Thirty-two years after Debendranath dictated and wrote out Brāhmo Dharma, the reformer, writer, and public intellectual Keshab Chandra Sen (Figure 3.1) created a unique institution titled “Pilgrimages to Saints.” From 1880, and lasting only a few years, this featured historical pageants to great figures in the history of religion, from the Prophet Muhammad, to Caitanya, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other wise men drawn from across time and space. Drawing from the spirit of comparative religion embodied most clearly by Max Müller, this pilgrimages project transcended mere appreciation of texts or ideas. Drawing from the European intellectual traditions he admired, it rather featured a synthesis of a diversity of texts and appreciation for non-textual sources. This approach, defined by him as “subjective” and which “endeavors to convert outward facts and characters into facts of consciousness,”1 included the facts and character traits of Jesus Christ, as well as a host of other individuals in religious history. Included in this line of saints were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, prominent North Americans central to the mid-nineteenth-century history of religion, as analyzed in chapter 2.

Alive from 1838 to 1884, living through the 1857–1858 rebellions, which shook India, the British Empire, and the world, Keshab emerged as a figure who would pioneer new definitions of religion, building upon the comparative religious scholarship of Rammohan and Debendranath.

This volume publishes selected papers from the 25th British Legal History Conference (BLHC), co-hosted by Queen’s University Belfast and the Irish Legal History Society (ILHS) in 2022. In providing this introductory digest of the papers in the volume, the Editors take an essentially chronological approach, reflecting the main theme of the conference. The first five papers address themes from the middle ages down to the seventeenth century, the latter being a period of profound constitutional change in England and Scotland. The next four papers are set in the eighteenth century, a period of profound constitutional change in Ireland. Themes connected to the tumultuous events in Ireland a century ago are the subject of the next section as well as the final paper in the volume concerning a unique archival reconstruction project. A final section contains three papers detailing constitutional change in other parts of the world as well as a plenary lecture by Lady Hale on a profound constitutional change in the United Kingdom in recent times, the ‘bringing home’ of the European Convention on Human Rights.

How can we make up our minds on whether or not international organizations are different from the sum of their parts? Taking a step back from doctrinal analysis, this chapter explores how the challenges that international lawyers have faced in that regard correspond to broader themes in philosophical discourse on ontological reductionism. This chapter suggests that questions of existence are inherently relative in the sense that they only make sense when considered in relation to other entities that are already admitted as non-redundant. Thus, the key to assessing the distinctiveness of international organizations is to first uncover the rationale that international law employs in buttressing their members as ‘real’ entities and then examine whether it can be equally applied to international organizations.

Challenging the general denial of race and racism in Europe, this article attempts to make visible the effects of German systemic racism by focusing on the archive version of Thomas Ostermeier’s 2010 Othello tradaptation at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin, in which Sebastian Nakajew, a white actor, played Othello in blackface.

6.1 [411] This is the right moment to state again the words of the God-breathed scripture. For it said: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue; those who control it will eat its fruits.”1 For, although it is possible for those who wish to think well to derive benefit from the goods of the tongue, provided that it were somehow to be attuned to orderliness and the duty of speaking words that would earn everyone’s admiration for having used it best, [nonetheless] some redirect their own words towards what is inappropriate. Their perverse and wicked words have even reached such a point that [412] they think nothing of those things that exceed the bounds of every vice, they let loose their wanton tongue against God, and they take up their weapons against the ineffable glory. The inevitable result of these actions will certainly be that they are convicted for the most extreme vices.

8.1 [532] Although the clever Julian undertakes a war against the ineffable glory1 and lets loose the arrows of his own understanding against matters that transcend [our] intellect, nonetheless they all miss the target.2 For he lies and boasts and makes mention of the God-breathed scripture, pretending indeed to know what is in it, but he is exposed as in fact understanding nothing at all, as an examination of the actual facts would demonstrate for us. For those who have recently been gathered together into “a holy people”3 by their faith in Christ and who are also doers of good works and experts in radiant and admirable pursuits, these he has called defiled, extremely disgusting, pitiable, disreputable, good for nothing, and every other term of abuse like this!4 Moreover, as if this tirade against us was not enough, [533] in still other ways too he tries to prove that we do not realize just how demented we are, nor indeed do we know how to walk straight down the path of truth, but that we, so to speak, jump off5 the highway, disregarding the commandment delivered through Moses – and this entirely – and diverging from the views of Moses and the holy prophets who came after him. So he again writes as follows

The so-called ‘Constitution of 1782’ has always been an important symbol in Irish history. By amending Poyning’s Law and repealing the Declaratory Act, the changes of 1782–83 meant that the Irish House of Lords regained its judicial functions, and the Irish Parliament could initiate its own legislation. But whether these changes constitute a significant constitutional change which touched a ‘principal part of a constitutional framework’ and raised ‘an important question of principle’ is necessary to determine. By analysing the economic legislation of the Irish Parliament, in particular the legislation on infrastructure, linen laws and the Dublin Paving Board, this chapter argues that the legislative independence did not influence the subsequent legislation of Grattan’s Parliament. The significance of the constitutional change lies in the symbolic importance for the contemporaries rather than in the legislative changes themselves, which had little effect internally in Ireland or externally in the relationship with Great Britain.

This article explores The Merchant of Venice through the lens of developments in monetary, mercantile and medical knowledge at the turn of the seventeenth century, in order to demonstrate how and why Shakespeare thinks about blood in economic and peculiarly circulatory terms.

Dark patterns are the subject of a surge of regulatory interest in the EU. Much new legislation in the areas of consumer law, data protection and competition law include provisions on dark patterns. Businesses use dark patterns to increase their revenue at the expense of consumers who purchase products they may not need, spend more time or give up more personal data than they would otherwise. Instead of focusing on the more normative issue of when dark patterns should be considered harmful, the chapter compares the different legal frameworks applicable to these practices and asks to what extent the increasingly fragmented EU regulatory landscape can offer effective overall protection against dark patterns. While useful complementarities may arise when parallel sets of rules target different concerns or protect different values, there are also risks of inconsistencies that may lead to either under- or overenforcement due to the fragmentation of the overall regulatory framework. The chapter submits that three needs result from the state of play and offers suggestions to improve the enforcement against dark patterns based on the current EU regulatory framework.

The vernacular historiographical tradition has evolved since the ninth century through merging core genres like annals, chronicles and historical narrative with empirical antiquarian treatises. It became clearly distinguished from religious and fictional writing only in post-medieval times, thus also adapting its concept of truth and its methods. While its earlier history is best described by way of a discourse tradition (Koch), a Wengerian community of practice emerges in the late modern period. Starting off as a purely narrative text-type, historiographical writing developed into a typical narrative–expository–argumentative conglomerate over the early and late modern periods. The heteroglossia so typical of historiography becomes less literary or dramatic and more evidential in nature, also evolving citation styles and footnotes. The evaluative and ideological potential of historiography is present from the start and realised by such means as group/person labels, evaluative lexis and superlatives.

During the 1730s, the nawab of Bengal, Shuja Khan, warned the Mughal court in Delhi against the renewal of the EIC's commercial rights, the most important of these being the duty-free trade farman granted by Emperor Farukhsiyar in 1717. According to him, although it had previously been possible for the Mughals to maintain control over them, the EIC had now become exceedingly entrenched in Bengal and could undermine the very imperial framework that had allowed and facilitated their presence in the first instance. The nawab made a rather stark assessment of the Company's affairs, stating:

As subsequent events were to prove, Shuja Khan was not wrong. While conventional narratives of Britain's imperial art usually commence with the late eighteenth century, imaginative visions of India had begun to permeate English visual arts earlier on. However, colonial overtures until that point take on a layer of meaning that remains to be fully explored.