Historiography, post-colonial theory, and Roman North Africa, a study of the impact of cultural beliefs on historical knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Starting from the premise that the historical treatment of a given topic changes over time, this thesis carries out an historiographical examination of writings on the Roman occupation of North Africa. The fact that the Maghreb was colonized by European powers in both ancient and modern times makes it a particularly fruitful area of study for a topic of this kind. The first half of the thesis is a literature review of two centuries of historical writing on Roman North Africa as well as a tracing of the concept of Romanization which, though developed nearly 100 years ago, remains the dominant framework for the study of Roman provinces. After this, a chapter is devoted to debates concerning the possibility of knowing the past as it actually occurred and to post-colonial theory. These ideas are then applied to urbanization, which has traditionally been treated as an integral part of Romanization. This analysis reveals that, although historical works have become less overtly political, biases remain. The Eurocentric discourse of development is singled out as one which continues to inform most writings on Roman Africa including those produced by non-European scholars. It is argued that, even if such biases can never fully disappear, recognition of their presence and impact is necessary if historical knowledge is to move forward. Finally, some suggestions are made concerning future directions for studies of societies within the Roman Empire.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".