Mercenaries and Adventurers: Canada and the Foreign Enlistment Act in the Nineteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A bstract: W estm in ster's Foreign Enlistm ent A c t o f 1819 and 1870 forbade B r itish subjects fro m recru itin g fo r or serving in foreig n m ilitary forces.D esp ite this p roh ibition, B rito n s served with foreig n m ilita ries in E urope and S o u th A m erica , and B r itis h N orth A m erica n s and later C a n a d ia n s fought or attem pted to fight in the A m erica n C iv il War, the defence of the P apal States, and the Ten Years War in Cuba (1868-1878).A u th o rities only pressed charges on rare occasion s, in spite of freq u en t violations.W hile som e people characterized these volunteers as m ere m ercenaries, others saw them as harm less adventurers, or even heroes.C a n a d a 's F o r e i g n E n l i s t m e n t A ct,1 passed in response to the Spanish Civil War, is the successor of two British statutes of 1819 and 1870.Westminster's Foreign Enlistment Act of 1819 was vague -a general prohibition against British subjects serving in foreign militaries or recruiting others to do the same.Yet during the next four decades, Britons served with foreign forces in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and South America.The eponymous 1870 act, an updated statute passed in response to the Franco-Prussian War, forbade enlistment in or recruiting for foreign militaries at war, but with which Britain was at peace.Despite cases regarding other prohibitions under the act -namely, outfitting ships for warlike 1 Geo.6 c. 32.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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".