:Opium and the Limits of Empire: Drug Prohibition in the Chinese Interior, 1729–1850.<i>(Harvard East Asian Monographs, number 241.)</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historical research on the Chinese opium question has certainly moved beyond the narrow confines of the Sino-British war (1840–1842) to broader historiographical and theoretical issues. Recent contributors to the new scholarship include Edward Slack, Joyce Madancy, Frank Dikötter, et al. and now, David Anthony Bello. Unlike most authors on the subject, Bello tracks the opium trails in China's western and southwestern landlocked border regions and attempts a multiple ethnic-geographic “reorientation” from the Han-dominated core of China proper to Xinjiang (Eastern Turkestan) and the Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan provinces, from the Euro-American traffickers to a mixed cast of Han, Muslim, tribal, and Central Asian smugglers and poppy cultivators. His work fills an important gap in the literature and illustrates successfully, through the travails of the Qing prohibition campaign, the “limits of empire.” Bello's main argument is that Qing territorial expansion in the west and southwest had created “crucial geographic spaces” (p. 284), which the imperial government did not control by imposing the Han core's centrally administered junxian (prefecture-district) system, secured by the local household registration (baojia). Instead, a hybrid structure engaging the administrative assistance of Muslim begs in Xinjiang and of tribal chieftains in the southwest was put in place. Weak control in these regions subsequently allowed foreign opium from Central Asia and (non-British) north India to penetrate and domestic cultivation to spread. Recognizing these problems only belatedly, the Qing court enforced absolute prohibition based on the Han core's experience with opium as an urban, coastal, mercantile, and Euro-American problem. Consumption and cultivation were criminalized in 1813 and 1831, respectively, and the draconian New Regulations were promulgated in 1839.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".