No Dishonour to Be a Pirate: The Problem of Infinite Advantage in Defoe's <i>Captain Singleton</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Captain Singleton (1720), Daniel Defoe rehearses the ethical and discursive justifications of predatory capitalism. Through an examination of Defoe's economic writings, I illustrate how the author confronts readers with the moral ambiguity of legal trade by comparing the “litteral” pirate Singleton with the “allegorical” pirates of London's central economic institutions. Through this comparison, Defoe places legal trade on an uncertain continuum with piracy. By extension, he explores the problematic necessity of reconciling the hero-outlaw Singleton's piracy to conceptions of national identity predicated on economic expansionism. Defoe suggests this reconciliation is best achieved by understanding trade in terms of “infinite advantage.” This article contextualizes “infinite advantage” as an imaginative projection onto the world of the conditions necessary to sustain infinite trade, and argues that Singleton appropriates this ideology to palliate fears of Hobbesian scarcity. Thus, the novel examines the conditions of scarcity that precipitate predatory trade practices alongside the fantasy of economic infinitude that would make these practices obsolete.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".