“A mere business affair”?Women in the social and commercial worlds of nineteenth-century Madagascar
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The port of Mahajanga in northwestern Madagascar was home to a diverse commercial community during the nineteenth century. Merchants from East Africa, India and the Arabian Peninsula drew upon extensive contacts within Madagascar to obtain commodities they would then sell to Americans and Europeans. Women living in these coastal communities, however, rarely entered into Western accounts of long-distance exchanges, despite their roles as wives, traders and community members in creating the cosmopolitan economic world of Mahajanga. While not directly participating in commerce with Americans and Europeans, women engaged in agriculture and other economic activities, in addition to forming close relationships with foreigners. To offset the Western trading documentation that ignores female contributions, this article relies upon a detailed source, the diary of British merchant John Studdy Leigh, to place women more fully into this history of exchanges. By expanding our consideration of economic contributions, we can examine how women bridged the diverse economic communities in northwestern Madagascar through their marriages with foreign merchants as well as their work in supporting commerce.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.020 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".