Visual Symbols and Military Culture in Britain’s West African Colonial Army (c.1900–60)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Visual symbols like uniforms, emblems and ceremonies became central in inventing British military culture among West African forces reflecting orientalist and ornamentalist interpretations of empire. While uniforms fostered military identity, the versions devised for West African soldiers reproduced racial stereotypes and military fashion trends. Granting insignia and Colours to West African units transformed them from simplistic paramilitaries to honoured members of the British imperial milieu. Colours served as ritual objects enabling West African forces to recreate pivotal cultural events of the British regimental system. The public presence of uniformed West African soldiers promoted a sense of imperial majesty that reinforced British rule. Travelling to Britain, West African troops participated in parades and exhibitions initially displaying the epic scale of the empire, but eventually these military visitors became symbols of colonial reform. With independence, Britain’s former colonies in West Africa retained Western-style military symbols altered to highlight republicanism and modernist aspirations.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".