The Proposal of a Prince or Delegation of a Duke? Britain’s Involvement in the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Out of concern for maintaining a ‘balance of power’ between states, the major European powers in the 18th century were continually shifting alliances with each other in what has been referred to as a “stately quadrille” (a quadrille being a dance characterized by a constant changing of partners). Most synonymous with this notion are the events of early 1756, a few months before the outbreak of the Seven Years War, where there was a dramatic reversal of alliances. It saw Austria and France put aside their centuries-old rivalry in response to an equally unlikely alliance between Britain and Prussia. This ‘diplomatic revolution’, as it has since been known, is often attributed to the clever machinations of the Austrian Prince Kaunitz who sought to dislodge France from their previous alliance with Prussia to win an alliance with France for himself. However, my research project seeks to emphasize Britain’s role in this affair, where I will illustrate that the Duke of Newcastle, despite being adamant on continuing the ‘old system’, nonetheless contributed significantly to actualizing this reversal. Throughout this project, I have faced many exciting challenges that have led me to a fuller understanding of what actually constitutes ‘historical investigation’. I find this to be especially true with the experience of thoroughly examining and responding to the full historiography of a particular topic; something that was both a challenging but immensely rewarding experience.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".