Fixing Ownership: Land Agents, Settlers, and Property Relations in Two Eastern Townships, 1840–1865
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The general fluidity and ambiguity of property relations during colonization meant settlers, who were often "squatters," relied on land agents to fix their relationship with property-owners. In turn, the latter needed the agent's on-the-ground expertise to manage their affairs and responsibilities for "improvements." Land agents thus became intermediaries between cash-poor settlers and absentee owners. George Bonnallie, active in the northern part of Stukely Township and western Orford Township had a repertoire of routine practices he pursued. Organized in a typology, they provide detail about late colonization and reveal the part played by entrepreneurial intermediaries in fixing property relations in areas still peripheral to the market economy. With in-coming settlement completed in these townships by the mid-1860s, after municipal reform, and with the arrival of speculation by local notables, neither property-owners nor settlers needed the suite of routines deployed to enable settlement. A standardized market for land transfers had developed. Abstract: Compte tenu du caractère généralement fluide et ambigu des droits de propriété pendant la colonisation, les colons, qui étaient souvent des « squatters », comptaient sur les agents fonciers pour manier leurs relations avec les propriétaires. En retour, ces derniers utilisaient les connaissances locales de l'agent pour gérer leurs affaires et leurs responsabilités en matière d'« améliorations ». Les agents fonciers sont donc devenus des intermédiaires entre colons sans argent liquid et les propriétaires absentéistes. George Bonnallie, actif dans la partie nord du canton de Stukely et dans l'ouest du canton d'Orford, avait un répertoire de pratiques courantes qu'il mettait en oeuvre. Organisées en une typologie, elles fournissent des détails sur la colonisation tardive et elles révèlent le rôle joué par les intermédiaires entrepreneuriaux dans la consolidation des relations de propriété dans des zones encore périphériques à l'économie de marché. Avec l'achèvement de la colonisation de ces cantons au milieu des années 1860, après la réforme municipale, et avec l'arrivée de la spéculation de la part des notables locaux, ni les propriétaires ni les colons ne nécessitaient de la gamme de pratiques déployées pour habiliter la colonisation. Un marché standardisé pour les transferts fonciers s'était développé.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".