Comment on Padraic X. Scanlan, Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Padraic Scanlan’s Freedom’s Debtors makes an important intervention in the debate on the abolition of slavery by looking at what actually happened in Sierra Leone as it moved from company project to crown colony. Scanlan shows that anti-slavery advocates were not in practice equity advocates: slaves had to earn their freedom. In so doing he forces us to reconsider the manifold forms of bonded labour that characterised the Atlantic world and the imperatives of a globalizing market that demanded the continuing production of tropical staples by captive workforces, before and after slavery. Scanlan arguably blends abolition and emancipation in the opening phase of the British campaign to end the slave trade, but he shows, despite the humanitarian motives of some activists, that the full emancipation for slaves was conditional on their integration into global political economies.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.032 | 0.043 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.004 |
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".