Militarizing the Atlantic World: Army discipline, coerced labor, and Britain’s commercial empire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historians of the Atlantic World have paid startlingly little attention to the main instruments European states deployed in their takeover of the region: their armies and navies. Conversely, few military historians have sought to re-think their own subject matter in terms of the many scholarly achievements of Atlanticists, being locked into the nationalist tropes embedded in studies of warfare. And rarely do scholars seek to recover the experience of the common soldier so as to relate them to the historical processes creating the modern world. As key players in the getting and keeping of Britain’s Atlantic Empire, soldiers also played a central role in globalizing capitalism by acquiring new territories to be planted with slaves and indentured servants, producers of commodities, the lifeblood of commerce. Like these unfree laborers, soldiers also had masters more than willing to whip them to their duty, making them another form of coerced labor in the capitalist project. In early modern warfare getting enough men into the field proved key to success. Making men into good soldiers willing to suffer horrible wounds or death required the imposition of rigid discipline. And soldiers resisted that class discipline in many ways, from calculated ineptitude through insubordination and desertion to mutiny. In return, their officers brought the might of a legal system to bear. Military justice proved even bloodier than the civil justice system, which whipped, mutilated, and executed felons with abandon. The army in effect waged guerilla class war against its own men, maiming and killing many to coerce them to do their duty in a way that transcended indentured servitude and slavery. Studying the application of military discipline in such political economic terms while mapping it against the Atlantic shows how colonial expansion itself relied on force and not just the labor regimes it enabled.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".