Arming Sheīkh Saīd: Conflict and Cooperation in Italian and British Imperial Policy in the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea, 1927-1940
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After the Great War, Imam Yahya, the spiritual and temporal ruler of Yemen, established control over the Yemeni highlands and fought wars against his rivals to extend his power. Jacopo Gasparini, the governor of Italy’s Eritrean colony, increased Italian trade with Yemen, primarily by shipping arms to Imam Yahya. Italian influence in the Arabian peninsula worried British officials. Britain’s primary goal was to protect its imperial road through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea by ensuring that no European Power established itself on the eastern shore or on strategic islands of the Red Sea. In 1927, Italy and Britain signed the Rome Understanding, agreeing to limit their imperial competition in the peninsula. Both parties maintained the Rome Understanding and its successor agreement in the 1938 Easter Accords until the outbreak of the Second World War, although both violated its spirit and letter when convenient. In the latter half of the 1930s, Imam Yahya wanted to acquire naval cannon to defend Sheīkh Saīd, a promontory that overlooked the strategically important Bab al-Mandeb Strait. Both Italian and British officials resisted providing them, as both feared that the other could seize Sheīkh Saīd and use these cannon to bar the southern exit of the Red Sea. After lengthy negotiations, the Italians eventually relented and shipped four naval cannon to Imam Yahya to try to earn his favour before the outbreak of Anglo-Italian conflict in World War Two. The episode of arming Sheīkh Saīd shows the nature of conflict and cooperation in Anglo-Italian relations in the Arabian Peninsula and the ultimate failure to reconcile their imperial interests.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".