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Record W4410833170 · doi:10.3366/irss.2025.0045

The Cotton Famine and the Decline of the Scottish Cotton Industry

2025· article· en· W4410833170 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Anthony Cooke

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational Review of Scottish Studies · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicScottish History and National Identity
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsFamineMemoirHistoryInvestment (military)Economic historyEconomyArchaeologyEconomicsPolitical scienceLawPoliticsArt history

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article argues that the Scottish industry recovered fairly quickly from the cotton famine but declined steeply in the late nineteenth century. The article analyses the wills and inventories of fifty Scottish cotton masters and sixty-one Glasgow West India merchants from 1783 to 1912—a total sample of 111. From the 1830s, Scottish cotton masters diversified their portfolios into iron and steel manufacturing, engineering, railways, chemicals, and shipping. Wills and inventories need to be supplemented by contemporary analysis, such as the posthumous memoirs of Archibald Alison, Margaret Irwin, and the Women’s Industries in Scotland, or contemporary biographies. Recent research by Sven Beckert, Maxine Berg, Pat Hudson and Giorgio Riello has emphasized globalization, increasing trading and financial links between Liverpool and New Orleans, and growing regional variations between Scotland and Lancashire. The decline of the Scottish cotton industry was rooted in cultural norms, social expectations, and religious behaviour, plus investment in more profitable industries developing in the west of Scotland.

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)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.142
Threshold uncertainty score0.281

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.003
Science and technology studies0.0020.004
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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 head0.029
GPT teacher head0.318
Teacher spread0.289 · 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 designNot applicable
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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