Electricity, Agency and Class in Lagos Colony, <scp> <i>c</i> </scp>.1860<scp>s</scp>–1914
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract European states gradually established colonial rule in Africa between the mid nineteenth century and the beginning of the First World War. Historians have assessed the infrastructure introduced during this period through the lens of colonial state-building and resource extraction. This article offers another perspective by reconstructing the early history of electrification in Lagos Colony, one of the first British colonies in West Africa, within the contexts of African agency (that is, knowledge and socio-political influence) and class. It argues that electricity was not a novelty to Africans when the government opened the first power station in 1898. The principles of electricity were already being taught in the classroom and through public lectures in the 1860s, and temporary exhibitions of electric light had been a feature of Lagos society since the 1880s. Furthermore, because of some demographic advantages, the Africans of nineteenth-century Lagos were able to shape colonial policies, including on financing electricity. Lastly, contrary to colonial African case studies in which scholars have argued that racial politics affected access to electricity, extensive primary sources affirm that a rising number of Africans in Lagos enjoyed electric lighting on the streets, at religious centres and at home from 1898.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".