The Doctrine of Lapse in Nagpur: Decision-Making at the Periphery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reinterprets the Doctrine of Lapse not as a uniform legal code or mere pretext for aggrandisement but as a situational instrument fashioned and applied at the colonial periphery. Centring on the annexation of Nagpur (1853–54), it reconstructs the Government of India’s deliberations through correspondence, legal memoranda, and council minutes to show that questions of right occupied the bulk of the formal argumentation, even as considerations of utility remained present. Annexation proceeded where three locally specific conditions converged: Nagpur’s dependent status under paramountcy; the dynasty’s own, well-attested succession norms; and the absence of a clear, timely act or declaration of adoption. The debate exposed competing imperial visions within the colonial state: Dalhousie and Halliday advanced a liberal-imperial case for direct rule and ‘improvement’, while Colonel John Low defended order and legitimacy through indirect rule and deference to indigenous law. The Court of Directors ultimately endorsed a conclusion already set in motion at Calcutta, underscoring the administrative autonomy of the periphery amid constraints of distance and communication. By recovering the legal reasoning and institutional politics that structured the Nagpur settlement, the article challenges functionalist, metropole-centred accounts and aligns with a Cambridge-school emphasis on provincial dynamics. It thus reframes the Doctrine of Lapse as contingent, argued, and variably enacted – an outcome of periphery-based governance rather than a mechanical, metropolitan fiat.
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 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 | 0.005 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".