The constitutions of settlers: Alex Martinborough, ‘Writing Settler Constitutions, Debating Imperial Responsibility, and Managing the Conscience of Parliamentary Empire, c.1860–1910’, Parliamentary History, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The constitutions of settlers: Alex Martinborough, ‘Writing Settler Constitutions, Debating Imperial Responsibility, and Managing the Conscience of Parliamentary Empire, c.1860–1910’, Parliamentary History, 2025

04Mar25

Abstract: This article explores how settler self-government and written constitutions provoked questions about the responsibilities towards Indigenous peoples and the role of British parliament in the imperial constitution. It traces how British and settler commentators drew connections between colonies in their responses to Indigenous and humanitarian critiques of imperial policy, contributing to changing ideas about constitutions, self-government, and the future of empire. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, self-government was a central component of British political thinking.Debates over self-government raised important questions with moral and ethical implications that politicians and public commentators grappled with throughout the empire. British politicians used self-government as a justification for empire and to distance themselves from responsibility for the injustices of settler colonialism. Constitutions were a flexible political technology that were used to justify imperial inaction and to manage the imperial conscience while facilitating a belief among British politicians that a legal empire could also be a moral one. Such visions never materialised. This article revisits the historic and continuing relationship between democracy, constitutions, and settler colonialism. It argues that as Britons debated the importance of self-government and colonial constitutions, seemingly settled constitutional ideas were deeply contested and remade through intercolonial debates.

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