm.
This isn’t to say items now owned by the monarchy that had been stolen throughout colonisation, such because the Koh-i-Noor diamond from India used within the Crown Jewels, which Pakistan and India have repeatedly requested to be returned. The dearth of transparency concerning what the Crown owns versus the Queen’s private results makes it even tougher to hint these histories.
5. ‘Our nice imperial household’
In a speech in 1947 in South Africa, then-Princess Elizabeth declared she would dedicate her life to “service of our nice imperial household to which all of us belong”. The idea of an “imperial household” displays the concept of the British monarchy as empire’s figurehead, vested in ideologies of white supremacy and colonialism.
This concept additionally performs a task in royal worldwide visits. Royal visits have traditionally had colonialist implications by portraying the royal as a white saviour. Media scholar Raka Shome discusses how Diana grew to become an emblem of this in pictures of her taking part in with and caring for black youngsters in Africa. We are able to maybe see this taking part in out once more this week in pictures of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge shaking arms with Jamaican residents by way of wire fencing.
Such visits try to rewrite colonial and imperial histories by way of discourses of philanthropy and international neighborhood, with the royals as “head” of the worldwide household. It’s, in essence, good PR.
A brand new chapter?
This solely scratches the floor of the monarchy’s connections to colonialism and imperialism. Because the PNP Ladies’s Motion, a Jamaican motion advocating for girls and women, wrote within the Jamaican Observer: “We had been crushed and damaged into believing that our function as a nation was to cater to yours.” This isn’t least in the truth that, as they are saying, roads had been resurfaced and hospitals had been cleaned in preparation for the royal go to this week, fairly than years earlier for the impoverished black communities who use them day by day.
In a speech in Jamaica, Prince William expressed “profound sorrow” over slavery which “ceaselessly stains our historical past”. He stopped quick, nevertheless, of acknowledging the monarchy’s function in that historical past, an establishment from which he continues to profit. Within the wake of world actions towards racism and colonialism, maybe it’s lastly time for the monarchy to reckon with its historical past.
Laura Clancy has acquired funding from the ESRC and the AHRC.
