Bibliographic record
Abstract
The book offers compact studies of a range of primary documents, somewhat eclectically chosen, that bear in some way upon the relationships between bankers and politicians over the years 1789–1815. Valmori makes use of how-to manuals for merchants (a category in which many bankers still belonged at the time) and their apprentices; bank administrative records; pamphlet debates concerning public debt; periodical commentary on issues of public finance; merchant correspondence with government officials regarding war supplies, military intelligence, taxes and patronage requests; private banker ratings of other commercial houses and banks; bankers’ written advice to clients and other bankers about investment opportunities, especially in regard to new government loans and existing public securities; government banking regulations; and police reports on stock-market trading. Coverage is split almost evenly between British and French sources, with a few references as well to developments in Amsterdam. It is good that Valmori chose to focus on the relationship between banking and politics, since (outside the field of American banking) it is rare for the two subjects to meet up in a single book. Usually, political historians work away at explaining the sequence of events, with only passing interest in financial issues. Economic historians, on the other hand, tend to concentrate on the theory of banking and ignore the all-important political context. A rare and notable exception is Calomiris and Haber’s Fragile by Design. They maintain that banks and governments have long been engaged in a bargaining process, in which governments grant charters in exchange for a lower interest rate on public loans—at the expense of private borrowers. Given his research interests, Valmori might have used his book to put their thesis to the test for his period. Alas, he never even mentions it. Indeed, the book features no central analytical question of any kind. His case studies all take the form of mere reportage rather than analysis.
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 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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
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".