Chronic coin shortages plagued Ireland and Britain's American colonies throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Despite complaints, every proposal to mint money in early modern Britain's overseas Atlantic empire failed, whether in Ireland, the Caribbean, or North America. This article explains why. Although the rulers in the court and Parliament were sometimes enthusiastic about colonial mints, the Officers of the Royal Mint exercised enduring influence and managed to obstruct each of these projects. The evolution of the Mint officers’ advice into a maxim of monetary uniformity allowed the doctrine of “one certain standard” to survive the ensuing decades of upheaval as it shed its visible politics. While their advice grew out of the particular politics of the early Restoration, it gained special power and durability when it took on the character of technocratic expertise. Still, an investigation of the same actors’ treatment of a parallel issue—the rates of the foreign coins that circulated in colonies—reveals that an authoritarian style had an enduring hold on imperial monetary policy. This article offers an explanation for the British Empire's peculiar monetary geography, and also demonstrates the way that seemingly apolitical technical knowledge can disguise a potent politics.

In his brief ministerial career, John Stuart, third Earl of Bute, undertook a project to remake how the king's ministers would perform. Eschewing the personal power accorded to ministers like William Pitt and the Duke of Newcastle under George II, Bute and the young King George III attempted to reform the cabinet into a place of debate, unity, and resolution where administration was shared by all ministers equally. In this they were following the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of the age into a new form of political arrangements, adapting the 1688 settlement into a structure capable of administering territorial empire so long as one did not look too closely at issues of sovereignty or representation. The seemingly small and inconsistently applied shift nonetheless had enormous consequences as it shaped the hemisphere-defining policies of Bute's ministry: the Treaty of Paris of 1763 and the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that followed close on its heels. While historical accounts of Britain's 1763–83 imperial crisis tend to focus on the revenue schemes of 1764–65 as the primary origin point for conflict, Bute's “cabinet revolution” played a larger role than has generally been acknowledged in setting the stage for grander visions of imperial power and the larger protests over that power.

The availability of preverbal focus in Romance is still the subject of controversy in the relevant literature. In this paper, we investigate the distribution of information focus in three Romance languages: Catalan, Spanish and Italian. The main goal is to understand if and to what extent information focus can occur preverbally in these three languages. To this end, we applied a new technique (Questions with a Delayed Answer) to elicit both production data and acceptability judgements. Our results show that preverbal foci are almost never produced in free speech under elicitation but are judged as acceptable by native speakers in rating tasks. The acceptability of preverbal foci, however, is subject to variation: they are more acceptable in Spanish but less so in Catalan and Italian. We interpret this difference across the three Romance languages in the light of the hypothesis formulated in Leonetti (2017), according to which Catalan and especially Italian are more restrictive than Spanish with respect to the mapping between syntax and information structure. While all languages resort to the dedicated word order with a more transparent information-structure partition for a focal subject (i.e. VS), Spanish is more permissive in also allowing a narrow focus interpretation of the subject in an SV order.

This investigation sheds light on the social history of pathogenic dirt and its significance for shaping medical practices during the nineteenth century. It consists of an analysis focusing on Swedish medicine, using 8800 yearly reports written 1820–1900 by Swedish provincial doctors for the National Board of Health in Stockholm. The main argument is that the provincial doctors’ perceptions of the relationship between dirt and health during this century can be better understood by focusing on similarities in the handling of different kinds of pathological dirt over the course of many decades, rather than seeing interest in cleanliness as something mostly unprecedented. A novel cleanliness regime became dominant during the latter third of the century, meant to counter a new hybrid between everyday dirt – bodily emanations from healthy bodies – and matter believed to have caused miasmatic and contagionistic disease. New ideas about filth and its impact on health played a crucial role in the development of public health and sanitation movements, and were a precondition for everyday dirt becoming a central medical problem around the turn of the twentieth century, but as is shown, they built on old precedents. Thus, the miasmatic and contagionistic approach to disease shaped conceptions of hygiene and cleanliness.

During the opening phase of the Irish civil war, Dublin’s O’Connell Street was subjected to large-scale destruction of properties and businesses for the second time since the 1916 Rising. Utilizing newly available compensation claims as well as state and local government records, this article examines four aspects of the post-civil war restoration of O’Connell Street for the first time: the scale of the destruction; the compensation scheme devised by the Irish government which accorded O’Connell Street a unique status in the Damage to Property Compensation Act of 1923; the context of the town-planning regulations introduced, as well as the concerns of property owners, the local authority and central government; and the process of reconstruction – how compensation was paid, what properties were rebuilt, in what manner and when.

This article examines recent measures undertaken by major commercial banks to mitigate and address human rights risks associated with their financial dealings in the arms industry. By reviewing the corporate policies of 20 leading banks that provide financing to top arms manufacturing and exporting companies, the article provides insights into three significant aspects of banks’ efforts: the development of defence sector policies, the implementation of risk assessments for adverse human rights impacts, and the application of exclusion clauses. These measures highlight the increasing recognition by banks of the need to address the ethical, social and human rights implications of financing arms deals, contributing to the broader regulatory and normative framework governing the arms industry.

Nozick’s ‘utility monster’ is often regarded as impossible, because one life cannot be better than a large number of other lives. Against that view, I propose a purely marginalist account of utility monster defining the monster by a higher sensitivity of well-being to resources (instead of a larger total well-being), and I introduce the concept of collective utility monster to account for resource predation by a group. Since longevity strengthens the sensitivity of well-being to resources, large groups of long-lived persons may, if their longevity advantage is sufficiently strong, fall under the concept of collective utility monster, against moral intuition.

This essay focuses on the concept of “international order” and its uses and misuses. It argues that the concept of “order” should not be conflated with the concept of a “system,” and that it makes more sense to speak of world order than international order because the former accommodates political units beyond the nation-state. Drawing on my recent book Before the West (2022) I show how the concept of “world order” travels better in history and also speculate about how it can help us think about the future as well.