Impeded by Informality: The War Office, the Admiralty, the Canadian Militia and War Plans to Capture the French Islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, 1898–1903
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In November 1897, the Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) North America and West Indies Station, Vice-Admiral Sir John Fisher, initiated plans to capture the French North American island group of St Pierre and Miquelon, using British garrison troops stationed at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the Canadian Militia in a supporting role. His staff developed the scheme without consulting the Government of Canada or the War Office, and only brought the Halifax garrison commander into the planning process in October 1898, when the Fashola Crisis was in full swing. The War Office and the government of Canada eventually learned of the plans, which slumped along until 1903, but no one seemed sure who had the authority to deploy the Canadian Militia abroad. The plans were never executed, but the episode reveals a great deal about the dysfunctional state of British strategic planning in the late-Victorian period, especially between the War Office and the Admiralty, and the evolution of the dominion-imperial relations.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".