Imperial conversations: linking the Caribbean, South Asia and North America through the monuments to William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, Vice-Admiral Charles Watson, and George Montagu Dunk, 2nd Earl of Halifax, c. 1801, 1933 and 2026
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1933 John Flaxman’s monument to William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield (1793–1801), was relocated from the central aisle of the north transept to the west aisle, where it now triangulates the monument to Vice-Admiral Charles Watson (1760–63), designed by James Stuart and executed by Peter Scheemakers, and John Bacon’s monument to George Montagu Dunk, 2nd Earl of Halifax (1782). This article explores the impact of this relocation on interpretations of Mansfield’s legacy in the Westminster Abbey pantheon. It challenges Mansfield’s conventional hegemonic presentation as an abolitionist and demonstrates how this characterization can be critiqued by interrogating the monument’s new surrounding contexts. Sculptural and biographical intersections between the Mansfield, Watson and Halifax monuments activate Mansfield’s personal familial connections to the Caribbean and professional judicial interactions with the British enslavement and transatlantic trafficking trades, reflecting more broadly the global imperial intersections which comprised the British imperial world. Hence, this article demonstrates how contested imperial legacies in the abbey pantheon can be extracted and scrutinized by engaging with nuanced conversations between monuments which are often overlooked by conventional methodologies that focus on individual monuments in isolation.
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 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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".