Until Irish independence in 1922, the country was a British colony. The reason for her extended absence is the fractious relationship Britain had with Ireland for much of the twentieth century, and for hundreds of prior years, too. She’s 85 now, yet this is the first time in her long reign that she has crossed the narrow seas to visit our neighbor to the west. I was reminded of this as Queen Elizabeth traveled to Ireland this week. That map at Oxford-which must now have gone, as its owner is retired-was more or less the limit of my exposure to my country’s imperial past during my formal education. Above the image was a line of large text that read, “How on earth did we get away with it?” Shaded red were all of Britain’s former overseas possessions, from India to swathes of Africa to North America. The continents were outlined in black on a white field. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford University my tutor-a deeply eccentric but profoundly decent man who claimed to both “loathe this century” and be surprised by the fact that he had lived to see it-had a map on his wall.
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