Empire and the Reordering of Edibility: Deconstructing Betel Quid Through Metropolitan Discourses of Intoxication
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Exotic, plant-based stimulants such as sugar, tea, and coffee linked metropolitan bodies with colonial expansion in support of the formation of modern Europe. But, not all tropical commodities easily flowed along these metropolitan routes. Betel quid, a prepared comestible, was among the most widely consumed stimulants in the world, but it was not popularized as a masticatory in modern Europe. This article traces the reconfiguration of betel quid in the British metropole in the early modern and modern periods. Through discursive analysis of medical and herbal texts, advertisements, British guides, and parliamentary papers, it shows how evolving discourses of intoxication motivated the betel quid’s transition from stimulating fruit into a largely inedible substance. Shifting notions of intoxication – first as a form of dissolute inebriation, and later as a state of measurable toxicity – provided the tools, language and social context to dissolve the betel quid’s edibility in conjunction with a broader civilizing process in imperial Britain. These metropolitan discourses reconfigured betel quid and in the process mobilized it as a new site of colonial differentiation.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.068 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".