Redeemers or Destroyers of Empire? The Irish, State-Directed Colonization, and the Fight for a British-Canadian West, 1880–1883
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes a proposal to have impoverished western Irish families then suffering from famine and distress colonize the Canadian prairies. London and Ottawa hoped that this “New Ireland” would solve several problems simultaneously. Their masculine, yeoman, loyal, “British” character would be rejuvenated as they pioneered homesteads. A state-directed colonization would ensure that this redemption occurred under the watchful eye of London and Ottawa. As they were rehabilitated, they would serve simultaneously as pioneer producers, consumers of British-made goods, “kith and kin” bolsterers of “Britishness,” and as soldier-settlers defending Canada and the Empire against Irish nationalism, the United States, French Canadians, the Métis, First Peoples, and immigrants from continental Europe. Yet this scheme never materialized. The British were publicly torn between rehabilitating the Irish and ridding itself of a poor, rebellious population. This led Canadians to believe the British would “shovel paupers” onto their shores. The Irish regarded the scheme as nothing more than “transportation” wrapped in a more benign guise. They were also caught between the ethos of self-help and the “New Imperialism” and growing state paternalism. If they could not be redeemed, as Social Darwinism and continued Irish unrest was arguing, then they might actually debase Britishness, and even potentially join the Métis and First Peoples in their disaffection. A growing Canadian identity led many to believe Canada would be better off settling seasoned American and New Immigrant farmers instead. The assisted Irish might undercut western Canadians' hard-won economic and social status as yeomen. Employers too routinely dismissed the Irish as unreliable, lazy, impertinent, and irredeemable.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".