Bibliographic record
Abstract
When Jack Greene first began, in the 1960s and 1970s, to collect the materials for this study of Jamaican society and economy in the mid-eighteenth century, the profession was in the midst of a methodological revolution that looked to cliometrics to suggest how the slave societies and plantation economies of the Americas had functioned.Forty years later, the profession is now asking different questions about the nature of culture and society in the Americas during the era of slavery, and the systems of thought and practice that helped to maintain and then to undermine racial hierarchies.What then does this richlydetailed study of the society and economy of selected Jamaican parishes in the 1750s, framed mainly in the terms set by the debates of the 1960s and 1970s, and based largely on the methodical quantitative study of tax rolls and parish censuses, have to offer?Each historian will inevitably find specific points of interest in this work, but three seem to me to be of particular importance.First, Greene's figures lend empirical weight to recent work highlighting the economic diversity of Jamaica.By careful comparison of various surveys he shows that even in this powerhouse of the sugar economy, only a quarter of estates may have specialized in this crop, including in the "harvest years" of the 1760s.Although previous historians have made use of individual surveys, Greene is the first to bring them together to generate a more accurate assessment.His work confirms a line of argument going back to Sidney Mintz via Trevor Burnard, Verene Shepherd, and Barry Higman that even Jamaica was no sugar monoculture, and that the economic, social, and cultural experiences of labor and work among both its free and enslaved populations were correspondingly heterogeneous and diverse.Greene's work will also provide an important context for much recent work on society, gender, childhood, and family in Jamaica, complementing more detailed studies of individuals or plantations by offering a broader perspective that takes in entire parishes and towns.He shows that profiles of land ownership varied widely across the island, and sometimes produced surprising results, as in the capital of Spanish Town in 1754, where over 30 percent of proprietors were black and more than half were women.Once again, this lends a definitive empirical base that can help to contextualize these case studies, to confirm the diverse and heterogeneous nature of black and white experience within Jamaica, and to provide a quantitative measure of the varying chances for agency that it offered to different social groups.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".