“Especially in This Free Country”: Webs of Empire, Slavery, and the Fur Trade
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spanning the years from late 1600s and into the early 1800s “‘Especially in This Free Country:’ Webs of Empire, Slavery and the Fur Trade” challenges a historiography that positions what has come to be known as the Canadian fur trade as exceptional in its relationships between colonizers and Indigenous peoples, where interactions between Indigenous producers and non-Indigenous traders are presented as largely cooperative and peaceful and as rooted in relationships that operated in the absence of coerced or unfree labour. In fact, the fur trade, connected as it was through webs of family/business relationships to the rest of the colonial world was not exceptional. Across northern North America the fur trade world experienced the same sorts of violence, including chattel slavery, as the rest of the empires with which these webs connected. Far from absent, colonial violence was a part of the Canadian fur trade just as it was a part of empire. Located in the pre-history of Canada, this thesis responds to Harvey Amani Whitfield’s observation that, although there have been some excellent studies of slavery in Canada recently, “slavery has not become part of the Canadian national narrative” 1 by arguing that chattel slavery in the fur trade in what would become Canada was linked to the empires it was a part of, pervasive, integrated into all aspects of the fur trade, and occurred across the northern North American continent.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".