A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship Between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1700, by Simon Mills
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For a variety of religious, financial, and intellectual reasons, a rising number of English chaplains stationed themselves at England's Levant Company in Aleppo during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.Simon Mills is interested in exploring the role these chaplains played in disseminating information from the Ottoman Empire back to England, and vice versa.Tracing the antiquarian motivations of key chaplains, Mills shows how a "commerce of knowledge" originated in the seventeenth century and crossed over and spread into the eighteenth.By focusing on England -rather than nations like Italy or France -his book intervenes in the sphere of European-Ottoman relations.Mills also offers interested readers an inter-generational review of how chaplaincy in the East played a vital role in the advancement of English scholarship.The Hebraist and theologian John Lightfoot's statements serve as the starting point for Mills' discussion of the fascination that English scholars had for the East.Writing in the 1670s, Lightfoot confesses that he longed to gaze upon "those places in the land of Canaan" (1).Referring to Levantine sites such as Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan, Mills suggests that Lightfoot's words point to a "shifting intellectual landscape" whereby the English wished to understand and experience the sacred sites explicitly and implicitly alluded to in the Bible (2).But this historical interest in "Canaan" did not arrive suddenly -as Mills demonstrates throughout his book, it was built through individual relationships between scholars, merchants, and citizens that were carried over into institutional
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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 | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".