Bibliographic record
Abstract
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 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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".