“Bringing ‘The Magic Carpet Up to Date’: Imperial Airways in Iraq, 1920–1932”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Scholars working on mandate Iraq have demonstrated the centrality of indiscriminate air power in the British Empire's “policing” tactics, recognising an intimate link between the Royal Air Force and mandatory rule. Less clear, however, is how Iraq's emergence as a node in interwar commercial aviation routes was also the product of British control. Foregrounding the activities of the British airline Imperial Airways (1924–1939) sheds light on the imperial roots of air tourism in Iraq. Using government records and the archives of Imperial Airways—alongside popular press books, magazines, newspapers, and ephemeral promotional material—this article draws attention to how Imperial Airways’ proponents talked about air travel in Iraq both as a boon for the British Empire and as a means of “developing” the mandated state itself. In this latter vein, promoters of “air-mindedness” emphasised Iraq's antiquity for multiple ends. First, and perhaps most obvious, to make it more enticing for tourists. Second, they juxtaposed an image of Iraq as frozen in the past with aviation's modernising potential. Ultimately, in foregrounding civic aviation, this article aims to contribute to the nascent historiography of tourism in Iraq alongside broader debates about transportation infrastructure, culture, and empire in the interwar period.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".