MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort

Slavery in the Cities of the Interior of West Africa

2024· reference-entry· en· W4399748585 on OpenAlexaff
Penda Mbow, Martin A. Klein

Bibliographic record

VenueOxford Research Encyclopedia of African History · 2024
Typereference-entry
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAfrican history and culture studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGeographyEconomic geographyPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Cities have played an important role in West African history. In the vast majority of African urban complexes, slavery and the slave trade have played an important role. As in most parts of the world, slavery has roots in the distant past, but its importance was increased by the demand for African slaves, first by the dynamic civilizations of the Mediterranean and the Middle East and then by European global imperialism. The efforts of Africa enslavers to supply these foreign markets meant the slaves were available for use within Africa. The number of those kept and used within Africa was generally greater than those exported. They were used as agricultural labor, concubines, soldiers, administrators, porters, servants, and artisans. There were contrasting patterns of slave use: peasants with small slave holdings, states incorporating slaves as soldiers and administrators, and a largely Muslim merchant class, which lived in cities but maintained large rural plantations. The process began in the 1st millennium bce but reached a peak in the long 18th century, when militarized states evolved to meet the demand for slave labor in the West Indies.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.065
Threshold uncertainty score0.129

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0030.002
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.068
GPT teacher head0.324
Teacher spread0.256 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2024
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueOxford Research Encyclopedia of African HistorySame topicAfrican history and culture studiesFrench-language works237,207