Ecology and empire in Andrew Burnaby's<i>Travels through the Middle Settlements of North America</i>(1775)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay draws attention to Andrew Burnaby's Travels through the Middle Settlements of North America (1775 Burnaby, Andrew. 1775. Travels through the Middle Settlements in North America, in the Years 1759 and 1760 with Observations upon the State of the Colonies. London: Payne. [Google Scholar]) for its imperially motivated yet also often ecocritically inclined documentation of colonial ecologies. No existing interpretations of the text have explicitly studied the traveller's imperial impulses in relation to his ecological consciousness. Readers have primarily focused on Travels as a colonial-era document of human-centred life. I argue that Burnaby's travelogue deserves to be recognised for its nuanced documentation of the non-human realm in relation to anthropocentrism. The author's self-positioning magnifies the notion that the formation of imperial identity can accommodate fragments of ecologically interested selfhood. The narrative stages the interconnectivity between political and ecological arguments, dramatising what critics have theorised as the “inextricability of environmental history and empire building” [DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George B. Handley. 2011. “Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth.” In Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, and George B. Handley, 3–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 10]. Burnaby's thoughts alternate between ecocentric and anthropocentric perspectives, yielding a fertile interpretive ground for both postcolonial and ecocritical inquiry.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".