The Empire as a Social Machine: Robert Wilmot-Horton on Emigration, Population and Capital Accumulation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the activities of Robert Wilmot-Horton as Under-Secretary in the Colonial Office (1821–1828). His support for emigration policies has been the subject of classic scholarship in the history of economic ideas and policy-making. By emphasising the relevance of Thomas Robert Malthus’s intellectual achievements on the relationship between poverty, emigration and capital accumulation – on which Wilmot-Horton relied – this work aims to illuminate the motives that led him to seek intellectual and legislative support for a plan that would allow the Irish and British poor to emigrate to the settler colony of Upper Canada with State assistance. To fully appreciate Wilmot-Horton’s contribution to the history of British imperial administration, it is thus crucial to link the emigration debate with the Colonial Office’s contemporary attempt to reform land administration in settler colonies. This proves the centrality that Wilmot-Horton ascribed to artificial legislative intervention in promoting the affirmation of market relations throughout the empire, thereby ensuring social and political stability in the motherland. Finally, this paper assesses key points of Wilmot-Horton’s emigration schemes and Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s later theories of ‘systematic colonization,’ shedding light on the ways in which the former considered emigration a meeting point between scientific principles and practical administration.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| 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".