Fair Trade and the Political Economy of Brandy Smuggling in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain*
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Thomas Ellis, merchant of London, never expected he would be prosecuted for participating in one of the largest commercial frauds of his time. So when the Customs seized his brandy in 1731 he fought back. His case would influence parliamentary decision-making and reveal the extensive involvement of merchants in illicit trade. Ellis’s argument that he was merely a ‘fair trader’ also illuminates the moral debate over smuggling during the period as governments sought to legitimize and enforce their trading rules and tariffs. Pressured by competition from professional smugglers and the revenue demands of the state, merchants responded by developing their own rules by which they could fairly compete. Ellis’s story, and the ‘Flemish scheme’ it exposed, thereby shed light on the moral economy of early modern capitalism, the history of smuggling, and the dynamic of market ordering by increasingly assertive states.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it