Keeping “the wheel in motion”: Trans-Atlantic Credit Terms, Slave Prices, and the Geography of Slavery in the British Americas, 1755–1807
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article uses a new dataset of 330 slaving voyages to examine terms of credit issued for British American slave sales between 1755 and 1807. It shows that credit terms consistently varied between American colonies, and that slave ship captains considered these differences when electing where to land enslaved Africans. Our dataset also shows that credit terms were highly erratic, especially in the last quarter of the century, contributing to both surges and collapses in the slave trade to individual colonies, and in the trade as a whole. Four such instances are examined in detail to show that instability in credit terms played an important and hitherto unacknowledged role in the volume and direction of Britain's trans-Atlantic slave trade in the second one-half of the eighteenth century.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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 it