The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the maritime sector marks a significant technological advancement with broad implications for operational efficiency, crewing, and regulatory frameworks. While these innovations are expected to enhance safety, reduce operating costs, and promote environmental sustainability, they are also likely to introduce challenges related to workforce displacement, cybersecurity, and evolving labor regulations at sea. This chapter examines the impact of AI on the maritime workforce, more specifically seafarers. It explores how AI may affect crew size, the emergence of new roles, and new skills in the future. It also offers an analysis of the significant impact of AI on working conditions and labor rights at sea under international maritime regulations, particularly the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC), 2006, and the Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers Convention (1978, STCW Convention), as amended. This chapter explores the intersection areas of AI and maritime law, focusing on the emerging regulatory frameworks, including the EU AI Act and the International Maritime Organization’s Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) Code. The findings point out that while AI presents opportunities for improving the working conditions of seafarers, its use must adhere to acceptable labor standards, legal clarity, and robust cybersecurity measures.

Under the public health acts of 1874 and 1878, poor law boards had been constituted of rural sanitary authorities and empowered to monitor and enforce basic standards of hygiene and cleanliness. The labourers acts altered the terms of social and political relationships in rural Ireland. Many boards of guardians perceived the labourers act as an integral part of the relief system. Introduced in February 1883, the Labourers (Ireland) Bill empowered rural sanitary authorities to implement housing schemes on behalf of agricultural labourers on the representation of twelve ratepayers. The limited success of the acts was blamed on the obstacles placed in the way of boards of guardians by landlords, the Local Government Board and the Privy Council. Local influence was important not only in getting schemes underway but also in the allocation of the cottages once erected.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Birmingham had become the hub of a highly integrated regional economy. The Black Country and the West Midlands as understood today should be regarded as the product of a transition towards spatial and economic integration which culminated towards the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Economic geographers argue that transportation innovations provide the key to regional growth and differentiation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Matthew Boulton and the other Birmingham manufacturers lobbied for a navigable link of more immediate value, namely one which would connect the town's industries to their fuel sources in the Black Country. The historians of Birmingham seem unconvinced of the case for an urban identity. The English agricultural writer Arthur Young visited Birmingham several times in the 1760s and 1770s, and in 1791 labelled it as 'the first manufacturing town in the world'.

This chapter focuses on witnessing and its correspondence with trauma/traumatic schism, and specifically the notion of trauma-tragedy. The importance and centrality of theatre within discourses of trauma therapy and healing, both in the experience of making and viewing, is epitomised by Psychiatrist Sandra Bloom's assertion. A demonstration of the traumatic gap between the impossibility of articulating trauma and the necessity to do so can be found in many pieces including Penetrator and Exquisite Pain. Exquisite Pain operates on the level of embodied empathic witnessing. After examining a series of performances which address trauma and witnessing in different yet complementary ways, the chapter discusses what 'witness' might mean and what it means 'to be witnessed' in the context of trauma-tragedy. Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis is an ambiguous play which, as Alice Tycer has persuasively argued, offers readers and/or spectators the opportunity to 'include their own experiences in the text and/or performance'.

This chapter explores European 'films of voyage', a cinematic tradition that articulates, both narratively and visually, representations of the countryside with questions of boundaries and cultural diversity. In European 'films of voyage', the iconography of the countryside plays an important part in mapping the nation as a diverse rather than a homogenous cultural space. The chapter presents two case studies based upon a close analysis of two films: Voyage to the Beginning of the World and Ulysses' Gaze. On the one hand, Ulysses' Gaze relates to the ill-defined and transient Balkan space whose cartography has changed widely in an area where different ethnic groups and religions have mingled for many centuries. On the other, Voyage to the Beginning of the World relates to the Portuguese national space, where political borders have remained substantially unchanged since the late Middle Ages.

The literature of travel and of artisanal encounter testifies to the interconnectedness of the eighteenth-century knowledge economy. It also exposes to view a world of material consumption based on sophisticated markets in which fashion and taste were increasingly measured in pan-European, even trans-Atlantic terms. During the third and fourth quarters of the eighteenth century, Birmingham and the West Midlands became one of the prime sites in the western world for the production of useful knowledge. Eighteenth-century visitors to Birmingham were in agreement that James Keir, James Watt and Matthew Boulton possessed both a great deal of 'pure' scientific knowledge and an uncommon level of technical skill. Scientific knowledge, the possession of scientific instruments and a taste for scientific experimentation became signifiers of access to polite culture, a kind of behavioural language enabling enlightened gentlemen, to recognise one another across the length and breadth of Europe.

This chapter explores when shipmaster conduct triggers Flag State responsibility. While individual acts are not attributable to States, exceptions arise from special State-individual relationships. Influenced by the shipmaster’s traditional role as agent and navigator, the modern role includes a range of internationally codified duties. If stemming from Flag State obligations, the shipmaster fulfills them, supported by two ARSIWA exceptions to non-attributability: (1) when individuals act under State control; (2) when the State fails to prevent conduct. Flag State responsibility for shipmasters’ conduct evolves in rescue violations. It arises when States fail to ensure shipmasters assist persons in distress where reasonably possible without endangering lives onboard, or when rescued persons face treatment violating international refugee law, including human rights law. This chapter re-assesses Flag State responsibility by examining whether shipmasters’ conduct is attributable based on their humanity or presence onboard. It also evaluates when private conduct is attributable to the Flag State, based on (1) organ/agent status under ARSIWA and (2) the State’s due diligence in preventing unlawful acts. Attributability depends on vessel ownership, breached obligations, and the State’s role in prevention. The chapter expands ARSIWA attribution analysis to autonomous ship operations, where shipmasters are absent or replaced by decision-making artificial intelligence.

This chapter analyses how the Italian police confronted the many twists and turns characterising the final dramatic years of fascism. It examines how police personnel reacted to the breakdown in the machinery of the fascist state and the collapse of social cohesion in the scenario of the 'fascist war'. The chapter also examines how police personnel reacted to changes in regime in the dramatic situation of military occupation and civil conflict. Reflecting in part Benito Mussolini's alignment with Nazi policy but also the longer-standing anti-Semitic orientation of fascism, the Race Laws, decreed in September 1938, sanctioned the ostracism of Italian Jews from the Italian community. Police personnel faced far greater dilemmas in the wake of the Nazi occupation, which followed Marshal Pietro Badoglio's announcement on 8 September 1943 of Italy's surrender to the Anglo-American forces, and the founding of the Italian Social Republic.

European integration has numerous effects on key national institutions, national constitutions and national political personnel in all European Union member-states. In response to European integration, the venerated École nationale d'administration (ENA) has been partially relocated from Paris to Strasbourg. Because French Eurocrats were most often on détachement in Brussels, it was natural for them to be in touch with the French government and various interest groups on a regular basis. This chapter discusses Jacques Delors as a member of the more restricted group of French Commissioners in the Brussels bureaucracy. If in France constitutional reform led to a shortening of the president's term in office, in Finland constitutional reform had more far-reaching effects. The Finnish reform changed the relationships between central political institutions, the presidency, the government and the parliament, empowering government and parliament and disempowering the president.