It projected the image of a nation of hereditary rather than looted wealth, which working classes were told they belonged to even as they were excluded from its privileges and exploited for its benefit.Īs a result, Britain evolved an image of such unique constancy that thinkers like George Orwell could promise that even with revolution, “England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past…having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.” This was the England imagined as a country house amidst rolling grassy hills-a pastoral, aristocratic romance based on forgetting the very recent transformation of rural landscapes in Britain. The corporate-partnership state yielded to a more institutionally differentiated apparatus presided over by Queen Victoria: the monarchy was the romance that helped legitimize the bureaucratic structures and impersonal, often brutal social relations of colonial and industrial capitalism. As Britain became the world’s most transformative, terraforming power, the very material benefits the monarchy derived from that activity allowed it to project an illusion of timeless continuity through ceremonial ritual. But Britons also found a sacred object in the monarchy and the imperial nation it symbolized.

Collective