When I arrived in Britain in June 1979 as a scared nine-year-old fleeing revolution in Iran, two female figures dominated the country: the newly-elected prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and Queen Elizabeth II.

For a little girl who was leaving turmoil and a country that would soon turn the worst of its violence against its own women, it was, in retrospect, true liberation to enter a Britain ruled by two women. Thatcher’s image, her voice, and her policies came to define my childhood and teenage years – by the time she was deposed as head of the Conservative party, I was 21 and at university. The Queen’s reign, on the other hand, has spanned my whole life. Her image, her presence, her voice, heard every Christmas as my family like so many others gathered around the TV to watch her speech, has been a constant backdrop.

As the nation began absorbing her momentous passing, I was struck by the persistent dissent seeping through the wall-to-wall tributes. Voices condemning the late Queen as emblematic of the sins of British Empire and the exploitation of so many other countries and their resources. Inevitably, it made me reflect on my own relationship with the monarchy and its human embodiment – the fact the Queen’s reign was so long and steady that I didn’t scrutinise the institution far beyond the dutiful, much-loved matriarch with her crown and corgis. Now I’m faced with my own growing sense of ambivalence at Britain’s feudal system.

Perhaps it’s only through the death of this powerfully benign figurehead that we can finally face a moment of reckoning with Empire and its dark and complex legacy. Perhaps it is the stony gaze of a younger generation, less dazzled by the rituals and splendour of monarchy, that makes me super-sensitive to the colonial horror stories underlying the polite surface of Commonwealth. But as I flip though social media, I see more and more posts decrying the late Queen as the head of a system that raped vast swathes of the world. I have seen denouncements so strong that they portrayed the Queen as some sort of slave master general. And I’ve seen acquaintances bewildered at the fact so many West Indians, Pakistanis, Indians, South Africans and Irish flocked to join The Queue to pay respects as she lay in state. I’ve witnessed the contradictions close up. My best friend’s northern Irish grandmother, whose Belfast family once stored Sinn Fein’s munitions in their garage, adored the late Queen. How can we reconcile these contradictory forces now the figurehead is gone?

As an Iranian who’s spent the majority of my life in the UK, and has been formed by this country’s values as surely as I have by my ancestors’ Iranian blood, I find it hard to explain this dichotomy. Some friends don’t understand how we once-immigrants, or children of immigrants, can embrace the deceased Queen so wholeheartedly. Why don’t we hate her and the privileged system she represents?

When I started to travel back to Iran as an adult in the 1990s, I was struck by how my elderly aunts constantly brought the Queen into conversation. Almost any discussion about domestic politics in Iran ended with one saying: “Why don’t you ask your Queen? It’s all her doing.” I would secretly roll my eyes, stifling a snort of derision. As a Brit, I was used to thinking of the Queen as a figurehead with no real power. It was only when I started researching my book The Cypress Tree and the roots of the Iranian revolution that I began to see there was substance to my aunties’ claim.

The Queen’s reign was so long and steady that I didn’t scrutinise the institution far beyond the dutiful, much-loved matriarch with her crown and corgis

I gradually discovered that almost every incident and defining moment of change for my birth country had been orchestrated by Britain. While Iran was never an official colony of Britain, much of its past and present was directly formed by the UK’s imperialism. Back in the 1890s, Britain was given the concession to control all growth, sale and export of tobacco from Iran, imposing trade laws so punitive that the country’s citizens protested. The Tobacco Riots were a precursor to the Constitutional Revolution of Iran (1905). This saw my home country become the first in the region to write a constitution, to institute a parliament (majlis) and to demand a reduction in the powers of the Qajar Shahs who were selling the resources of the country to imperialist powers such as Britain and Czarist Russia. During those six years of revolution the Great Game between Russia and Britain saw a line drawn down the centre of my country, dividing up the two imperialist powers’ spheres of influence. Thus, ruthlessly limiting the amount of autonomy that the Constitutionalists could have.

Meanwhile, Englishman William Knox D’Arcy – fresh from making a fortune from the goldmines of Australia – won the concession to prospect for oil in southwest Iran in 1901. Lent financial support by Admiral Fisher, who was converting the British Royal Navy from coal to oil, D’Arcy finally struck oil in 1908 and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was born.

On the eve of the Great War in 1914, the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, persuaded the British government to buy a majority share in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, ensuring Britain’s naval forces had access to cheap oil. From then on, HM Treasury received 84 per cent of the profits of Iranian oil. Indeed, so vital was Iranian oil to Britain, that the foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, declared the Allies sailed to victory “on a sea of oil”. In 1920 Curzon pressed for a revision of D’Arcy’s original concession, to make sure all future wars would be won with the help of Persian oil. In 1951, at the time of Iran’s Oil Nationalisation Crisis, it was claimed that Britain had received more money from the profits of our oil in that past year alone than Iran had in the previous half-century. Indeed, the greatness of Britain that many of my British compatriots associate with the institutions set up after WWII – such as the Welfare State – was funded by proceeds from Britain’s overseas colonies, including the most lucrative of all: Iranian oil.

British meddling in my country didn’t stop with exploitation of our oil. It was Britain that installed the last Shah’s father, Reza Khan, (an illiterate army officer) on the Peacock Throne in the 1920s, putting out the embers of our Constitutional Revolution. And it was Britain that deposed Khan and replaced him with his glamorous son, Mohammad Reza Shah, in 1941. It was Britain, alongside Russia, that ignored Iranian neutrality in both world wars and, in order to protect their access to our oil, invaded and occupied Iran, leading to mass famine and the loss of nearly a million Iranian lives over the two wars. And it was Britain, alongside the US, which deposed our wildly popular, much-loved, democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who nationalised Iranian oil in 1951 – a precedent that set off the wave of nationalisation of countries’ assets that led to the Suez crisis. Mossadegh was not just popular in Iran, he was Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1952. It took Churchill’s re-election, and President Eisenhower succeeding the more sympathetic Truman in 1953, to activate Operation Ajax – the notorious op by which US and Britain fomented regime change in Tehran. The two countries deposed Mossadegh and brought back the Shah (who had run away during the Crisis), thereby giving the US their own chance to grab Iranian oil.

This history means that, in recent years, I’ve come to understand my aunties’ wariness of the Queen. Britain was the not-so hidden power behind the throne for so long in my country that a popular book My Uncle Napoleon, set during WWII, features a family patriarch who blames the British for every ill in our country. Despite Britain’s waning influence and America’s role as chief puppet-master, there are still people in Iran who remain convinced Britain is somehow pulling the strings. As I trace the roots of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and ponder why I’ve lived most of my life in exile from my country, all paths lead back to Britain’s imperialist expansion, its ruling institutions, the quashing of democratic movements in Iran, the exploitation of our natural resources, and the deliberate incitement of civil unrest to further the West’s goals.

Rather than blaming colonialism and exploitation on the monarchy, I would feel more comfortable in my adopted homeland if native Britons had a less simplistic view of this history

And yet my own story is inexorably woven together with Britain’s presence in Iran. My father was able to ride out of the Kurdish mountains and go south to Abadan (where Britain built the world’s largest oil refinery) to study at the Polytechnic established by the British. He was among the first wave of Iran’s brightest, who were sponsored by the Iranian state to be sent to British universities to study engineering, to bring that expertise back to Iran. He fell in love with post-war Britain in his five years at Birmingham university and his training there enabled him, on returning to Iran, to step into positions vacated by British bosses when Mossadegh nationalised our oil and Brits were barred from their posts.

Growing up in Abadan before the revolution there was a lively mix of foreign residents working for BP – as the APOC became. Furthermore, the long-term presence of the British, then the Americans and French, made Abadan the most culturally mixed, liberal and advanced city in Iran.

So perhaps it was logical that it was Britain we fled to when the revolution swept away the old – or indeed any – order in 1979. Britain took us in when we had to leave Iran and it is also Britain that has allowed me to live a free and independent life as a woman with a voice, able to enjoy free speech – this privilege we are lucky enough to call a right – and to write and speak and educate. Some of my sense that I can aspire, despite my sex, to positions of influence surely comes from the presence of the late Queen: constitutional head of state for the 43 years I have lived in Britain. Even the fact that I can lecture my fellow Britons on the evils this country has visited on mine, is, I know, a function of the freedom that I experience living here. When I promote The Cypress Tree, I always read out the section about Mossadegh and the Oil Nationalisation Crisis and I always have many in the audience who come to personally apologise for their country’s part in this. They wring their hands and feel bad about this unknown part of their own imperialist history.

I know that – rather than vilifying the late Queen and blaming historic racism, colonialism and exploitation on the monarchy – I would feel more comfortable in my adopted homeland if native Britons had a less simplistic view of this history. If they recognised it’s a history we share, that involves each other and make us inseparable. Every time I hear the anti-immigration rhetoric that the current government embraces, I flush with anger, knowing the institutions, like the NHS, that they flag as being under threat only came into existence via purloined resources from countries like mine. Countries from which the very refugees we turn away are fleeing.

And so, as an Iranian and British citizen watching the late Queen’s funeral, I mourned an old woman who was a constant backdrop to my life – even as I deplored the violence of the institution she represented. And my greatest wish is that ordinary Britons would educate themselves on the realities of Empire. Become more keenly aware of what our good fortune, advanced democracy and privileged lifestyles here are built on. We must all recognise that life and history and reality happen in the grey areas, in nuance and complexity, that the threads of our histories intertwine, and that a simplified perspective is never a complete one.

Kamin Mohammadi is a British-Iranian author, journalist, broadcaster, teacher and cultural curator. Her journalism has been nominated for a UK Amnesty Human Rights in Journalism award, and for a National Magazine Award by the prestigious American Society of Magazine Editors. Kamin has authored two books: “Bella Figura: How to Live”, Love and Eat the Italian Way” (currently in development for TV); and “The Cypress Tree: A Love Letter to Iran”, both published by Bloomsbury/ More info at kamin.co.uk