‘Saviour’ of the Empire: Jan Smuts’s Conceptualisation of the British Commonwealth of Nations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the time of the First World War, the British Empire was in a phase of transition away from central rule from London over all dependencies. For some decades the self-governing dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) had been given increasing autonomy over their domestic affairs. In return for their sacrifices as participants in the war, the dominions were expecting to receive more power over foreign policy and defence issues, which would be the next step in their progress towards independence. The idea that the United Kingdom and the dominions should form a Commonwealth of Nations within the British Empire was taking root. David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, invited the dominion leaders to an Imperial War Conference that took place in London from March 1917. Jan Smuts was nominated by Louis Botha’s cabinet to represent South Africa at the conference. As a result of his success as theatre commander of the Allied forces in East Africa he received an overwhelming hero’s welcome in London. He became Lloyd George’s right-hand man. At the Imperial War Conference, he stood out as a leader with exceptional qualities. In a series of highly publicised speeches, Smuts emerged as the most influential orator among the participants in the debate about the future of the Empire. In a famous speech at a banquet for both Houses of the British Parliament in London on 15 May 1917 he detailed his proposals for the envisaged British Commonwealth of Nations. He rejected the creation of an imperial federation in favour of an alliance of equal states. In this article, Smuts’ conceptualisation of the Commonwealth is analysed from the perspectives of his holistic thinking, his internationalism, and his views about race.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".