Distant Reading Case Study: Postcolonial Discourses around the Queen's Platinum Jubilee and Funeral in 2022

The British monarchy, like others in Europe, is strongly entwined with colonial histories. In 2022, as the United Kingdom celebrated Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee and later mourned her death, a number of voices discussed the complexity of the monarchy’s legacy and debated whether this institution had a future at all. While supporters celebrated the Queen as a symbol of continuity and unity, others critiqued her role in upholding traditional societal structures and imperial inequalities.

The British Empire, which reached its height in the 19th and early 20th centuries, spanned smaller crown colonies and protectorates within Europe as well as vast territories in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. The monarchy’s role in this empire cannot be separated from the economic exploitation, cultural erasure, and political subjugation experienced by many colonised peoples. Yet, Queen Elizabeth II herself, as head of the Commonwealth when most colonies aimed for self-governance or became fully independent, has also been seen as a progressive figurehead in postcolonial discussions about international friendship and new collaborations between nations.

These conflicting views of the British monarchy can als be traced in the international Twittersphere's reactions to the Queen's funeral and King Charles's accession in September 2022. When the Twitter academic API was still available, Susan Schreibman, Costas Papadopoulos and Monika Barget scraped the trending hashtag #AbolishMonarchy between 8 and 19 September 2022 to collect a data set that reflects mostly negative perceptions of the British monarchy. Not all of the anti-monarchist sentiments voiced in these tweets are directly related to colonial history. They include other social and moral concerns such as the high expenses of the royal family or scandals surrounding the Queen's children and grandschildren. At the time, aristocratic racism towards Prince Harry's wife Meghan made global headlines, and Prince Andrew's involvement with sex-offender Jeffrey Eppstein had also come to public attention. So what role did postcolonial concerns play overall, and who addressed them on Twitter?

Using Voyant Tools, you can dive deeper into the diverse data set and uncover specifically postcolonial elements. You will need to look beyond some of the more obvious and frequent terms, paying close attention to mentions of race, national and regional identities, or the monarchy's present-day connection to authoritarian regimes.

Data Set (collected via the Twitter API)

The data set was collected via the official Twitter API in 2022 and is available both as a CSV table (including metadata) and a TXT file for distant reading. Some tweets are very short and emotional, consisting only in keywords that describe people's rejection of the monarchy, e.g.:

Unelected. Undemocratic. Unaccountable. Unnecessary.

Other tweets refer to specific historical details which you may need to research further, for example:

$45 Trillion was stolen from India alone, Shree Paradkar is right.

Also, most tweets use more than one hashtag, and you should also consider why certain other hashtags beyond #AbolishMonarchy were chosen, and what they mean in a postcolonial context, e.g.:

#WhyNotScotland

Questions for Data Analysis

Here are some research questions to explore through Voyant Tools, which will help uncover postcolonial key themes in the data:

1. What is the emotional tone of the tweets?

Is the criticism voiced in the tweets mostly fact-based or emotional? Do the tweets contain swear words or well-known political slogans? What are the dominant sentiments (e.g. "pride", "disappointment", "anger", or "resentment")?

2. What is the relationship between colonialism and the monarchy in these conversations?

   How do tweets link the monarchy to historical colonial power? Which regions or countries with a colonial past are mentioned? Use Voyant's "co-occurrence" tools (e.g. Links and Terms Berry) to analyse which terms often appear alongside “empire” or “colonial.”

3. How do users from former colonies engage with the monarchy compared to users in the UK?

   Is there a difference in how people from the Global South and those from the UK view the monarchy? The user names in the CSV file as well as usernames tagged in the tweets may give you an idea of people's backgrounds. When the colonial past is explicitly mentioned, what is discussed? Do people focus on economic issues, do they mention war and violence, or are they concerned about stolen cultural goods and neglected heritage?

4. Is neocolonialism criticised alongside historical colonialism?

   Are demands for abolishing the monarchy mostly associated the colonial past, or did Twitter users also mention neocolonial trends today? Consider that they may not mention this terms explicitly but speak about unfair global trade, labour exploitation, and the political sidelining of certain countries and ethnic groups.

5. What role does the British monarchy play in postcolonial identity?

   How do people frame the British monarchy in terms of identity and national consciousness? Do you think that the British monarchy still has an impact on how people with a colonial heritage see themselves and their communities?

Ideas for further data analysis: Studying the legacy of European monarchies in popular media

Beyond social media, it could be valuable to explore how popular media narratives, such as documentaries, dramatised films, and books, shape postcolonial discourses about European monarchies. For example, the ITV documentary The Queen’s Green Planet offers a deliberately positive view of the British monarchy’s role in environmentalism and (climate) diplomacy. By contrast, the Netflix series The Crown presents royal history as a soap opera with a focus on family entanglements and personal tragedies. You can certainly find similar media products for other European monarchies, too. The Dutch, Belgian and Spanish monarchies also have a prominent colonial past that may be worth studying through popular receptions. Even the Danish had oversea colonies and were involved in the slave trade. In 2023, the Nordic Council Film Prize went to the Danish film Empire by director Frederikke Aspöck, screenwriter Anna Neye, and producers Pernille Munk Skydsgaard, Nina Leidersdorff, and Meta Louise Foldager Sørensen. This film focuses on racism and power struggles during Denmark’s colonial control of St. Croix (West Indies) in 1848. Exploring how viewers react to such narratives, e.g. in YouTube comments, can be an interesting topic to explore also in a final essay.

Cited Works and Further Readings:

• Hall, C. (Ed.). (2000). Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; a reader. Routledge.
• Ittmann, K. (2025). Fueling empire: the British Imperial Oil Complex, 1886-1945. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198963271.001.000
• Cushion, S. (2025). Slavery in the British empire and its legacy in the modern world. Monthly Review Press.
• Stockwell, S. (2008). The British Empire: Themes and perspectives. Blackwell Publishing.
• Ukelina, B. U. (2017). The second colonial occupation: development planning and the legacies of British colonial rule in Nigeria. Lexington Books. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=1612104
• Umoren, I. D. (2025). Empire without end: a new history of Britain and the Caribbean (First Scribner hardcover edition). Scribner.