Colonial collaborators: Britain and the Catholic Church in Trinidad, c. 1820–1840
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Trinidad, a predominantly Catholic and Francophone island, became a British colony in 1802. The lynchpin of the Catholic Church’s authority and influence in the region, Trinidad’s religious culture was defined by powerful racial tensions. Francis de Ridder, a Roman Catholic priest, was born in 1800 to a slave mother and a Belgian-born planter father. As a priest and free person of colour in Trinidad between 1825 and the early 1830s, his experience reveals much about the complex, yet collaborative relationship that existed between the Catholic Church and Britain’s colonial office. This relationship, which expanded significantly between 1820 and the early 1840s, was informed by demographic change and the reorganization of ecclesiastical structures. The de Ridder case is used here as a springboard for exploring some of the ways that slaves and free people of colour were excluded from religious practice and Church authority structures. In working closely with colonial officials on the ground in Trinidad, these Catholic leaders, who were often bishops or their coadjutors, embedded the Church within the governing structures of elite white society. What emerges is a picture of a Church whose missionary leadership actively pushed non-whites to the periphery of the story of its global spread.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".