Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1860 and 1914, three to four million people passed along Durban’s waterfronts, most travelling to or from an industrialising hinterland that a colonial gatekeeper called a ‘Mecca for aliens.’ This article explores mass migration through Durban and the changes the phenomenon brought to the social world and built environments around the lagoon that forms today’s large container port. Using Immigration, Harbour Department and Water Police archives, it shows how the lagoon, until the mid-nineteenth century an obscure outlier in the Indian Ocean World, became deeply integrated with processes simultaneously underway across much of maritime Asia. After an introduction that places colonial Durban alongside the wider changes common to many Indian-Ocean ports, we set the scene with an overview of the lagoon’s deep precolonial past. The core argument then moves through several phases. First, economic and technological developments from the 1850s, designed to inflate cargo capacity, also intensified transoceanic migrant traffic. This generated a rich cultural heterogeneity on the lagoon’s fringes. Second, mass migration fueled a backlash among colonial authorities, who built an elaborate architecture of detention and surveillance around the inner shore. Third, some migrants subverted the new order by ‘jumping ship’ in creative ways, ensuring the waterfronts remained, for a time, unruly heterotopia. In these ways, Durban became a characteristic Indian Ocean port city. But Durban authorities introduced an unusual element: to the north they created a recreational beachfront for settler elites. This ultimately reorientated the city’s waterfront away from the lagoon to the open ocean, casting the former’s social history into the shadows.
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.
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".