Bibliographic record
Abstract
First published in 1987, The Writing on the Wall tells the story of the muddle, shortsightedness and duplicity which characterised Britain’s dealings with her Pacific Dominions. It describes the reactions of each Dominion and chronicles the desultory responses of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to the developing crises in the North Pacific. The result is an important contribution to the history of all four continents. As the 1930s opened, the British Empire was everywhere recognised as a Great Power. Its rule extended over one-fifth of the earth’s land surface; it encompassed the largest population of any ‘State’ in the world; it controlled one-sixth of the world’s trade. In truth, the Empire was tragically fragile. Both Britain and the Dominions had disarmed to the point of impotence, so that when Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931 and attacked Shanghai, the centre of British trade in China, in the following year, they were unable to respond. British defence chiefs declared Japan’s success to be ‘the writing on the wall’. Despite these warnings, British politicians chose to appease the Japanese at the cost of seriously damaging the League of Nations, and to avoid spending money on defence in the Far East. Despite the concerns of the Dominions—Australia, New Zealand, and Canada—the scene was set for the total collapse of Britain’s Empire in the East within a decade. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of history.
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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.105 | 0.059 |
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".