The Narcissism of Petty Differences? Thomas Jefferson, John Graves Simcoe and the Reformation of Empire in the early United States and British–Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article compares the prescriptions for trans-continental empire articulated by two Anglo-American executives in the late eighteenth century: Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States (1801–1809), and John Graves Simcoe, Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada (1792–1798). While the political character of the republican Jefferson and the ultra-monarchist Simcoe differed, they articulated strikingly similar prescriptions for trans-continental empire. Both emphasized the importance of white settlement and commercial development in the West. The article explains this apparent paradox by arguing that Jefferson and Simcoe represent variations on a common Anglo-American theme of empire. The similarity of Jefferson's and Simcoe's prescriptions for new forms of empire reflected their common experience of imperial governance, the American Revolution and exposure to political and economic thought in the British Atlantic World, as well as the common challenges of winning over the volatile allegiance of western settlers and the opposition of native peoples in the trans-Appalachian West.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".