What brought billions to watch the Queen’s funeral was the enduring qualities in British history that should not be obscured by its sometimes controversial colonial past.
The first royal funeral at the new abbey in Westminster was Edward the Confessor’s in early 1066. With Elizabeth II’s funeral on Monday, the British have been doing the same thing in the same place for almost 1000 years. In 2022, billions watched on television and heads of governments representing much of the world’s population attended in person. What brought them was not a royal family that’s now a sort of high-class soap opera.
London is a global city even without its empire. Much of the pomp on Monday – the red coats, plumed helmets and medals – was symbolic holdovers from the relatively recent imperial past.. It is too much to say that Britain invented the modern world, as some historians do.
Some Brits like to think the empire was acquired “in a fit of absence of mind”, which makes it sound more benign or harmless. But the British also had fits of racism, invasion and the theft of wealth, mass brutality, entitlement, and self-interest dripping with hypocrisy. Yet so did the Romans, but nobody doubts that modern Europe would have been very different and probably much worse off without them.
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