Children on Board: Child labor on ships in the Indian Ocean, c. 18th – 19th Centuries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A growing body of research has focused on adult Asian sailors’ employment on European ships in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. However, the experiences of children who worked on ships in the Indian Ocean World have received comparatively little attention. The scholarly lacuna is striking considering the tremendous increase in the scope and sophistication in the discussions on child slavery and abolition. This article examines the use of children as maritime laborers in the Indian Ocean World between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In doing so, it examines the multiple pathways through which children were brought for work on ships and studies the recruitment patterns of adult and child sailors. It focuses on the various types of labor performed by children on ships and discusses how conditions of servitude on land were transferred to a ship when children accompanied their masters. It then also discusses how prevailing understandings of childhood, domestic service, and child labor shaped the actions of English East India Company officials towards child sailors while undertaking anti-slavery measures during the nineteenth century.
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 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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".