Commerce, Industry, and the Laws of Newtonian Science: Weber Revisited and Revised
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The cultural resources that facilitated the move to industrial society in late eighteenth-century Britain remain opaque. In nearly one hundred years we have barely moved beyond the Weber thesis, and among economic historians culture has become a low priority. This essay challenges that narrowness, not by repudiating Weber, but by building upon his legacy. It begins with the problematic: why were so many early British industrialists, Unitarians? They were represented far in excess of their presence in the general population. The attempt to answer the question relies upon archives in Birmingham and Manchester, upon a close reading of letters and sermons by James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, and chapel oratory in both places. The project was made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC, and it builds upon material presented by the author in Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (Oxford University Press, 1997).
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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 | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".