Debating Settler Constitutionalism: Consent, Consultation, and Writing a Transatlantic Debate, 1822–1828
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1822, Robert Wilmot, the undersecretary of state for the colonies, introduced a bill to unite Upper and Lower Canada in the British House of Commons. In doing so, he was proposing not just an intercolonial union but a new constitution. He believed that because the Canadas’ constitution was granted by an Act of Parliament in 1791 it could be changed by Parliament without colonial consultation or consent. Whig parliamentarians and colonists contested this interpretation and raised questions about consent and the status of colonial constitutions. These debates in the 1820s reveal just how muddied thinking about colonial constitutions and consultation had become. Lower Canadian opposition to the bill has received significant attention from historians, yet this attempt at constitutional change also forced Upper Canadians to take unexpected positions, including interpreting the 1791 act as a written charter. Through these transatlantic debates, they were continuing to fashion a settler interpretation of British constitutionalism. This article traces these ideas by examining the movement of news and rumours through emerging, intertwined colonial and imperial public spheres, which illustrate the permeability of the line between public and private information. Inserting this failed constitution-writing effort into the longer history of Canadian constitutions sheds light on the limits to imperial intervention and encourages a broader rethinking of Canadian constitutional histories and the role of empire in a long nineteenth century.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| 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".