Imagine that you, like me, have familial origins in any one of the hundreds of countries subjected to the arbitrary cruelty of British rule. Most likely, you didn’t grow up with the view of Buckingham Palace in the skyline, but you felt the presence of the British Crown in other, more insidious ways: the enduring injustices of the slave trade. Views of poverty and underdevelopment resulting from centuries-spanning exploitation. Displays of plundered objects from your own country as trinkets in museums. The very presence of an iconic Indian jewel on the crown Elizabeth donned (and that Camila will now wear). The whitewashed legacies of empire officials who were violent bigots. None of which was ever actually corrected, with apologies or trillion-dollar compensation or even basic acknowledgement. As the Kenyan cartoonist Patrick Gathara stated in June, referring to Elizabeth: “To this day, she has never publicly admitted, let alone apologized, for the oppression, torture, dehumanization and dispossession visited upon people in the colony of Kenya before and after she acceded to the throne.”