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.

Why did the nineteenth century see so little progress in addressing smoke pollution, even as smoke was increasingly recognised as a problem and economical technological solutions were identified? This article argues that efforts to abate smoke were impeded by the antagonistic class relationship between stokers and manufacturers, which prevented the emergence of a mutually beneficial compromise around smoke abatement. Employers sought to reduce smoke by compelling their stokers to take greater care under the threat of punishment. Law played an important role, siding with employers to impose liability for smoke pollution on stokers. Even when stokers were not prosecuted directly, employers often demanded indemnities as compensation for careless stoking. This reinforced mistrust between the two classes, undermining efforts to bring stokers on board with the goal of abating smoke. These findings may offer lessons today, as climate policy continues to be opposed despite the availability of green technologies and the existence of a scientific consensus on climate change.