<i>Masters and Servants: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Its North American Workforce, 1668–1786</i>. By Scott P. Stephen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC)’s impact on the European colonization of North America can scarcely be overstated. For two centuries prior to its territories’ absorption into Canada in 1870, the HBC formed the leading edge of colonialism from the Arctic Circle to the Missouri River, and from the Hudson Bay coast to the Pacific Northwest. Despite its vast reach, the HBC’s internal workings, especially in its early years, have remained mysterious, obscured by bureaucratic language, time, and distance. This book seeks to recreate the inner world of the HBC and the (mostly) men who operated it, from its founding around 1670 to its inland expansion in the 1780s. During this early period, British HBC employees traded intermittently with Cree, Nakoda, and Dene people from small outposts on Hudson Bay. Stephen demonstrates that these coastal “factories”—so named for being the households of managerial “factors”—operated according to customs of hierarchy and reciprocal obligation that British historian E.P. Thompson once called a “moral economy.” Typical of early modern society, economic and social considerations were inseparable, as masters and servants lived together in a type of self-contained business family. Commitment to this household organization and its “social and moral covenants,” Stephen argues, provided the Company with stability to survive despite its posts’ extreme geographic isolation and frequent conflicts with the French, while also reducing pressure on Indigenous lands (p. 164).
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
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".