Writing Settler Constitutions, Debating Imperial Responsibility, and Managing the Conscience of Parliamentary Empire, c.1860–1910*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores how settler self‐government and written constitutions provoked questions about the responsibilities towards Indigenous peoples and the role of British parliament in the imperial constitution. It traces how British and settler commentators drew connections between colonies in their responses to Indigenous and humanitarian critiques of imperial policy, contributing to changing ideas about constitutions, self‐government, and the future of empire. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, self‐government was a central component of British political thinking. Debates over self‐government raised important questions with moral and ethical implications that politicians and public commentators grappled with throughout the empire. British politicians used self‐government as a justification for empire and to distance themselves from responsibility for the injustices of settler colonialism. Constitutions were a flexible political technology that were used to justify imperial inaction and to manage the imperial conscience while facilitating a belief among British politicians that a legal empire could also be a moral one. Such visions never materialised. This article revisits the historic and continuing relationship between democracy, constitutions, and settler colonialism. It argues that as Britons debated the importance of self‐government and colonial constitutions, seemingly settled constitutional ideas were deeply contested and remade through intercolonial debates.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.006 |
| 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".