Meaning and Markets: Hunting, Economic Development and British Imperialism in Maritime Travel Narratives to 1870
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PROMOTING THE SETTLEMENT IN 1624 OF WHAT are now the Maritime Provinces and the Gaspe Peninsula, Sir William Alexander promised gentlemen a life with “all sorts of objects to satisfie the varietie of desires. I might speake of the sport that may bee had by Hunting, Hawking, Fishing, and Fowling”. As commodities of “forreine Traffique”, the targets of such sport offered merchants “a great benefit” they could claim “without dispossessing others” because the existing inhabitants did not “appropriate to themselves any peculiar ground, but . . . runne like beasts after beasts, seeking no soile, but onely after their prey”.1 Hunting was at once an activity of sport, profit and subsistence – a mark of social rank, an object of commercial exchange and the meanest form of production. Later, it became a magnet for tourists as well. Representations of hunting were central to the economic and cultural construction of empire in the Maritimes. Who hunted, how and for what purpose invested hunting with divergent utilitarian and ritualistic meanings.2 The former emphasized the creation of use or exchange value from a physical environment of exploitable resources. The latter emphasized the symbolic where “nature” served as a special moral or aesthetic realm. As part of his stage theory, Adam Smith posited an unproblematic progression from the former to the latter: “hunting and fishing, the most important employments of mankind in the rude state of society, become in its advanced state their most agreeable amusements, and they pursue for pleasure what they once followed from necessity”.3 Hunting was likewise important to the economic thinking of British travellers to the Maritimes. But rather than being deployed only sequentially and to reflect progress, utilitarian and ritualistic meanings of hunting often co-existed and exposed considerable anxiety about the economic development travellers otherwise promoted. Moreover, rather than moving directly from necessity to amusement, representations of hunting passed through an intermediate phase as a foil for the values of an agrarian settler society.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".