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Record W4408138109 · doi:10.1017/jbr.2024.183

“Cruelty's Sisters”: Buying Seamen's Wages in Late Stuart England

2025· article· en· W4408138109 on OpenAlexaff
Barbara Todd

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of British Studies · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicHistorical Economic and Social Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCrueltyCriminologyHistoryPsychologyDemographic economicsEconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract To delay paying wages to seamen, the late Stuart Navy issued them instead with “tickets” to be redeemed for cash after months or years of delay. Seamen often sold the tickets at deep discounts to ticket buyers, who became government creditors for unpaid wages, one of the largest items in the national debt. Ticket buyers were savagely attacked in pamphlets. This article is a preliminary exploration of ticket buying, focusing on the large minority of buyers who were women. It shows that many of them were in fact the wives and widows of the seamen, working in the crowded streets around the Navy Office and in the cottages of the maritime communities nearby. Navy pay books are introduced as a key source; the business of one trader is evaluated using her financial papers, and the work of others assessed from probate records. Ticket buying opened up related opportunities for women as brokers of deals and as professional receivers of wages. But while pawning could be used as protection against the growing hazard of unpaid tickets, even with deep discounts it was difficult to make even a moderate return in the trade. Ticket buying was not a route to fortunes.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.254
Threshold uncertainty score0.506

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0080.002
Scholarly communication0.0030.002
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0020.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0150.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.034
GPT teacher head0.252
Teacher spread0.218 · 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
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
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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