Constituting a Settler Empire: Written Constitutions and Reordering the British Empire, 1860-1930
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores settler constitution-writing in British settler colonies of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I focus on constitution-writing moments in each settler colony. Through them, I argue that a shared settler constitutionalism emerged. This was a vernacular constitutionalism that was produced in multiple places, through a wide variety of sources, and by a diverse group of people who engaged in a shared, if asymmetrical conversation. It contributed to the reordering of an increasingly global British Empire and was at the heart of important strands of British imperial political thought, including liberalism and humanitarianism. Settler constitutions were an important way that the British Empire and settler colonies participated in new forms of global political thinking driven by the proliferation of written constitutions. Constitutions were flexible political technologies that were used to consolidate, expand, and justify the British Empire. They were also a powerful tool to challenge the empire on the very grounds that it attempted to justify its existence. Constitutional history produced a powerful teleological narrative of progress that included both the colony to nation story and the gradual spread of constitutions and democracy from Britain outwards to the colonies. This dissertation challenges these teleologies by following ideas and debates about constitutions through the webs of empire to show how settler constitutionalism operated as a technology of empire and facilitated racialized visions of civilization. Although often viewed as benevolent texts and understood in national frames, constitutions were inherently global texts. They facilitated the expansion and consolidation of exclusionary settler states. Revisiting the history of settler constitutions from this perspective allows for a critical reassessment of a central element of modern politics and the continuing legacies of imperialism and colonialism.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".