Charles the Modernizer? Not Where the British Empire is Concerned
When King Charles III is crowned in Westminster Abbey next month, he will swear “to govern” not just “the peoples of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland,” but those of 14 Commonwealth realms as well. These are the former British colonies — including Australia, Canada, and New Zealand along with thirteen other territories scattered across the Caribbean and the Pacific — which still recognize the British sovereign as the head of state. In 1994, Charles notoriously suggested tinkering with another part of the coronation script, restyling the “Defender of the [Anglican] Faith” as a multicultural “defender of faith.” But he has never shown the same inclination to rethink the crown’s role as an imperial relic.
The coronation ceremony on May 6 will cast Charles in a role he has long resisted: the guardian of tradition. Yet his carefully cultivated reputation as a “modernizer” (uncritically embraced by the latest season of Netflix’s The Crown) was always overblown. He is best understood as a Tory Romantic with a sentimental attachment to ideas of nature and community. The 1973 essay collection by economist E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, was an early influence. The same back-to-basics sensibility lends Charles’s views a progressive edge in some areas (as in concern about climate change) and a reactionary tinge in others (as in his cantankerous distaste for modern architecture and his construction of a neo-Georgian fantasy village, Poundbury, in Dorset).
It would be wrong to assume that Charles’s nostalgic streak encompasses a desire to restore imperial rule. If nothing else, one of his recurring duties as Prince of Wales — to attend ceremonies marking the formal end of British control, beginning with Fiji in 1970 — impressed on him the sad finality of decolonization. Observing the handover of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 “left me with a lump in my throat,” as he noted in his diary. Yet it is impossible to separate Charles’s longing for the virtues of a vanished past from his perception of a nation in decline and an empire in retreat. “I have been entirely motivated,” he wrote in 1993, “by a desperate desire to put the Great back in Great Britain.”
Following a long line of “green imperialists” before him, Charles’s idea of conservation has extended to cultures as well as environments. A high school trip to the Commonwealth realm of Papua New Guinea convinced him of the threat posed to indigenous folkways by Westernization. It also helped to inspire his decision to study anthropology at Cambridge. Soon afterward, Charles fell under the sway of the South African writer Laurens van der Post, who took him on a safari to Kenya and regaled him with a romantic view of the Kalahari “bushmen” as the “lost soul” of humanity. What sociologist George Steinmetz calls “salvage colonialism” — a vision of empire as a protective force, shielding supposedly primitive peoples from the disenchanting force of modernity — is an essential part of the king’s intellectual genealogy. His writings are peppered with references to the dehumanizing effects of industrial capitalism and the spiritual richness of cultures relatively untouched by it.
While it would be easy to dismiss Charles’s antimodernism as eccentricity, the monarchy as an institution has a long history of posing as a champion of “traditional” authority, preferring to deal with Indian princes and African chiefs rather than educated urban nationalists. The process of reimagining the crown as a patron of global multiculturalism began before Charles as well; it was 1966 when Elizabeth II attended the first multifaith service for Commonwealth Day, the start of an annual tradition. But the transition from imperial hierarchy to brotherhood of nations has not always been a smooth one. In 1970, as historian Philip Murphy has shown, Charles privately questioned whether some Commonwealth nations had been granted independence before they were ready for self-government — an echo of views expressed by his father, Prince Philip, decades before.
In recent years, Charles has taken a more diplomatic line. He denounced “the appalling atrocity of slavery, which forever stains our history,” in a visit to Barbados in 2021, and acknowledged “the profound sorrow” of colonialism while hosting the South African president at Buckingham Palace last year. But while he is famously opinionated on subjects ranging from urban planning to organic farming to alternative medicine, his public pronouncements on the legacies of empire have been far more measured. Following the example of his mother, he has favored expressions of regret over apologies for wrongdoing, to say nothing of support for reparations. What other reason could there be, though, for Britain to maintain ties with its onetime colonies in a vaguely defined association of states?
Charles once mused that “the Commonwealth exists because, quite simply, it is ‘there.’ Perhaps no one quite knows why it is there.” If he has embraced the organization more fully since becoming king, this is an implicit admission of the fact that the crown needs the Commonwealth more than the Commonwealth needs the crown. Clinging to what is left of empire furnishes the monarch with a global stage and a sheen of prestige ever harder to come by in polarized, populist, tabloid-dominated Britain.
When Charles’s mother pledged to “govern” Britain’s overseas territories at her coronation in 1953, her words were not universally welcomed — certainly not by the insurgents then fighting British rule in Malaya and Kenya. But they did not yet ring hollow. Perhaps Charles will more squarely confront the anachronisms and contradictions of the Commonwealth in the years to come. For now, however, he embodies Britain’s ambivalent attitude toward the imperial past: unable to defend it yet unwilling to part with its glories, either.
