Heroic Imperialists in Africa: The Promotion of British and French Colonial Heroes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Berny Sèbe has written an excellent comparative account of the rise to prominence in Britain and France of male colonial figures in the late nineteenth century and their continued relevance into the interwar years. For Sèbe, as for a number of other scholars working on imperial heroes, what defined these men as heroes was not their deeds or careers but rather the construction of a reputation amongst their respective national publics. A heroic reputation was established through marketing, political manipulation and cultural appropriation; sometimes, a heroic figure was self-conscious and instrumental to the development of their own reputation, sometimes they were not. But for the historian of popular imperialism, what matters is why certain figures developed a heroic reputation, for what purposes were they used and what these heroes tell us about their own domestic societies’ values and relationship to the imperial project. Sèbe’s book is very good at explaining how the reputations of key imperial figures were established, and on providing the deep context to the creation of national reputations at this time. Indeed, the first third of the book is devoted to the convergence of technical, commercial, educational and political factors that facilitated hero-making. Although other forms of material culture (monuments, naming practices, visual media) are also examined, the bulk of the evidence and the crux of the argument lies in the commercial explosion of print culture in the late nineteenth century. Sèbe clearly outlines the rise of mass literacy and the desire of publishers to sell to mass audiences, the application of ‘second industrial revolution’ techniques to book production. That these economic, technical and cultural changes occurred at the moment of the ‘new imperialism’—most particularly in Africa—helps explains the prominence of the particular imperial heroes he focuses on in this period. In short, the profit motive drove both the British and, a little later, the French, culture industries to lionize imperial heroes.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".