Gender, Race, and Fortunes in the East India Company's 'Familial Proto-State': The Evidence of Scottish Wills and Testaments, c.1740-c.1820
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The family unit has become an important lens for investigating the social, gendered, and racial dimensions of early British imperialism in Asia. Using evidence derived from wills and testaments registered by Scots at the English East India Company’s settlements between 1740 and 1820, this article explores how colonial wealth was redistributed. In doing so it reconsiders how families and kinship acted as both a transhemispheric connection between Europe and the Indian Ocean World and a disruptor of social, gendered, and racial dynamics. It queries arguments that family boundaries could be porous enough to incorporate mixed-race children resulting from relationships between Europeans and local women. Analysis of overall patterns of wealth allocation, rather than individual family case studies, reveals a clear tendency to separate or ‘silo’ such children. Offspring born to local women received far less than family back in Scotland and were usually left in the place of their birth. Families in Scotland stressed a political economy of profit remittance and discouraged the creation of new obligations to children and local women. Considerable sums were instead allocated to female relatives. One result of the policing of extended family boundaries was a heightening in pre-1820s Scottish society of colour consciousness and racialised notions of identity. In this way, the Indian Ocean World, just as surely as better-known processes such as the Atlantic slave trade, contributed a practical and immediate set of imperatives driving new concepts of race and racialisation in Enlightenment era Scotland.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".