Elizabeth II maintains 15 reigns after the conversion of Barbados that replaced her by Sandra Mason

After the transition this Tuesday from Barbados to the status of republic, Queen Elizabeth II continues to be the head of state of 15 countries – including the United Kingdom – of which the most important are Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The small Caribbean island replaced the 95-year-old British sovereign as head of state with the inauguration of the jurist Sandra Mason as the country’s first president.

In this way, the former British colony of just 280,000 inhabitants has changed its status from constitutional monarchy to that of republic.

This transition also coincides with the 55th anniversary of the independence of the Caribbean island, which was a British colony until 1966 and has maintained its ties with the Crown to this day.

Barbados joins the status of other Caribbean countries

Barbados, which plans to remain part of the Commonwealth of Nations, is the fourth Caribbean country to replace Elizabeth II with a president.

Guyana already did, which became a Republican on February 23, 1970; Trinidad and Tobago, which broke ties with the British monarchy on August 1, 1976, and also Dominica, whose transition was carried out on November 3, 1978.

The rest of the nations in which the British monarch continues to reign, although playing a purely ceremonial role, are Canada, Australia and New Zealand (the most important), to which are added, in the Caribbean, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas , Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines; and in the Pacific, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Tuvalu.

These nations, former colonies of the British Empire, became independent although they maintained their relationship with the monarchy of the United Kingdom.

Most of those colonies and territories under British rule became independent in the decades after World War II, and many became constitutional monarchies, keeping Elizabeth II as queen and head of state.

In these kingdoms, the role of the queen as head of state is above all symbolic and is subject to the legal system of the authorities of each state.

According to some historians and experts, some kingdoms that preserve the monarchy have done so because their institutions have been able to evolve from semi-colonial self-government to obtain full sovereignty.

Furthermore, those kingdoms inherited the British parliamentary system of government, in which there is a clear separation between the head of Government and the head of state.

At the opening ceremony of the new session of the Parliament of Barbados, Sandra Mason said that the time had come to “completely leave the colonial past behind”, while other analysts consider that behind the decision to become a republic there are factors like the rejection of racism and other forms of oppression and less attachment to the monarchy.

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