Trade, Consumption and Industry: Transatlantic Constraints on the Bay Trade
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In November 1700 the Board of Trade in London received an alarming report that the fur trade of New York and Boston had ‘sunk to little or nothing, and the market is so low for beaver in England that ‘tis scarce worth the transporting’. The author, Richard Coote, first earl of Bellomont, governor of the province of New York, was concerned at the wider consequences of the fall in the price of beaver skins, from fourteen to five shillings per pound, in the London market. While the declining value of beaver discouraged the Iroquois, the main suppliers of fur to the colony, it also reduced the incentive for distant native groups to trade with the English. Playing on the threat from the French in Canada, Bellomont argued that New York was a frontier province where relations with the Indians had to be managed in the interests of the monarchy. Ignoring the situation at Boston, he requested the removal of customs duties on fur in New York and England. Early the following year, he urged the board to secure parliamentary support to encourage the fur trade. Drawing on the example of France, he appealed for legislation requiring all hatters to use a certain amount of beaver wool in the manufacture of headwear. Such intervention would ‘help the consumption of Beaver which at present is grown almost out of use in England, since Carolina hats have been so much and Beaver hats so little in fashion’. Although demand for the latter revived, Bellomont's concerns illuminate the state of the transatlantic fur trade at the close of the seventeenth century. Colonial networks on which commerce depended seemed to be under threat, not least as a result of changes in the supply of raw material. This included the opening up of a vast commercial zone awarded to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670. As studies of the company demonstrate, the rapid growth of the northern fur trade, based on seemingly limitless supplies of thicker and more valuable pelts, created problems in the metropolitan market, which was one of the sources of the governor's alarm.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.053 | 0.002 |
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".