[forapurpose]

> The British empire was a parliamentary democracy, and it has done a lot of truly abhorrent stuff over the 18th and 19th centures.

A detail: They had a monarch with real power in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as a parliament.

[vkou]

The question of "Who has power in the British Empire" was settled pretty definitively back in 1649, when Charles I lost his head.

If you want to split hairs, we can say that it was settled more definitively in 1661, when Cromwell's head was put on a spike outside Westminster hall.

The empire was governed by Parliament.

The queen/king had some power, sure. Today, Larry Page has some power. Rupert Murdoch has power. The Koch brothers have power. Aristocrats, throughout history have had power, even if they have no formal posts in government. Just because a few well-connected individuals have power in a country, doesn't mean that it isn't a democracy.

[dragonwriter]

> The question of "Who has power in the British Empire" was settled pretty definitively back in 1649, when Charles I lost his head.

> If you want to split hairs, we can say that it was settled more definitively in 1661, when Cromwell's head was put on a spike outside Westminster hall.

Those are both wrong. It was settled in 1911 when George V made clear he would intervene by appointing new life peers if necessary to assure passage of reforms which would strip the House of Lords of its power to reject legislation, which finally settled that the Commons would henceforth be effectively the sole decisive ruling body of the Empire.

Prior to that, the Commons (democratic, approximately) and Lords (decidedly not) had an ebb and flow of power, with the Lord's sometimes being more powerful and the Commons sometimes being more powerful (including, for a period, the Commons abolishing the Lords with Cromwell's support, but that, like Cromwell, didn't last.)

[forapurpose]

It wasn't a binary change, from absolute power to none. Those events represented shifts in degree from the crown to Parliament. AFAIK, King George III still had significant power, for example, during the American Revolution.

Also, I've never heard the UK of that era referred to as a democracy. Here it says that under Queen Victoria (1837-1901), the role of the monarch transformed from one that exercised real power to one that was purely ceremonial:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Victoria-queen-of-Unite...