On Thursday, many in Britain will enjoy the start of a four-day holiday weekend to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee. The 96-year-old is the longest-reigning British monarch, having served 70 years on the throne.

We consider the future of the British monarchy and the Commonwealth, an association of 54 countries that the queen has long championed with a roundtable of experts: Phillip Murphy, professor of British and Commonwealth history at the University of London and director of history and policy at the Institute of Historical Research, and Kristina Hinds, a newly-appointed senator in Barbados and head of the department in the faculty of social sciences at the University of the West Indies, and Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, a nonprofit independent research foundation in Canada.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

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