The English Royal Navy's relationship with Scotland during the years preceding the Union of 1707 is usually cast as problematic in scholarly discussion, with the navy viewed as the enforcer of an embargo on Scottish trade with France. This study examines the Scottish use of Royal Naval convoy in the first years of the War of Spanish Succession through to 1707, focusing on the North Sea region. It adds nuance to security issues surrounding the parliamentary union by arguing that convoys to Scotland were more frequent than generally acknowledged, an improvement on the situation in the 1690s, and that when combined with the small Scottish navy, provided coverage that largely met Scottish needs. As a result, in a period of otherwise fierce debate, naval protection for Scotland was relatively uncontroversial. Convoy was therefore an unusual, if belated, success for regal union, and that success meant that Scots were more deeply enmeshed in the English system of maritime security than has been often been credited.

Susan Pennybacker's presidential plenary to the 2017 North American Conference on British Studies in Denver, Colorado, explores the lives of four of the subjects of her book (in progress) of the same title. It identifies the kinds of archival and ethnographic sources that allow new treatments of the exile, émigré, and expatriate communities of London after the close of World War II and of those who contributed in various ways to the ethos of metropolitan political culture in the “late empire” and Cold War era. The essay focuses on the South African Ruth First, the Indian diplomat Mrs. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the Indian academician Achin Vanaik, and the South Asian Londoner Suresh Grover, a member of the Monitoring Group, a legal assistance and anti-discrimination organization in the capital. It suggests the importance of scholarship that reckons with known and notable activist persons who led and represented many others in their challenges to global politics from a base in the “mammoth crossroads, the secure and unsafe haven that is London.”

This article investigates the treatment of oronasal vowel /ↄ̃/ of the prenominal adjective bon (/bↄ̃/) in liaison, as produced by 19 speakers of Northern Metropolitan French. The oronasal vowel of this word has traditionally been identified as a denasalized vowel in liaison, which, when paired with the liaison consonant [n], is typically understood to be produced identically to the feminine form of the adjective bonne (/bↄn/). To verify this supposition, the adjective pair bon/bonne is produced in various contexts and word sequences by each speaker in a series of reading tasks. Six acoustic measures (i.e., A1−P0, A3−P0, center of gravity, F1 bandwidth, F2 and vowel duration) are taken for each token and the resulting data are analysed in a series of regression models. A brief acoustic description is given for the vowel /ↄ̃/ both in and out of liaison, and comparison is made between bon in liaison and the feminine bonne in prevocalic position (e.g., bon ami vs. bonne amie). Analyses indicate that 15 of the 19 speakers seem to produce bon in liaison distinctly from non-liaison bon, but not distinctly from pre-vocalic bonne, which may support suppletive analyses of adjectives in liaison.

Though presidential personality and preferences heavily influence US Arctic policy, climate change and the perceived threat to US interests posed by rising international engagement in the north among great powers such as Russia and China are increasingly impacting US policy in the region. Recognising that these trends are likely to persist into the future, it is important to understand the US Arctic policymaking apparatus, how geopolitical and environmental factors affect the creation and implementation of such policies through the presidency and how the resulting presidential policies may impact US leadership in the region for years to come. Consequently, this article examines how the distinct styles and preferences of Presidents Obama and Trump interact with growing climate change and defence challenges in the region within the US Arctic policymaking process. We illustrate this interaction through examples at both domestic and international policy levels and then place it in the larger context of the differing presidential approaches to institutionalisation when setting policy. Ultimately, we conclude that not only do presidential priorities regarding climate change, rising international engagement, and institutionalisation critically influence Arctic policymaking, but how a future president views these issues will heavily impact the direction of policies affecting the region.

What scholars referred to as a climate change litigation ‘explosion’ in 2015 has today become an established movement which is unlikely to stop in the near future: worldwide, over a thousand lawsuits have been launched regarding responsibility for the dangers of climate change. Since the beginning of this trend in transnational climate litigation scholars have warned that the separation of powers is threatened where judges interfere with the politically hot issue of climate change. This article uses Jürgen Habermas's political theory on deliberative democracy to reconstruct the tension between law and politics generated by these lawsuits. This reconstruction affords a better understanding of the implications of climate change litigation: while the role of the judiciary as such remains unchanged, the trend is likely to influence the democratic legitimacy of judicial lawmaking on climate change, as it indicates an increasing realization that a sound environment is a constitutional value and is therefore a prerequisite for democracy.

Why is pain bad? The most straightforward theory of pain's badness, dolorism, appeals to the phenomenal quality of displeasure. In spite of its explanatory appeal, the view is too straightforward to capture two central puzzles, namely pain that is enjoyed and pain that is not painful (e.g. pain asymbolia). These cases can be captured by conditionalism, which makes the badness of displeasure conditional on an agent's attitude. But conditionalism fails where dolorism succeeds with explanatory appeal. A new approach is proposed, reverse conditionalism, which maintains the explanatory appeal of dolorism, but gives attitudes a value-defeating role. It is argued that this view does best in fulfilling the desiderata and capturing the cases.

Using Leicester's de-industrialized St George's area as a case-study, this article discusses three projects, all of which involved an academic team, including urban historians, working with a range of non-academic partners, in order to uncover the history and heritage of this part of the city in order to support the regeneration of the area. The first two of these projects leveraged digital media to engage public audiences, while the third used a more ‘traditional’ set of interpretation panels, removing the requirement for specific technology in order to access information as they passed along the street.

In this paper, the unexpected behavior of object negative quantifiers in some diagnostic tests of sentential negation is accounted for within a Minimalist framework assuming that: (i) negative quantifiers decompose into negation and an existential quantifier; (ii) negative quantifiers are multidominant phrase markers, as Parallel Merge allows the verb to c-select their existential part but not their negative part, thus giving negation remerge flexibility; (iii) tag questions involve or-coordination of TPs, and neither/so clauses involve and-coordination of TPs; (iv) two positions for sentential negation are available in English, one below TP (PolP2), and one above TP (PolP1). Activation of either PolP1 or PolP2 in the absence of other scope-taking operators corresponds to two distinct grammars. If PolP1 is active, the negative part of an object negative quantifier remerges in its Specifier valuing the [upol: ] feature of Pol1 as negative ([upol:neg]) while skipping the TP-domain. As no negative formal feature is present in the TP, a negative question tag is required, as well as so-coordination, too-licensing and Yes, I guess so ‘expression of agreement’. Conversely, if PolP2 is active, the negative part of the object negative quantifier remerges in the TP-domain (in Spec, PolP2), thus requiring a positive question tag, neither-coordination, either-licensing, and No, I guess not.

The recreation of urban historical space in museums is inevitably a complex, large-scale endeavour bridging the worlds of academic and public history. BCLM: Forging Ahead at the Black Country Living Museum is a £23m project recreating a typical Black Country town post-World War II. This article uses case-studies of three buildings – a Civic Restaurant, a record shop and a pub – to argue that urban-historical research methodology and community engagement can both create a vivid sense of the past, and challenge pervasive prejudices. It also argues that such a collaborative and public project reveals much about the urban and regional nature of industrial areas like the Black Country in this pivotal historical moment.

John Maynard Smith (1920–2004) was one of Britain's most eminent evolutionary biologists. For over forty years, from 1954 onwards, he also regularly appeared on radio and television. He primarily acted as a scientific expert on biology, but in the late 1960s and the 1970s he often spoke on the implications of science (biology and more generally) for society. Through four case studies, this paper analyses Maynard Smith's scientific broadcasting against developments within the BBC as well as the relation between science and society in Britain. It finds that while Maynard Smith acknowledged and accepted increasing mediation through the BBC and its producers, he stayed publicly and privately critical of both format and content decisions in his reflections on the science–media relationship. At the same time, we find that over a decade before the 1985 report by the Royal Society on the public understanding of science, Maynard Smith came to think of engagement with the public via the media as scientists’ responsibility.

Hip hop, reggae/raggamuffin, and fusions between these genres, emerged in the Italian island of Sardinia in the 1980s and 1990s. In this article, we examine the ways in which these transnational music forms have found fertile terrain in post-colonial Sardinia across generations and cultures through the music of the historic hip hop crew, Sa Razza, the next generation ‘rappamuffin’ artist, Randagiu Sardu, and the Senegalese-Sardinian Afro-reggae musician, Momar Gaye. Through the analysis of selected tracks and video clips we explore how overlapping cultural, social, and political discourses of decolonisation are framed and narrated through language, music, and images as a means of expressing cultural and political agency, critiquing the impacts of exploitation and colonisation, and consciously and self-reflexively reinterpreting and celebrating marginality.

This article presents three arguments on why businesses have direct obligations under existing international law. Nevertheless, in the present state of international law, the obligations of businesses are limited and wholly dependent on the state’s further action of implementation and enforcement. To reach this conclusion, the article asserts that businesses have partial legal personality in international law; that legal obligations and the enforcement model must be distinguished as two separate issues; and that human rights are requirements of justice that emanate from the dignity of each human person to any social actor, including businesses and other non-state actors. The article attempts to contribute to the debate about a binding instrument on business and human rights and presents an alternative understanding of international law that can assist domestic tribunals in applying international human rights standards to businesses as they carry out activities in their jurisdictions.

Set in contemporary Palermo, Emma Dante's Via Castellana Bandiera (2013) offers a powerful exploration of the South as a site of cultural contact, interaction and confrontation by focusing on a western-like showdown between two women whose lives are differently marked by mobility and migration. In Dante's film, the simultaneous articulation of queerness and southernness is a way to queer the traditional image of the frontier and to offer an evocative elaboration on how identities are constructed, mobilised and played off against each other in the neoliberal context.

This essay explores how hormone treatments were used to optimize and normalize individuals under Italian Fascism. It does so by taking the activities of the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute − an Italian eugenics and endocrinological centre founded by Nicola Pende in 1926 − as the prime example of a version of eugenics, biotypology, which was based on hormone therapies. This essay first demonstrates that Italian Fascist biopolitics was not only concerned with increasing the size of the Italian population, but also with improving its quality. It suggests that under the Italian Fascist regime hormone therapies became eugenic tools of intervention to improve the Italian race. Second, while Pende's institute purportedly enhanced men and women, its activities show the extent to which the ‘techniques of normalization’ pursued by the Fascist regime were both systematic and invasive.