JOHN E. CROWLEY. Imperial Landscapes: Britain's Global Visual Culture, 1745-1820.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With this ambitious book, John E. Crowley explores how British artists, voyagers, publishers, rulers, and (implicitly) viewers forged a “global British landscape” in the service of empire (p. 2). Between 1745 and 1820, topographic representations of the world—from North America to the Pacific to India—provided British audiences with landscapes that appeared simultaneously foreign and familiar. For Crowley, this “topographic imperative” worked to naturalize colonial claims (whether politically, in the case of the West Indies, or intellectually, in the case of the Pacific), typically eschewing triumphalism in favor of a visual rhetoric that downplayed conflict and controversy. All of this occurred precisely as British landscape traditions were being formed within the British Isles themselves by artists like Richard Wilson and Paul Sandby. While the past two decades have supplied a growing body of art historical literature on British colonialism, this book differs from most such studies in its sweeping, comparative scope. It should be useful for anyone grappling with the relationship between European landscape traditions and the exertion of state power in foreign contexts. After an introduction establishing the book's two crucial concepts—“the British Empire” and “the Topographic Imperative”—chapter one surveys the visual traditions of European empires during the three centuries preceding the Seven Years' War (the watershed for Crowley), while the next six chapters address specific regions: Canada, the Pacific, the West Indies, the United States of America, India, and Australia. A brief conclusion looks to the wider European embrace of an imperial landscape tradition, thanks especially to Napoleon Bonaparte and Alexander von Humboldt. Unfortunately, there is no summation tying together the book's previous chapters (and also no bibliography though the endnotes are outstanding).
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.007 |
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".