Conservatism and British imperialism in India: finding the local roots of empire in Britain and India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the importance of political conservatism in shaping the ideological and political foundations of British imperialism in India between 1857 and 1914. From the Indian Revolt to the rise of Indian nationalism, it examines how British and Indian conservatives attempted to define a conceptual and institutional framework of empire which politically opposed liberal imperialism to the First World War. It relies upon a biographical analysis to examine how intellectual configurations defined distinct political positions on Indian empire. This study reveals the extent that local conservative inclination and action, through political actors such as Lord Ellenborough, Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Mayo, Lord Lytton, the Kathiawar States, Roper Lethbridge, and M.M. Bhownaggree, shaped public and partisan discourse on empire. It argues that British and Indian conservatives evoked shared principles centered in locality, prescription, and imagination to challenge, mollify, and supplant the universal and centralizing ambitions of liberal imperialists and nationalists with the employment of pre-modern ideas and institutions. It is argued that this response to liberalism conditioned their shared contribution and collaboration towards an imperial framework predicated principally upon respecting and supporting local autonomy and traditional authority in a hierarchical and divided India. This formulated political positions and policy on Indian empire which advocated for the state’s primacy, paternal local authority and property obligation, and veneration for the transcendent qualities of tradition and religion. Moreover, this framework conditioned a challenge to a European civilizational definitions of race and identity, with an incorporative and vertical identity and subjecthood determined by a state’s, group’s, or individual’s national belonging as well as loyalty and obligation to the Crown.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".