Bibliographic record
Abstract
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 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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".