Working Through a War: The Traders of John Holt & Co. in Cameroon During the First World War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper will explore the experiences of John Holt & Co.’s European and African traders who were in German-controlled Cameroon when war broke out in August of 1914. Using company and government archives, the paper argues that local employees, who came from multiple European countries and from across the west coast of Africa, faced significant hardships but, through skill, experience, and self-interest, kept the company afloat at a time of crisis and transition. The paper begins with an investigation of how the German government in Cameroon made British employees prisoners of war and then, after the British conquest of Douala, German employees were subjected to the same treatment by occupying forces. The second part explores the breakdown of trading networks and the difficult situation of employees in the interior who suffered from a lack of security, the violence of invading armies, and the destruction of property. Despite the hardships, wartime conditions also created economic opportunities for some African employees, and part three explores their enlarged responsibilities during the war years. The final section examines the post-war era as the region transitioned from German to Anglo-French control, exploring some continuities with the pre-1914 period as well as the consolidation of some companies and an increasing expatriate dominance over the commodities trade.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".