Interstate competition and Chinese ascendancy: The political construction of the global cotton market, 1973–2012
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that interstate competition over the organization of the world economy shapes the spatial configuration of commodity chains. This departs from much of the literature that emphasizes firm- and sector-level dynamics. To illustrate this argument, we use formal network methods in conjunction with a historical analysis to examine the evolution of the global cotton trade between 1973 and 2012. Through this analysis, we demonstrate that changes in the spatial configuration of the cotton market were shaped by changes in the nature of competition among the most powerful states in the world economy. While the cotton trade was once characterized by a bipolar network reflecting the nature of interstate competition under the Cold War, by the early 2000s China’s accession to the World Trade Organization and the end of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement had dramatically reshaped the global cotton market. The result was a binodal network in which trade flows were increasingly concentrated between China and the United States.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".