Expressions of Sovereignty: Law and Authority in the Making of the Overseas British Empire, 1576-1640
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis contributes to the body of literature that investigates the making of the British empire, circa 1576-1640. It argues that the crown was fundamentally involved in the establishment of sovereignty in overseas territories because of the contemporary concepts of empire, sovereignty, the royal prerogative, and intemationallaw. According to these precepts, Christian European rulers had absolute jurisdiction within their own territorial boundaries (internal sovereignty), and had certain obligations when it carne to their relations with other sovereign states (external sovereignty). The crown undertook these responsibilities through various "expressions of sovereignty". It employed writers who were knowledgeable in international law and European overseas activities, and used these interpretations to issue letters patent that demonstrated both continued royal authority over these territories and a desire to employ legal codes that would likely be approved by the international community. The crown also insisted on the erection of fortifications and approved of the publication of semiotically charged maps, each of which served the function of showing that the English had possession and effective control over the lands claimed in North and South America, the North Atlantic, and the East and West Indies. Finally, the crown engaged in diplomatic negotiations with other colonizing European powers, during which its envoys justified British overseas activities using an embryonic, common legal language in order to bring about the consensus of the international community. Because of the crown's expressions of internal and external sovereignty, this study concludes that the congeries of overseas territories ruled by Queen Elizabeth and the early Stuarts were -legally, structurally, and nominally, if not culturally, politically, and ideologically - an "empire". This conclusion challenges those of recent historians who have questioned both the crown's involvement in new found lands, and the efficacy of international law in the establishment of overseas sovereignty.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".