Bibliographic record
Abstract
When I first started working on this project as a graduate student in 1992, I met a senior scholar in front of the order desk of the French Archives Nationales, which then held the majority of the colonial records prior to 1789.She politely inquired about the area of research I hoped to tackle, and I proudly declared, "Why, the first overseas French empire, madame."She became animated and began giving me many helpful hints as to where I might find more information on Napoleon and Haiti, his plans for Egypt, the sale of Louisiana, and so on.Surprised, I exclaimed, "Oh, madame, I mean the first one: Canada, Acadia, Louisbourg, the Îles du Vent ..." She looked at me quizzically and then thoughtfully smiled.She wished me good luck in my efforts and pulled away to fetch her dossier.For many scholars, and still within the French popular mind, no French empire existed until 1802.Before then were the vieilles colonies, it is true, but this collection of territories, which stretched from the rich entrepôts of India to the vast claims in the North American interior and today comprises about a quarter of Canada and half the continental United States, hardly counted as an empire.This book examines the role of transatlantic communications in creating and maintaining French imperialism during the height of France's first overseas empire in the eighteenth century.As the most powerful nation on the Continent, and with a long interest in colonial exploration and adventurism dating from the early sixteenth century, France seemed destined to take a leading role in exploiting and settling the New World.That it had largely failed to do so by the end of the eighteenth century and had ceded much of its dynamic to Great Britain is well known.But disagreement over why France achieved mediocre results remains.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.564 | 0.398 |
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".