The Confederate States of America and the British Empire: Neutral Territory and Civil Wars
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The United States is locked in a war with insurgents, and struggles to stamp them out. The insurgents sustain their effort in no small part because they receive arms and supplies from supposedly neutral powers abroad, and can seek shelter in - and attack from - neutral territory. The United States threatens action against neutral power, or against insurgents on their territory, if situation is not redressed, risking escalation of war. This scenario, in modified form, could be applied to any of half a dozen American wars, from Iraq or Afghanistan, to Vietnam or Seminole wars. My own anecdotal experience in Iraq and Afghanistan was deeply shaped by availability, to our opponents, of adjacent, theoretically neutral territory in which to shelter or receive support. Rather than rehashing seemingly endless literature on conduct of counterinsurgency warfare, which has exploded in volume in past decade, I will look to another example, American Civil War, as a case study of how a supposedly domestic insurrection, as Union diplomats often referred to Confederate States used adjacent neutral territory, and how international forces shaped that conflict. In interest of focus, I will limit analysis to British neutral territory, although I think there is merit in further study to include Mexico, Cuba, and contested regions of American West. By broadening our scope of examination to include neutral territory it becomes clear that Confederacy (or the rebellion) was more than just Confederate States of America: it was a transnational rebellion against United States, fueled by arms from abroad, that exploited British neutrality out of military weakness and opportunism in interest of its war effort.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".