Lakes, Rivers and Oceans: Technology, Ethnicity and the Shipping of Empire in the Late Nineteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Big Steamers 'Oh, where are you going to, all you Big Steamers, With England's own coal, up and down the salt seas?' 'We are going to fetch you your bread and your butter, Your beef, pork and mutton, eggs, apples and cheese.' 'And where will you fetch it from, all you Big Steamers, And where shall I write you when you are away?' 'We fetch it from Melbourne, Quebec and Vancouver, Address us at Hobart, Hong Kong, and Bombay.' . . . 'Then what can I do for you, all you Big Steamers, Oh, what can I do for your comfort and good?' Send out your big warships to watch your big waters, That no one may stop us from bringing you food. For the bread that you eat and the biscuits you nibble, The sweets that you suck and the joints that you carve, They are brought to you daily by all us Big Steamers And if anyone hinders our coming you'll starve! This is not perhaps one of Kipling's best poems. It was written especially for a school text book published in 1911 and was therefore intended for a juvenile audience. As part of the propaganda of a maritime empire, it is perhaps fascinating to deconstruct it. The steamers, it may be observed, are big. Indeed, in the original the repeated titular refrain of Big Steamers is always capitalised. They run on and they carry British coal. But the stress is entirely on food, not industrial raw materials. The fundamental message is that the British are fed by imports, and that starvation faces those who do not provide an adequate, protective Big Navy to deal with big waters, not piffling channels. Inevitably, all the places mentioned are in the formal British Empire. It is, in short, a combined paean of praise to the merchant marine, supposed imperial economic integration, and the activities of the Navy League. Although the poem never appeared in Kipling anthologies until comparatively recently, the text continued in print and was repeatedly recommended for use in schools down to at least the 1940s and 1950s. In 1946, the popular Clydeside maritime historian George Blake lamented that the British did not know enough about the ships and the sea on which they depended.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.002 |
| 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".