The impact of imported firearms on Southeast Asian states has been a topic of much debate, but is often discussed in relatively general terms. This article uses the archive of the Dutch East India Company to analyse the importation of muskets into late seventeenth century Ayutthaya, which took the form of diplomatic gifting, as well as their intended uses. Muskets are found to have been used mainly for the suppression of internal popular revolts, which was aided by extremely strict gun control aimed at keeping firearms a royal monopoly. The importation of these guns was responsive to immediate need and stopped once revolts became less frequent. The volume of the trade between 1658 and 1709 is found to have been surprisingly low.

Light pollution – the use of artificial lighting at night (ALAN) – is a growing environmental problem. This article focuses on how the European Union (EU) governs light pollution. A few key points are made. At first glance, the regulatory situation appears to be straightforward: there is no explicit EU governance in this area, as no regulation has been adopted with specific targets to mitigate light pollution. Yet, many EU instruments indirectly affect the growth of light pollution without mentioning the term by name. This article discusses specific examples from the EU Habitats Directive and the Energy Labelling Regulation, amongst others. On the basis of these examples, the article argues that this web of instruments, when considered together, can be conceptualized as ‘shadow’ governance. It concludes that unless light is shed on regulatory spillovers, the current EU regulatory framework will continue to worsen, rather than address, light pollution.

This study investigates the interpretation of referring expressions in Korean – a discourse-oriented language in which referential resolution relies primarily on discourse context rather than morphosyntactic cues. Across three experiments, we manipulated the accessibility of potential antecedents by varying their grammatical roles and examined the effects on referential interpretation using naturalness ratings and antecedent choice tasks. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that null pronouns function as the highest accessibility markers, yielding the strongest subject antecedent preferences and the highest naturalness ratings. In contrast, overt pronouns and full NPs displayed no clear interpretive bias in these contexts. However, Experiment 3 – featuring globally ambiguous sentences – revealed a clear three-way distinction: null pronouns were strongly associated with subject antecedents, while overt pronouns and full NPs favored object antecedents, with full NPs eliciting the strongest object bias. These findings support the key predictions of Accessibility Theory, particularly the form–function correlation linking referential form to cognitive accessibility. Notably, the accessibility distinction between overt pronouns and full NPs appears weaker and more context-sensitive, suggesting that referential form distinctions are not equally weighted across all categories. This work offers novel and comprehensive cross-linguistic support for Accessibility Theory by providing empirical evidence for the proposed hierarchy of the Accessibility Marking Scale.

This article examines Charles Bell’s experimental practices by drawing historiographical attention away from the priority disputes over the spinal nerve functions for which he was most famous. I argue that Bell’s primary research interest was the expression of emotions. To this end, he developed a programme of vivisection that explored the underlying mechanisms of emotion. However, this also resulted in a profound contradiction between his experimental practices and his worldview – conducting painful experiments on beloved animals despite moral revulsion towards animal experimentation. This opens up three interconnected areas. Firstly, it allows an exploration of disciplinary identity in medicine, particularly the way that disciplines demanded specific practices and behaviours. Secondly, vivisection more generally required methods and ethics that opposed the growing anti-cruelty voice. Here, a combination of animal choice and the importation of techniques from the slaughterhouses was critical. Thirdly, vivisectors navigated a complex emotional landscape between their professional obligations and broader cultural sensibilities. These three areas are linked together using Boddice’s concept of moral economies, the affective frameworks that structured feelings. Particularly important were the sentimental and Romantic economies, both of which impacted Bell and his research. At the same time, Bell always struggled to reconcile the tensions between his disciplinary identity and his sentimental and Romantic beliefs, ultimately leading him to abandon experimentation after his assistant John Shaw’s death. I conclude by identifying the guarantees provided by character for licensing ostensibly cruel behaviours, thus allowing for the maintenance of probity within competing moral economies.

This paper presents a corpus-based investigation of Latin volo ‘to want’, arguing that it exhibits previously overlooked reportative uses from at least the 1st century BCE, whereby speakers attribute beliefs, opinions, or statements to an external source. Focusing on third-person present-tense forms (vult, volunt) across a corpus spanning from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, the study analyses the semantic, pragmatic, and morphosyntactic properties of these constructions, as well as their diachronic development. Reportative volo is shown to emerge from ambiguous contexts where volition and doxastic stance overlap – especially in small-clause constructions with subject coreferentiality or passive infinitives of verbs of opinion. Diachronically, it is proposed that the doxastic component – implicit in volitional uses and anchored in the volitional subject – becomes explicit, when the anchoring of an external doxastic source shifts from outside (i.e. the opinion of others) to the volitional subject, who is then reinterpreted as an evidential source. Comparisons with German wollen (and to a lesser extent with French vouloir) contextualise this development within a broader grammaticalisation path from volition to evidentiality. While wollen is already grammaticalised as a reportative marker, Latin volo offers novel diachronic and structurally distinct evidence for this cross-linguistic trajectory.

This paper adopts a sociosemiotic perspective to examine how normative consensus and legitimacy are constructed in global artificial intelligence (AI) governance discourse. Drawing on a corpus of forty-seven international normative documents, the study identifies an emerging cross-textual consensus around three core principles – Safety, Human-centric and Fairness – and analyses how these are semiotically encoded. The findings reveal tensions between state and non-state actors, and between semiotic agreement and practical implementation. For instance, ‘Safety’ is often framed through securitisation discourse, while ‘Human-centric’ is increasingly grounded in international human rights frameworks. The study further shows that discursive strategies such as nominalisation help establish surface-level consensus but introduce ambiguity that undermines enforceability. By conceptualising governance texts as dynamic semiotic systems, this research moves beyond the hard law–soft law dichotomy, revealing global AI regulation as a contested arena of meaning-making. It offers a theoretical basis for advancing more inclusive and operational governance models.

This article examines the creation in the early 1710s of a library at the Dublin military hospital for old soldiers known as the Royal Hospital Kilmainham (RHK). It shows that the library was created after an appeal by the master of the RHK, describes the books in the collection, and examines the gifts from a significant pool of seventy-one high-status men and women across Ireland from which the collection was constructed. It considers why the library was created at this time and its use during the two centuries that would elapse before the final closure of the hospital in the wake of Irish independence. This article is the first ever examination of the physical books and makes significant use of the minute books of the board of the RHK and its sub-committees, manuscript records that historians have tended to assume were lost or destroyed after the evacuation of British troops from the twenty-six counties.

It was a puzzle to the British and has been a puzzle to historians ever since, why the American colonists, who enjoyed a degree of liberty, political autonomy, and even low taxation that was the envy of subjects in the home country, would join in a risky revolution to sever ties with the nation of their origin. The answer, according to Edmund Burke, was in large part religion. “Religion,” he explained to fellow members of Parliament in his “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies,” always a “principle of energy,” was “no way worn out or impaired” in North America—and that religion was of a particular kind. Burke wrote: “The religion most prevalent in our Northern Colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.” Of all faiths, this hyper-Protestantism, wrote Burke, is “the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.” This article sets out the ecclesiological, experiential, and theological differences among the largest Protestant denominations in Revolutionary America and the ways in which these differences contributed not just to the revolutionary spirit, but to the democratic and republican strands of revolutionary and constitutional thought in the new United States. The biggest contrast was between members and clergy of the Church of England, who were most involved to remain Loyalists, Reformed Protestants (Congregationalists and Presbyterians), who inclined toward republicanism, and Baptists, who were the most democratic and individualistic.

Despite the social, political and personal importance of contentious death investigation, medico-legal autopsies have received scant socio-legal attention. By extending understanding of the importance of care for the dead in this context, this article begins to bridge that gap. To do this, I explore original empirical data from interviews with Anatomical Pathology Technologists who both assist during post-mortems and take responsibility for the care of the deceased’s body before and after autopsy. I argue that care is woven throughout their practice and identities. This care is enacted within a complex context of relations and regulations, such that practice can simultaneously be technically and morally ‘good’ (including actions that go beyond what is necessary or mandated). In making this argument, I both extend understandings of care to relationships with the dead, and contribute new insights into the way that coronial justice can, and should, gain legitimacy.

In the 1820s, the East India Company commissioned a steam-powered dredging vessel to be constructed and set to work on a series of rivers that connected their capital of Calcutta with the Ganges River, and thus major commercial and population centers in northern India. The vessel, however, was a failure. It could not float on the rivers it was meant to dredge. This hitherto untold narrative of early steam engines on the subcontinent argues that the ultimate failure and abandonment of the vessel was not due to insurmountable technical difficulties but rather to a failure of imagination by the EIC administration. They were limited by what they believed an imperial river should be and what were appropriate ways for humans and their technology to interact with that river. This illustrates how the British Empire in India conceptualized modern technology as European and therefore “naturally” in opposition to the Indian environment, as well as how such conceptualizations ultimately stymied their imperial ambitions.