Subsea cables date to the 19th century with telegraphic use and have served various roles, including military. However, they rose to prominence in communications with the Internet’s creation in 1980s. Today, global telecommunications, the Internet, and financial and security systems rely on subsea cables, which handle about 97% of international communications. A new development enhances subsea cable technology by adding oceanographic sensors to collect ocean, environment, and climate data. These are called ‘SMART (Sensor Monitoring and Reliable Telecommunications) cables. Adding monitoring to subsea cables is a cheap way to improve marine environmental understanding through data collection, transforming them into dual-purpose systems combining data gathering and telecommunications. This dual role raises legal questions—primarily whether SMART cables collecting marine data qualify as scientific research needing coastal State consent in certain maritime zones. The subsea cable industry is lukewarm on SMART cables, fearing coastal State laws may hinder operations which adds complication. Security concerns over subsea cables increases with geopolitical tensions and deliberate targeting, such as the October 2023 Baltic Connector incident. Adding new technology to an established one raises several issues. Though SMART cables offer strong scientific benefits for understanding the (marine) environment, caution is needed as legal hurdles arise.

Norman Simmons insists, 'railway modelling is the art of creating in miniature a working replica of a full-size railway.' As Martin Evans notes, model engineering is 'very closely allied to full-sized mechanical engineering, and the problems involved in the design of working models are similar to real practice. Viewed from outside the railway fancy all attempts to miniaturise the full-sized railway's machine ensemble may seem much of a piece; but within that fancy attempts split into three activities, each marked by its own aesthetic. Curly Lawrence identified two of these: toy trains and model engineering. Lying between these two, and by no means always comfortably, lies the third practice: railway modelling. Experienced workers always advise newcomers to moderate expertise. A model railway's Gestalt works best when different elements display common standards. Model railways' key artifice, low-voltage electric motors powering steam- or diesel-outline models, presuppose high-grade electrical competence.

This chapter discusses the concept of sexuality as a moral problem in the first decades of the new Irish state. Irish Catholics were involved in social activism directed at issues of public morality. The new independent Irish state had organisations involved in this campaign, which included the Irish Vigilance Association, the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, St Vincent de Paul Society and the Legion of Mary. These organizations aimed to incorporate the public morality framework into social policy and legislation.

Ernest Younger's encounter with Toronto in the early 1920s to mid-1930s covers many of the concerns of this chapter, primarily the differences perceived between the origin and destination in vital matters such as environment, employment, and housing. The chapter explores the divergences between the various points of settlement in the British World and between Irish and Scottish experiences. It discusses a number of methodological issues, primarily the contrasts between divergent forms of testimony, including contemporary written accounts and retrospective oral and written interviews. Similarities with home could make the transition easier, as did disparity that favoured conditions in the destination over those in the country of origin. As with the housing situation, verdicts on towns and technology depended to a large extent on the background of migrants. Irish and Scottish migrants were less prone to the difficulties and cultural misunderstandings experienced by non-English-speaking foreign groups, such as German migrants.

This chapter outlines the tactics, including the cultivation of influence as much as authority, that were used by 'pioneers' to negotiate a growing role for women officers within existing structures. It demonstrates that senior women officers achieved considerable success in creating their own professional networks that cut across individual police forces. The chapter discusses the ideological contexts of gender politics and in relation to the impact of total war in the first half of the twentieth century. Policewomen's roles and working conditions were carefully negotiated with their chief constables during the First World War and the inter-war period. The concept of the 'feminine' continued to be a point of reference during the Second World War, although some members of the newly created Women's Auxiliary Police Corps (WAPC) were deployed to undertake more 'masculine' activities.

Feminine occupations tended to encourage women workers to project a heterosexual identity at work and were therefore environments which proved insignificant to and problematic for the construction of a lesbian identity. In a conflation of the patterns of development of the lesbian and the career woman, both were women who had failed to develop a maternal instinct and thus mature beyond the adolescent phase of homosexuality. The influence of medical discourses characterising lesbians as emotionally abnormal and potentially predatory, meant that single women teachers were increasingly regarded as poor role models for girls. Cultural associations of masculinity and women-only environments with lesbianism meant that the women employed in such workplaces were constructed as potentially sexually deviant. Under the leadership of Margaret Damer Dawson and Mary Allen, both of whom were lesbians, the Women Police Service (WPS) made an important contribution to women's policing during the First World War.

This chapter discusses variations in the nature of migrant journeys. It presents cases of forced migration, including the migration of Vietnamese refugees and the traumatic journeys of the Jews and Irish people. The migrations of the Jews and the Irish represent the largest European migrations of the nineteenth century. In this chapter, both the emigration of the Jews from the Russian Empire and the horrors of Irish famine emigration are discussed in detail.

This chapter examines issues relating to language, accent, and cultural traditions. The linkage between accent, identity, and hostility is apparent from the testimony of Scots who arrived as youngsters in the United States. The chapter focuses on the issue of dual national attachments and considers if broad ethnic identities differed according to the divergent societies migrants found themselves in. Most Irish and Scottish migrants were more intrigued with the novel foods they encountered in their new destinations rather than attesting to their continuation of Irish fare. Apart from holding to various cultural aspects of their ethnicity, migrants were also conscious of jointly belonging to their new homelands. The novelty of aspects of Scottish culture for other ethnicities seems to have prompted some Scots to powerfully emphasise this particular element of their national identity. The popular ethnic stereotypes, rather than cause division, served to foster friendly relations among various national groups.

This chapter focuses on three aspects of collective experience among young French-North Africans in Seine-Saint-Denis: the banlieue, the quartier and racial discrimination. While the banlieue and the quartier are often considered as predominantly socio-economic categories, the chapter argues that they can be seen as representing an interface between social and more cultural forms of identity. The chapter discusses interface between the socio-economic and the cultural in relation to the interviewees' narratives of racial discrimination. The notion of belonging to a community which is primarily defined in terms of an antagonistic relationship between Paris and la banlieue is a fairly prevalent phenomenon among the young people who took part in the fieldwork. In addition to a strong sense of identity with regard to the banlieue, which is simultaneously conceived as a socio-economic and cultural 'imagined community', some interviewees reveal that they enjoy close ties with their immediate quartier.

This chapter focuses on the works of Edna O'Brien and John McGahern. O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy (1960–64) and McGahern's The Dark (1965) were banned due to their portrayal of sexuality. The chapter also discusses the reform of literary censorship and the contribution of these novels to the cultural reconfiguration of sexuality and social change in Ireland.

In the thoughts and imaginations of most people, siblinghood has been stripped of its eighteenth-century functionality. Conjugal family forms have become ascendant in contemporary conceptions of family life, but sibling ties have become the definitive language for much of current social, religious, and political thought. Georgian siblings, in all of their rivalrous and friendly glory, inhabited a different time. As the Georgian period ended there was a decline in siblings' material and economic interdependency and a simultaneous intensification in the literary portrayal of their emotional connections. The Travell siblings' lifelong economics, both emotional and material, were, in Leonore Davidoff's words, a central element in active kinship. Sibling relationships were intricately complex, and understanding siblings is necessary to understanding early modern family and gender relations, and equally necessary to appreciating the role of family relations in social interaction.

Chapter 3 demonstrates how Blake’s biological myth, though obscure, was deeply embedded in contemporary revolutionary discourses. Reading the Urizen books against Blake’s neglected, unpublished The French Revolution (1791), this chapter puts Blake in intimate dialogue with Burke, Sieyès, and other revolutionary and reactionary writers who evocatively updated the body politic metaphor to describe a radically changing political landscape. Having discussed Blake’s critical attitude towards political self-organisation, this chapter discusses the further connotative development of the word “organization” in The Four Zoas, which picks up on the use of the term in British responses to France’s imperialist military project in the Revolutionary Wars. The chapter ends with a discussion of how after a turbulent revolutionary decade of utopian miscarriages, Blake came to envision political change in terms of regeneration and rejuvenation instead of gestation and birth.

The British Labour government announced a withdrawal from Aden in 1966, departing from the previous Conservative government's commitment to maintain a formal defence link with its allies in the Federation of South Arabia. Britain's withdrawal from Aden was premised on the Federal Administration, along with the South Arabian Army (SAA), taking over internal security from British forces as they transitioned towards independence in 1968. In a secret memorandum to the Foreign Office in the days leading up to withdrawal, the High Commissioner Sir Humphrey Trevelyan hoped that the SAA, which he recognized as being ‘more closely aligned with the NLF than with FLOSY’, could occupy the rebellious Crater district and seize control ‘with or without the collusion of some of the Sultans and/or more of the Opposition parties’. The notion of colluding with local moderates was a recurrent theme in Britain's small wars, as too was the often contradictory (and utterly clandestine) negotiations with extremist insurgents and terrorists. This chapter explores the disharmony in civil-military relations on the question of withdrawal from Aden, arguing that, in dodging the bullet in Aden, Britain opted to come to terms with its relative power in the world.