Full Steam Ahead: Steamship Adoption and Trade Flows During the First Golden Age of Globalization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From 1870 to 1910, shipping to and from the US transitioned from an industry dominated by sail-powered ships to one where steam accounted for virtually 100% of shipping. I study the effects of the steamship on US port-level trade flows and their composition, leveraging cross-port differences in the speed and extent of steamship usage over time. In order to conduct this analysis, I digitize port-level trade flows disaggregated by product and port-level tables of shipping volume broken down by sail versus steam. I find that ports which increased their proportion of steam in shipping volumes increased trade by diversifying their trade flows. This diversification occurred along two dimensions: trading partner countries and products. In other words, ports which adopted steam saw more trade, driven principally by products and countries which were not initially dominant in that port’s trade in 1870. The results in this paper therefore suggest that one way in which trade diversification can occur is via the lowering of transport costs.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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.
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".