Workers of War and Empire from New France to British America, 1688–1783
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the eighteenth century, the French and British empires mobilized thousands of workers in what is now Canada through a system of mandatory labour known as corvée. Rooted in the feudal obligations of peasants to their landlords, corvée was introduced by the French, and later exploited by the British, becoming part of their arsenal during the American revolutionary wars. Richard Tomczak chronicles the transformation of the corvée system over a century. Under the French regime, corvée was mostly directed towards local public works projects, such as building roads and bridges. After the conquest of Quebec, the system assumed greater scope. The British realized their need for labour in an underpopulated region and co-opted corvée for their imperial ends, requiring the male inhabitants of New France to work in state enterprises such as iron mining and logging, and conscripting Canadians to support their military expeditions during the American Revolution. This surging demand for labour in the service of the state precipitated widespread protests in New France, forcing the governor to ratify a new provincial code regulating the use of corvée. Tomczak also sheds light on the rhythms of French Canadians’ working lives, their understanding of corvée obligations, and the ways they expressed resistance when the system became burdensome. Exploring a lesser-known aspect of the labour arrangements that propped up the colonial state, Workers of War and Empire from New France to British America, 1688–1783 puts French Canadian workers front and centre in the history of early Canada.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".