Something to Remember When the Coronation Ales Arrive
Source: Adnams
One, smallish comment on the Queen, who I’m reliably informed is still dead. In our flattened 21st century world, where everything, including politics, is merely performative, the death of the Queen has become a massive opportunity for wallowing in celebrity. In this context, the Queen has been transmuted into a kindly old lady with fabulous castles and jewels, the matriarch of the longest-running reality show ever.
Amid the countless, breathless stories, I haven’t heard a single comment on the qualification that justified her 70-year rule, which was the blood that ran through her veins. Blood, which indicates sacred superiority not just within the UK, but over the “children” of the colonies. (Recall, the Queen was also the head of church, not just state.) The notion of hereditary rule, the belief that one human being has the right to rule many others because of their innate, biological superiority, is something we seem keen not to mention amid all the teary salutes. Why point out the fly on the crumpet at this moment of international blubbering?
Of course, she wasn’t just a kindly old lady: she was the ruler of an (admittedly shrinking) empire. The power of the monarchy means jailing people who ask something as innocuous as “Who elected him?”—referring to new King Charles. It means anointing new Prime Ministers. It comes with all the castles and lands, paid for by the subjects (“subjects”—there’s an interesting term for citizens of Britain) who are not allowed to question the very monarchs their taxes fund. Those lands, incidentally, consist of ~300,000 acres and tot up to $34 billion in value—all owned by King Charles III.
The monarchy is also the head of an empire that spent centuries extracting wealth from distant lands—like the giant Indian Koh-i-Noor diamond that tops one of the crowns. One of the reasons Brits shipped perishables like beer in the bellies of their Indian-bound ships is because they were empty on a return trip that existed to ship goodies from the colonies to England. Rude to mention just now, no doubt.
Yet part of the privilege of sitting in Buckingham Palace requires the monarch to acknowledge this complex history to their subjects, particularly in those far lands. In the hours following the Queen’s death, people living in places like Jamaica, born with the wrong blood in their veins, took to social media to remind Britons the of cost of their empire. For Britons, the Queen personified a thousand years of power and glory, but that’s just half the story. Not everyone’s story of empire is the same.
I’m writing this post mainly as an excuse to point you to this article by Ruvani de Silva, the most trenchant and nuanced examination of identity and empire I’ve read. (And not among beer writers—anywhere.) Ruvani, whose parents immigrated from Sri Lanka, mines her experience and comes to a complex, indefinite sense of the consequences of empire.
“You can never go back to the time, place, or identity you would have had had you never been colonized. Your culture is forever altered, from the Georgian mansions and European-style parliament buildings that dot South and South-East Asia to the internalization of the values, habits, and cultural mores of the oppressor. You cannot simply remove them and pretend they never existed. They become embedded into the physical and spiritual psyche of the colonized, and in trying to tear them out, you find you are literally tearing pieces off yourself.”
I’m afraid the United Kingdom can’t go back to a time in which British doesn’t acknowledge people like Ruvani, either. In their spasm of nostalgic nationalism, Brits want to look back and see the WWII Queen, the Queen of Duty and Dignity, and see themselves as uncomplicated heroes in a centuries-long story. (Every citizen does, and of course the United States could teach the UK something about ignoring troublesome history on the way to self-congratulation. But that’s a different post.) And maybe a component of this incredible spectacle comes from the knowledge it’s the last one we’ll ever see. This rose-tinted history dies with the Queen.
In the coming weeks or months—I don’t know the timelines; this is the first coronation in my lifetime—companies will celebrate the ascension of Charles III with celebratory coronation products. Breweries famously make coronation ales, but I assume there will be coronation chocolates and coronation biscuits and coronation dishware and coronation mouthwash. On the one hand, this will be simple, British fun. The King has no real power, we’re told constantly (and insincerely), so it’s just a way of signaling a bit of easy patriotism. Some of the products will become collectibles or perhaps family heirlooms. That’s fun, too.
But all of this is happening at a curious moment, when the world, now safely distanced from that unpleasant episode of fascism, is reconsidering its commitment to democracy. Democracies are curious, fragile institutions, requiring citizens to place ideas above blood. They ask losers to gracefully accept being governed—governed, not ruled—by the winners. The UK has always lived in a delicious tension between the idea of blood qualification, rulership, and empire on the one hand and grubby, voluble democracy conducted by the lowborn, and increasingly, descendants from the colonies on the other. (The country was very close to having the descendent of Indians as PM.) A legal and social kludge has perpetuated the government in spite of these contrary values, and by all accounts the British are happy with the system.
I’m an American and so of course I can’t understand this. Our national myth rests on overthrowing the tyranny of inherited power. Yet the reign of Charles also arrives at a moment when the karma of empire is ripening. Brilliant thinkers like Ruvani have social power her parents’ generation lacked. On this coronation we get to hear the fuller, bloodier, less respectable history of empire from the people it harmed. For centuries, their experiences have been erased from the British story. But going forward, we won’t be able to unknow them. Those bottles of coronation ale will carry a somewhat more fraught meaning. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them stayed away from IPAs, knowing now what those letters really mean. That is in itself quite a change.
I hope they think of the meaning of blood, as well. Perhaps it’s a peculiarly American thing to be so hung up on it, but I can’t help reduce the lessons to those tiny platelets. The one unarguably positive result of the empire are immigrants and the children and grandchildren of immigrants who now enrich Britain. In such a country, which draws much of its vibrancy and health from people born around the world, does it make sense to grant such power to one family based purely on their birth? Bury the Queen, mourn her, but don’t erase the full account of who she was.