Neo-Mercantilism in Practice: State Chartered Railroads, Imagined Futures, and the Creation of a Settler-Society in the Red River Valley of the North, 1845-1890
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Economic sociologists, drawing both on pragmatist action theory and Keynesian and Schumpeterian economics, have recently begun to look at the important work projection plays in economic action, especially under conditions of radical uncertainty. In this thesis I apply this framework to historical political economy, the rapid post-Civil War settlement of the American West by transcontinental railroads. I use the Red River Valley of the North, an extremely fertile region on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota, as a case study, examining the imaginaries of the Valley projected by two railroads, the Northern Pacific and the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba, and how they shaped the creation of a local agriculture based settler society. I argue that this led to two types of developmental processes, those based upon rough consensus over imagined futures, which applied to the construction of a network of towns and various attempts to attract settlers, and those based upon disagreement over imagined futures, which applied mainly to agricultural practices, and broader concept of the ultimate economic function of a given railroad. The former processes were gradual, acting according to an overarching logic established at the beginning of settlement. The latter, in contrast, was an "eventful", personality driven process of disjunctive "creative destruction." Finally, I argue that these points of conflict and consensus reflected similar points within broader social, political, and railroad discourses.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".