These perennial patterns of change are important enough. Progress in all branches of the natural and medical sciences since 1926, when Elizabeth was born, has been extraordinary. In the 1920s, science-fiction writers might have imagined a man on the moon, animal cloning, IVF treatment or smartphones, but few would have thought all of these things possible within a few decades. The spread of education has transformed possibilities for populations worldwide (there are now a staggering 25,000 universities). And the development of the capitalist economic model has made most people in the developed world richer than they could have dreamed of at the time of Elizabeth\u2019s birth.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the 1920s, the world seemed poised at a dramatic moment, when the promise of a new economic order generated by Soviet communism posed a seemingly unstoppable challenge to the old-fashioned, laissez-faire industrial order. Few then would have confidently predicted that the model of modern finance capitalism would spread literally worldwide, even in nominally communist states \u2013 few but for Karl Marx<\/a> himself, who predicted long beforehand that capitalism would become a world system before its revolutionary transformation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n These trends were all discernible well before 1926, and have continued uninterrupted during the lifetime of the Queen, spreading globally to reach regions and populations that were bypassed by most of the advantages of the modern age in the 1920s. Such trends are not to be confused with those changes that have helped to rewrite the history of the modern age. Of these, perhaps the most visible transformation has been the end of hundreds of years of territorial imperialism and of empire as a model of political organisation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When Elizabeth was born, the British empire<\/a> was the largest territorial empire the world had ever seen. Postage stamps bearing her grandfather<\/a>\u2019s portrait were used across six continents. In Europe, six other states possessed overseas empires; in Asia, Japan imitated them. It was still assumed that ruling subject peoples regarded as racially inferior was a permanent feature of the world order, and in the 1930s Germany, Italy and Japan set out separately to enlarge their territorial empires to challenge those of Britain and France. In effect, this was the last gasp of imperialism as a world order. The Allies fought the Second World War<\/a> to overturn German, Italian and Japanese empires. In doing so, the British and French empires faced the unavoidable conclusion that, in destroying Axis empires, the whole imperial structure was itself doomed. Elizabeth never became empress of India; the subcontinent achieved independence in 1947, the year Elizabeth and Prince Philip were married<\/a>.<\/p>\n Although Queen Elizabeth has been titular head of the Commonwealth<\/a> since 1952, this has been the decoration necessary to mask the transformation of the world to one of independent sovereign nation states. The independence in 1975 of Portuguese Mozambique and Angola (Portugal\u2019s was the first and last European empire) brought to a conclusion five centuries in which \u201cempire\u201d had been a dominant motif. By 1970, Britain\u2019s empire consisted of little more than a string of islands worldwide, and by the 1980s many of those were independent. The public was much less affected by the change than might have been expected. The loss of imperial status made little difference to the position of the monarchy.<\/p>\n The second of these fundamental changes has been in the nature of warfare. Not accidentally, a great deal of the warfare of earlier ages, and the First and Second World Wars in the 20th century, was fought chiefly by European states whose identity was bound up with ambitions for imperial survival or succession, and whose populations mainly assumed that war was part of the natural order. When Elizabeth was born, the prevailing military culture, widely accepted by civilian populations, was one of total war \u2013 a concept of the modern age in which a state organised its whole society and economy to fight a war, whatever the cost.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The mass armies and economic sacrifices that characterised the war of 1914\u201318 left an indelible stamp on the postwar populations of those states that had taken part. When war planning began again in the 1930s, every potential combatant power thought in terms of devoting all its human, intellectual and economic resources to the grim task of waging it. Though small groups of pacifist and anti-war lobbyists thought such conflict was an affront to civilisation and should never be waged again, the general assumption was that modern war, waged with mass armies and massive expenditure, was a democratic war \u2013 one that ought to involve the whole population. When bombs fell on and around Buckingham Palace<\/a>, the popular view was that monarch and people shared a common fate: a \u201cpeople\u2019s war\u201d that was, paradoxically, also the king\u2019s war.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n No one now expects the major states to wage total war, mobilising all the resources of economy and people, fighting to the bitter end. Although the nuclear threat has hovered over the whole period of the Queen\u2019s reign, the prospect of nuclear war has withered away with the end of the Cold War. Warfare itself has not disappeared \u2013 there have been small wars, wars of Cold War containment, civil wars, border disputes, United Nations interventions, even the Falklands War<\/a> in 1982, Britain\u2019s last international war waged alone \u2013 but the wars between the powers that characterised centuries of global history are no longer viewed as the usual state of things. Elizabeth II is the first British monarch not to face the prospect or reality of war with other major powers. Violence in the current global order stems from ideological confrontation and terror: a product of the collapse of so-called \u201cfailed states\u201d, and a threat from which no state is immune, but not a threat likely to prompt a return to massive state-on-state conflict now or in the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n The third major change \u2013 the increasing role and power of the state itself \u2013 has been bound up with developments prompted by the collapse of empire and the experience of world war. The former accelerated the evolution of a world order based on the nation state as the key form of political association. The United Nations, founded in 1945 in San Francisco and subsequently based in New York City, now represents nearly 200 nation states. When Elizabeth was born, there were wide areas of the world\u2019s population where the state intervened indirectly, if coercively, through imperial control; in other parts of the world the state did what it had always done \u2013 raising revenues and imposing justice but not much more. In the developed industrial world, the state only grew in importance with the demands of wartime mobilisation that made it necessary to provide adequate statistics, to control areas of production, and to impose nationwide controls and restrictions. It is this model of the state \u2013 as a dominant and intrusive presence in the everyday lives of all citizens \u2013 that has been adopted in all the many new nation states that emerged out of the collapse of empire.<\/p>\n Looking back over the past century, it is difficult now to imagine communities in which the role of the state was limited: controls over movement less rigid; intervention in economic and commercial life restricted to things essential for the state\u2019s functions; welfare, health and safety largely left to local communities; and the obligations of the subject or citizen relatively simple. The world of states has been transformed. The modern state as a set of regulations, institutions and practices has emerged quite independent of political forms or ideologies. The most intrusive and vindictive of states flourished under Adolf Hitler and Stalin, and under dictatorship everywhere. But, even in modern democratic states with a developed notion of civil society and a progressive sense of liberty, the state has come to control, regulate, discipline and examine the daily life of its citizens at every point. It does so in the name of a putative collective good, but the state is the instrument for ensuring that the way that collective good is defined cannot easily be challenged.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The emergence of the modern Chinese state is perhaps a good example, where the collective interest in conformity is stressed by the state apparatus and dissent is regularly penalised. The instruments now available to a state in terms of surveillance and intelligence are vast and are used to marginalise dissent or, in the case of the conflict with international terrorism, to put a class of perpetrators beyond conventional law. This is the case for all states, whatever their political complexion. The paradox of democratic claims to stand for liberty is captured in the American detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, a permanent reminder of the extraordinary power now exercised by states and the incapacity of its citizens to challenge it.<\/p>\n That power has been recently tested in one of the most dramatic global experiences in the Queen\u2019s lifetime. The pandemic of the SARS-derived Covid-19 virus, first identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019, has exposed just how fragile the modern world is in response to a global shock for which there was little preparation or forewarning. In Britain, the response was likened to the Blitz<\/a>, when people pulled together to cope in the face of adversity \u2013 a reality that the Queen had experienced as\u00a0<\/span>a young princess in 1940. The analogy is not an ideal one, but both have involved mass death (indeed, the pandemic has killed more than the Blitz), broken families, a massive strain on the available healthcare system, and close state monitoring of public behaviour. The response globally, though by no means uniformly successful, illustrates the extraordinary progress of medical science in supplying vaccines within months of the outbreak, and the degree to which populations can act collectively to mitigate the impact. A few years before the Queen was born, so-called \u201cSpanish flu<\/a>\u201d killed at least 20 million worldwide. Covid-19 might have done the same, had weaker state structures and poorer medical facilities been in place. 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