Black Students in Imperial Britain: The African Institute, Colwyn Bay, 1889–1911, by Robert Burroughs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This very good book is about a school for African children and young adults that operated in Colwyn Bay, North Wales, from 1889 to 1911, known initially as the Congo Training Institute or Congo House and later renamed the African Training Institute. The major objectives of the author, Robert Burroughs, are to advance our understanding of the imperial ‘civilizing mission’, to reveal the meaning and consequences of humanitarian missions for the British as well as for Africans, and to demonstrate the agency of the students enrolled in the Institute’s programme. The Congo Training Institute was founded by the Rev. William Hughes, a Baptist pastor, who had served as a missionary in Africa but had been forced to abandon this work owing to ill-health. He sought to carry on the goal of evangelical humanitarianism by establishing Congo House for the training of young Africans to return to Africa as missionaries. As the Institute required large donations from sympathetic Britons to operate, Hughes devoted enormous efforts to raising money. One of the leading arguments of the book is that a reciprocal exchange arose between students on the one hand and the Institute and its donors on the other, in which providing humanitarian aid yielded returns for both parties. Imperial philanthropy obviously served to legitimate British imperialism. In addition, the Institute’s students reciprocated by expressing their gratitude, extolling the generosity of donors, and affirming the superiority of the culture they were imbibing. More than that, however, Burroughs argues that missionary movements ‘became an integral and intimate part of national and other self-identities’ (p. 9). The goal to civilise others was tied to the goal ‘to civilize the British self’ (p. 84).
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".