The Historiography of the English State during ‘the Long Eighteenth Century’: Part I – Decentralized Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article reviews the four most prominent themes in the historiography of the modern English state during the last six decades, with a particular focus on ‘the long eighteenth century’ (1660–1837). The first is the vision of an expansive and centralized administrative state in Victorian England most famously set forth in the work of the late Oliver MacDonagh. Second is the notion of the state as an information‐gathering entity that has recently been forcefully stated by Edward Higgs. Third is the vision of an unexpectedly powerful, substantially centralized ‘fiscal‐military’ state during the eighteenth century, powerfully evoked in the work of John Brewer. Finally, a brief overview is given of the prodigious historical literature that has arisen in recent years surrounding the notion of the state as abstract entity capable of commanding the loyalties of those people over whom it rules. The article concludes by suggesting how a more fully integrated vision of the English state in history might be achieved through a deeper, more dynamic interrelation of changing political‐administrative structures and shifting social‐cultural forces.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".