“A Smattering of Education” and Petitions as Sources: A Study of African Slaveholders' Responses to Abolition in the Gold Coast Colony, 1874–1875
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By the mid-nineteenth century African societies had begun to use petitions as an instrument of agitation for reforms in nascent colonial policies. This was especially true of those societies located in the coastal enclaves where precolonial European and diasporic African influences were markedly profound. Compared with other African responses to European colonial rule, anti-colonial petitions are less spectacular. This explains, perhaps-deservingly so, why petitions or memorials, which also took the form of deputations, as a historical genre have been marginalized in the polemical studies of African responses to colonial rule. Such studies have included militant responses in the form of war, riots, social banditry, millennarianism, arson, strikes, avoidance of conscription, desertion, and mass migration. Other forms of African response, devoid of militancy or overly tumultuous actions, have been aptly described by James C. Scott as theWeapons of the Weak. These have included foot-dragging, the use of songs, and the protest politics of the indigenous African press. This study deals with how slaveholders in the Gold Coast responded to British abolition of slavery and pawnship in the Gold Coast in 1874-75. Specifically, I examine how the African intelligentsia in the Gold Coast Colony used quasi-legal means, essentially petitions, to oppose abolition and emancipation of slaves and pawns. This opposition was undertaken on behalf of slave/pawnholders, including the indigenous rulers of the coast, especially the Fante region. Additionally, the study draws attention to Africans' use of petitions as an important historical source that can benefit the study of various aspects of colonial rule and facets of African responses.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".