I want to put down here an article I came across by Prasenjit Basu, eminent historian and economist.
I was troubled by the villification in some quarters of the Queen and realized that what was being said and written had a lot of gaps and falsification. I scoured the net to see where I could get clarity, and found it in this piece:
QE I was a feisty queen of a small island nation (with 1/30th the population of the world’s largest economy at the time, India’s) but gave the royal charter to establish the English East India Company in 1600. England had defected from the mainstream of Christendom during her father’s (Henry VIII’s) reign. The charter for the EICo marked the start of England’s (and Britain’s) global ambitions.
QEII, on the other hand, was a gentle monarch who presided over the empire’s dissolution. The jewel in her father’s crown, had already gone by the time she ascended the throne, although her uncle Dickie Mountbatten had ensured that Nehru and Gandhi agreed to keep India a dominion—betraying the Congress’s pledge (since 26 January 1930) to accept nothing but Purna Swaraj. The British had no interest in giving India even dominion status at the end of WWII, as was clear in a white paper produced for the British government in May 1945 by the British army Chiefs of Staff. This spoke of steps needed to keep iron control over India and the Indian Ocean area for the next 15 years (until 1960!) regardless of any “constitutional changes” in British India. At Simla in 1945, the British basically offered the Cripps plan rejected rightly by Gandhi in 1942—partial self-rule by Indians, albeit in a Balkanised nation, still supervised by a British viceroy and provincial governors in accordance with the GoI act of 1935, with slight modifications to its federal features.
It was QEII who was to reign over the dissolution of the rest of her empire. After Suez in 1956 (when the absence of Indian soldiers showed that Britain was a paper tiger in the ‘Middle East’), Pakistan became a republic, Malaysia and Ghana became independent soon afterwards, Iraq threw out its British-puppet monarchy in 1958 and Singapore got self-rule in 1959. African colonies (Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Nigeria, Tanzania) and Kuwait declared independence in the 1960s, other Arab protectorates (UAE, Qatar, Bahrain) in 1971 (the year Sri Lanka became a republic), and Hong Kong was ‘returned’ in 1997 to China (although its Central island had been given to Britain in perpetuity in 1842).
The two Elizabethan Ages thus bookended the start and end of the British Empire.
(Our grouse and hatred is for what the East India Company did to our country and our people, and which British government added to and continued till our independence. The monarch was merely a figurehead with no real powers. And so, as a human being how she impacted on us (or not) is, I feel, important.)