British Imperial Administration and the ‘Thin Crust of Order’: Society, Constitution, and Diplomacy in the Political Thought of Lord Elgin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay analyses the thought of Lord Elgin in relation to his transnational colonial service in Jamaica, Canada, China, Japan, and India between the 1840s and the 1860s. Elgin was implicated in the most eventful processes of the Victorian age: the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean, the implementation of “responsible government” in Canada, the Second Opium War, and the establishment of the Indian Raj. In the course of his 20-year imperial career, Elgin expressed original views on politics and society, which were first inspired by his knowledge of Aristotle, the Scottish Enlightenment, and Coleridge, then influenced by his militancy among the Peelite liberal conservatives, and eventually developed during his administration of the colonial empire. After detailing Elgin’s view of social order, this essay examines the constitution as a tool of government of colonial societies, and focuses on the figure of the Governor as a fundamental constitutional actor. The article concludes by considering Elgin’s liberal imperialism as a lens through which to rethink notions of civilization and barbarism on the imperial scale.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".