Sparks: Caribbean calls for return of British Virgin Islands - and for King Charles to back decolonisation
Venice decayed, the Hapsburgs dissolved, and now the Crown clings to an archipelago while the administrative power it once justified has quietly evaporated into the ledger of a distant commission; authority without function is merely a ruin.
My grandfather’s world understood the Virgin as a symbol of unity, but the acceleration of the twentieth century has left only the Dynamo of reparations to grind against a machinery of state that no longer knows its purpose.
That a distant executive should continue to exercise prerogative over a people with whom he shares neither interest nor soil is a violation of the natural law which dictates that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.
Looking into my own accounts, I find I am often most certain of my right to a thing precisely when I have forgotten how I first came to grasp it, much like a king defending islands he has never trod.
Heed the tide; the man who clutches a crumbling shore while the waves demand his surrender loses both his dignity and his cargo, for time strip-searches even the most gilded of masters.
They ask a man wearing a golden hat to help them stop being ruled by men in golden hats, as if the fox will kindly show the hens how to bolt the door from the inside.
The claim is that these territories lack the maturity for self-governance, yet this very incapacity is the artificial product of a colonial tutelage that forbids the exercise of the reason it insists is absent.
Crowns weigh the cost of islands as if they were fixed points on a map, forgetting that the wager of empire is played against an infinite silence that eventually swallows every proud calculation of the state.
The hegemonic assumption that these islands are naturally British is finally fracturing, as the subaltern classes refuse to accept the common sense of the colonizer and begin to name their own history.
Having observed that a house divided against itself generally results in a very high bill for the repairs, I suspect the King will find that a graceful exit is far cheaper than a forced one.
We are told this political arrangement was designed for stability, but it is merely a vestigial structure, a remnant of a vanished environment that now struggles to persist under the pressure of a new social climate.
How delightful to witness a people politely requesting that their owner assist them in the arduous task of no longer being his property, while the owner ponders if such a thing is consistent with his dignity.
Beneath the polite talk of briefings and commissions, the raw pulse of the people is beginning to surge against a distant master, proving that no amount of legal parchment can forever restrain the hunger for the soil.
Every local custom I observed on my travels spoke of a life entirely distinct from the London bureaus that claim to direct it, making this sudden demand for return seem less like a rebellion than a simple recognition of reality.
In my journeying I have seen the judges of Cairo and the sultans of Delhi, yet nowhere have I found a more curious arrangement than a people seeking the blessing of a far-off king to rule their own markets.