If you were to go back in time and ask the average person in 1926 – just as a young princess who is not in the direct line to the throne was born in Mayfair, London – whether the monarchy would reach peak popularity some 100 years later, the man would think you are nuts.
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After all, during that part of the 20th century other royal households were on their way down: The German kaiser died in the Netherlands after fleeing; the emperor of the Austria-Hungary Empire died in Madeira. Those two, as well as the last Russian Czar, are all buried in unmarked graves, and they are all related to the late Queen Elizabeth.
Things could have gone the same way in England. When, in 1936, the prime minister essentially forced the king – her uncle – to abdicate, and her father became king, people did not expect the monarchy to last, figuring it was all but obsolete. The empire was already showing signs of falling. Even the stories of the British spirit of unity during the war have been embellished. For example, when the Queen Mother visited East End she residents hurled trash at her. This attitude changed when Buckingham Palace was hit by the Germans.
So who needs a queen when there is no empire? Well, the princess-turned-queen who died in September 2022 may go down as the most popular monarch in history, and with a very robust monarchy. There are many reasons for that, but perhaps the most interesting thing is the way the Queen and the royals responded to the empire's disintegration and the subsequent influx of immigrants.
That response started with how the UK handled its foreign relations. When the young queen visited Ghana in 1961, she danced at a special gala with the nation's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, who was the father of African nationalism. She could not care less that he was African, and he might as well have been the king of Sweden or an Austrian duke. That foxtrot dance resonated all across the continent and made people view the British Commonwealth as a worthy and decent institution rather than an extension of the British Empire.
While it is easy to think of that dance as another diplomatic gimmick on the part of UK diplomats, the fact of the matter is that within Britain the images of the dance were just as powerful. It happened during a period when a picture of a black man with a young white woman could trigger violence in many places in the UK. Even British football rarely had black players. The queen would occasionally discard protocol and embraced non-whites – from Nelson Mandela and Pelé to various chieftains and ordinary folks – applying the same exact rules to every race.
"To many Black Britons, the Queen could do no wrong," activist Patrick Vernon wrote in the Guardian this week. This was also how many Indian immigrants viewed her, in part because of Louis Mountbatten – her husband's uncle and the last viceroy of India – who took it upon himself to integrate displaced Indians into the UK.
At her accession, she ruled 34 countries; at her death, she was only the head of state of 14. But in the process, she managed to create a whole new multi-ethnic empire in London, between Brixton and Brick Lane.
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