Queen Elizabeth: The monarch at the heart of an evolving Britain
When Queen Elizabeth II ascended the British throne in 1952, her empire from the West Indies to the Far East was in its final stages of decline, having lost the crown’s leading dominion, India, five years prior.
Having reigned for 70 years, she was the longest-serving of any British monarch, beating Queen Victoria’s 63 years. Just this spring, she celebrated a Platinum Jubilee in 2022, marked by four days of festivities. If the two queens were widely popular figureheads, both seen as national grandmothers by the end of their reigns, they ruled over very different Britains. Queen Victoria oversaw a period of industrial and military change – and the rapid expansion of the British Empire to global domination.
Queen Elizabeth oversaw the empire’s diminishment and Britain’s struggle to define itself in the postwar era from a superpower to a bit nation in the British Isles. Her death, at the age of 96, comes at a time of great uncertainty with war having returned to Europe, a major economic crisis looming and threatening to plunge many into poverty, and turbulence in British politics in the wake of Brexit
