{"id":1168513,"date":"2018-04-25T10:35:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-25T10:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"urn:bbc:podcast:p0657c33"},"modified":"2018-04-25T10:35:00","modified_gmt":"2018-04-25T10:35:00","slug":"imperial-echo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2018\/04\/25\/imperial-echo\/","title":{"rendered":"Imperial Echo"},"content":{"rendered":"With the closing ceremonial of the 2018 London Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting barely over, BBC radio\u2019s Royal Correspondent Jonny Dymond excavates the Commonwealth of Nation\u2019s 19th Century origins in the British Empire and its formal institution in 1949 as a post-colonial worldwide network of states \u2018free and equal\u2019 within the organisation.\n\nSome have joked that the long shadow of its colonial origins has made it the \u2018after-care service of Empire\u2019. And with Her Majesty the Queen as its Head, the Commonwealth in the 1980s and 1990s became a powerful tool in the pursuit of majority rule in Zimbabwe and South Africa. But since then it has struggled to clearly define itself for the closely interconnected 21st Century.\n\nJonny Dymond samples the colour and the conversation of the London summit, visits the institution\u2019s palatial London home, Marlborough House, and talks to Secretary General Patricia Scotland about the Commonwealth\u2019s value in the modern world.\n\n(Photo: Prime Minister Theresa May chairs a meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) in London, 2018. Credit: Getty Images)\n<p class=\"syndicated-attribution\">This post was originally published on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/p0657c33\">The Documentary Podcast<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With the closing ceremonial of the 2018 London Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting barely over, BBC radio\u2019s Royal Correspondent Jonny Dymond excavates the Commonwealth of Nation\u2019s 19th Century origins in the British Empire and its formal instituti&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1527,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168513"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1527"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1168513"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1599204,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168513\/revisions\/1599204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1168513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1168513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1168513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}