The Commonwealth (or Commonwealth of Nations) is a unique grouping of 56 developed and developing nations, comprising 30 per cent of the world’s population spread across a quarter of the world’s land mass on every continent. Many members were once part of the British Empire.

The modern Commonwealth was born in 1949 when India, on gaining independence and republican status, agreed to remain in the Commonwealth based on ‘free association’ and ‘equality’, with the British Monarch becoming ‘a symbol of the free association of independent members nations, and as such, Head of the Commonwealth’.