Chapter 2: The British royal family and the colonial empire from the Georgians to Prince George
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There has been a recent surge of interest amongst historians in the relationship between the British monarchy and the empire. Despite its novelty, however, this new historiography rests on some familiar foundations, tending to see the imperial monarchy as an exercise in spectacle and 'invented tradition', and a product of the 'new imperialism', c. 1870–1914. This chapter places the topic of crown and colonies in a different, longer-term perspective. It argues that the English (then British) Crown, much like its continental counterparts, had a significant influence over the expansion of empire from the sixteenth century onwards. By the nineteenth century, the royal prerogative over the church and army in the colonies had extended as dominion grew, and the court and royal family exercised influence over colonial administration. One reason for this was the extent of indigenous forms of kingship and native monarchy in many parts of the empire. Especially as a female monarch, Queen Victoria was seen as offering the cloak of protection, exemplified here by case-studies drawn from New Zealand and India. When rival European empires consolidated their realms after 1860 -- notably Italy and Germany -- Queen Victoria and her advisors attempted to do the same for the overseas colonial empire. By focusing so much on charting the origins of the modern twentieth century Commonwealth, historians have overlooked the deeper roots of Britain's monarchical empire before 1870.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".