Bibliographic record
Abstract
your fleet is the security and protection of your trade, and both together are the wealth, strength, security and glory of Britain. Lord Haversham (1707) Britain started and ended the eighteenth century celebrating its Navy. In the interval the Navy played a key part in establishing an empire in America and India, only to lose the former. During much of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the time when the American colonies were lost, the Navy and its administration was severely criticized on numerous occasions. Among other things this book examines the justification for that criticism, examining the relationship between the Navy and the state to determine what was wrong with the Navy and its ships on the eve of the War of American Independence. There was a stark contrast between the three wars broadly covering the middle of the century. The war, beginning in 1739, over Captain Jenkins’ ear and becoming the War of the Austrian Succession, was entirely successful as a maritime war even though the peace negotiated in 1749 provided no more than a breathing space for Britain and France in their struggle for empire. The war left the Navy’s affairs in some disorder. Yet, after a disappointing start, the Seven Years’ War, in which the opening shots were fired in America in 1755, was the most successful war ever fought by Britain. At the Peace of Paris in 1763, Britain had gained Canada and the beginnings of an empire in India. The War of American Independence saw in its early stages a decisive check to Britain’s seapower, contributing to the loss of an American empire. Much has been written on why Britain’s seapower suffered a setback and some of this has necessarily concentrated on the period between the Peace of Paris in 1763 and 1776 when the Americans declared their independence. Criticism has centred for the most part on the inadequacy of the Navy’s ships and upon the shortcomings of the Navy’s administrators. There were too few ships, others were in a state of disrepair, and little had been done about it. The view that the administration of the Navy during the 1760s and 1770s was at best inept and at worst corrupt seems firmly established in much conventional historical literature. It is hard to dispel the image of a parsimonious do-nothing post-1763 naval administration that elevated corruption, negligence and inefficiency to new heights.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.066 | 0.030 |
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".