MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4402301619 · doi:10.1086/731366

The Great Distress: Wage Labor and British Antislavery after 1815

2024· article· en· W4402301619 on OpenAlexaff
Padraic X. Scanlan

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Journal of Modern History · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicHistorical Economic and Social Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsWageDistressLabour economicsEconomicsDemographic economicsPsychologyClinical psychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In 1834, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in the British empire became free laborers under the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act. In Britain that same year, the Poor Law Amendment Act created the first free market in labor for some of the United Kingdom’s poorest workers, agricultural laborers on British and Irish farms. Although political economists in Britain posited that slavery was estranged from the free market, “free labor”—at least for farmworkers—came to Britain and its empire at roughly the same time. For some activists in the British antislavery movement, wage labor appeared to have a civilizing power, and it seemed that enslaved people would need to be taught how to behave in a free labor market so that its “natural” laws would impel them to steady wage work after emancipation. In 1815, the end of the Napoleonic wars brought a prolonged period of economic “distress” in Britain and Ireland. In this era, antislavery thinkers began to reflect on the ways that wages, properly calibrated, could civilize free as well as enslaved workers. This article traces overlapping ideas about the free market in both antislavery and laissez-faire economic thought. It shows how antislavery thinkers struggled with the tension between their faith in a free labor market and their concerns about setting a “civilizing” rate of wages. Finally, it sketches the history of the Quaker abolitionist William Allen’s attempt to build a colony in England that would educate free workers in wage labor.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.771
Threshold uncertainty score0.260

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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 head0.018
GPT teacher head0.184
Teacher spread0.167 · 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 teacher head, not a consensus.

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

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 venueThe Journal of Modern HistorySame topicHistorical Economic and Social StudiesFrench-language works237,207