This chapter examines the various ways in which ancient tragic and comic playwrights constructed race on their stages. Inspired by Geraldine Heng’s articulation of race in the premodern past as an ‘essentialised difference’, I explore essentialised conceptions of ethnicity and descent featured in various plays and how these intersected with broader cultural and political discourses around identity in fifth-century Athens. I trace the discourses of alterity and inferiority that feature in various tragic plots centred on interactions between Greeks and barbarians from Aeschylus’ Suppliants to Euripides’ Medea, as well as notions of superiority that foreground the various myths of Athenian autochthony staged across the fifth-century BCE, most prominently in Euripides’ Erechtheus and Ion.

This chapter explores how from the nineteenth century onwards in particular anti-Semitism played a key role in the definition and practices of Classics as a discipline. It traces the roots of such prejudice to virulent Christian rhetoric and violent behaviour starting in late antiquity, and continuing through to modernity. It considers how such expressions have affected the historiography of ancient Israel. It also exposes the racial basis of philology itself, and the disavowal of racism by philologists. Finally, it outlines the role anti-Semitism played in the institutional formation of the subject of Classics in the universities of Europe.

This chapter looks at the relationship between papyrology and race from a historical and disciplinary perspective. European imperialism, from Napoleon’s expedition onwards, enabled the legal and illegal transfer of a hundred thousand papyrus fragments from Egypt to Europe and North America. The process was sustained by White race supremacy ideas, which most scholars embraced, according to which Egyptians and their Ottoman ruling elite were incapable of appreciating the real meaning of antiquities, including manuscripts, putting at risk their preservation. The accumulation and archival of papyri in European and North American collections went hand in hand with a programmatic exclusion of Egyptians from studying the material and was functional to the creation of a new academic field, papyrology, controlled by White classicists. The chapter’s conclusion opens question about future directions, regarding both colonial collections and institutional inequality.

This chapter is in two parts. The first offers a general overview of twentieth-century African adaptations of Greek tragedy. It discusses the selection and treatment of age-old cultural practice of the Yoruba in adaptations by playwrights such as Wole Soyinka (Bacchae) and Ola Rotimi (The Gods Are Not to Blame), and how these exemplify an engagement with and representation of other peoples and cultures. The second segment examines the complexities of culture and race in Femi Osofisan’s Tegonni, An African Antigone and MEDAAYE: A Re-reading of Euripides’ Medea, utilising the concept of ‘symbolic violence’, as developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s concept is pertinent here for penetrating the means by which dominant groups assign identities and roles to the dominated, and also for identifying how the latter may then accept or reject the dominant construction depending on the resources of resistance that they command and can deploy. I argue that a similar struggle revolving around symbolic violence is visible in racial and gender constructions in Graeco-Roman culture, and that these two plays of Osofisan not only serve as intercultural dialogues for navigating these issues but also provide a thread for tracing the processes of these constructions.

This chapter examines the legal and political economy issues surrounding trade in services, focusing on the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). It contextualises the GATS’s origins, structure, and key obligations, including market access, national treatment, and MFN. The chapter also analyses the complexities of scheduling commitments, exceptions, and the evolving landscape of services trade. It concludes with a critical reflection on the challenges and future prospects of regulating services trade in the context of digital transformation and geopolitical tensions.

Leveraging the late José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown, this contribution proposes Brownness as a structuring concept for the study of racial affect in the Roman Mediterranean. Scholarship on race in the Roman Mediterranean has privileged somatic and/or phenotypic paradigms; approaches to race and racial formation that do not accord primacy to the inscription of race on the body are generally rare in the secondary literature, which has not systematically engaged with explorations of racialisation and affect in Black studies, Ethnic studies, and Queer studies. Moving in step with recent efforts to bring critical race theory to bear on the figuration of Blackness in ancient Greek texts, this chapter maps several interpretative strategies for tracking and evaluating Brownness in Roman texts – as a matrix of shame, anxiety, and melancholic subjection.

The chapter begins with the basic nomenclature of our periodization and asks the question: what is Protogeometric? From there it tackles the issue of where were mechanically drawn circles first invented – which is now clearly somewhere in the north Aegean – but stresses that determining the place where circles were first invented probably does not matter a great deal when formulating broader conclusions of political, social, economic, or ethnic importance, and it leaves open the possibility that although Athens was not the first place to invent mechanically drawn circles, it may have been the place that gave rise to the Protogeometric style of pottery. The conventional periodization of Protogeometric is reviewed, as is the issue of regional styles of Protogeometric pottery in the Greek world, before the thorny issue of the relative and absolute chronology of Protogeometric is tackled. The chapter ends by asking whether we can speak of a Protogemetric Aegean, and the conclusion is that this is not really possible. A coda discusses doing away with the highly problematic notion of a “dark age.”

This chapter examines the relationship between geopolitical rivalry and world trade law. It begins by discussing the consequences of trade for national power and security, and how dominant states approach foreign economic policy. It then analyses recent geopolitical developments and their implications for the evolution of the international economic order. It concludes by discussing the implications of the analysis for world trade law and policy in the future.

This chapter explains the reasons for the stalemate in the WTO negotiations on domestic agriculture support, public stockholding (PSH) for food security purposes, and fisheries subsidies. The negotiations are crucial for achieving Sustainable Development Goals related to zero hunger, food security, sustainable agriculture, and marine resources. In agriculture, members are divided on disciplining trade-distorting support and addressing historical asymmetries. The PSH negotiations are contentious owing to disagreements on a permanent solution and calculation of the external reference price. Fisheries subsidy negotiations have stalled on the issue of over-capacity and overfishing subsidies, despite progress on illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing.

This chapter examines the evolving landscape of digital trade regulation, tracing its transformation from early electronic commerce initiatives to the current focus on the data-driven economy. It analyses the dynamic regulatory models emerging in free trade agreements and digital economy agreements, highlighting the influence of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. The chapter further investigates the progress and challenges in digital trade governance within the World Trade Organization, particularly the Joint Statement Initiative on Electronic Commerce. It concludes by assessing the impact of digitalisation on global trade law, noting both legal innovations and setbacks owing to geopolitical differences and the complexities of integrating domestic data governance with international trade commitments.

Race, racism, and ethno-racial factors have shaped histories of ancient Greece and Rome from at least the nineteenth century. Historians of the ancient world show the influence of Hegel and race science on their writings. Notable examples include Droysen’s comments on Persian civilisation and Mommsen’s on the Celtic. Historians are troubled by racial mingling in the Roman empire, and some explain the decline and fall of Rome as the result of racial mingling. Racialising attitudes and analyses can be found in the early twentieth century as well and continue into the years of the Second World War. Not all historians are straightforwardly racist, and many show complicated and contradictory attitudes towards race. They make clear that a liberal outlook on life is not incompatible with racist beliefs in some areas. This is the context in which to appreciate Frank Snowden’s writings on Blacks in antiquity and Martin Bernal’s attempt to rewrite the history of Graeco-Roman antiquity and classical scholarship.

What marks out Athens in the Early Iron Age (EIA) is not only clear continuity from the Bronze Age but a steady rise of population through the EIA into the Archaic period. Following a brief topographical overview and a summary of Athens before 1200 BCE, this chapter focuses on the evidence of tombs, including an account of five and a half Athenians: a putative warrior aged 35–45 years at death, an old man aged 70, a young woman in her early 20s accompanied by terracotta model boots, a slightly older woman with her unborn child, and a social outcast. This is followed by what evidence there exists for the settlement of Athens. A major theme is the resilience of the population from the Bronze Age into the EIA and Archaic period. Whether it is cast as a village or town, the urban nucleus of the settlement was the Athenian Acropolis. What played out in the EIA in Athens was the formation of what was to become one of the largest and most successful city-states of the ancient Greek world.

Study of the material remains of Greek and Roman antiquity played a key role in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emergence of the modern disciplinary formation of Classics as the comprehensive study of the ancient Mediterranean world. Over the same period, it was also central to the development of racial thought in the spheres of aesthetics, ethnology, and historical anthropology. After articulating a conception of race that, following Stuart Hall and Noémie Ndiaye, treats it as a ‘sliding signifier’ drawing upon an archive or repertoire of racial tropes, this chapter discusses how, in studying Greek and Roman monuments under the sign of ‘art’, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship attended to material antiquity in a manner that was both formed by and formative of constructions of race emerging between the ‘Age of Discovery’ and the European ‘Enlightenment’. It explores the relation of classical art historiography to other racializing discourses of difference along three key axes: ‘Culture’, ‘Differentiation’, and ‘Beauty’, attending to the role of environmental or climate theory, heredity, and physiognomy in emerging theories that sought to explain the diversity of ancient and modern peoples as evidenced by their visual and material productions.

This chapter examines the concept of territory. While administrative space was no novelty in East Asia, notions related to space transformed in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Treaty of Nerchinsk marked the borderlines between the the Qing and Russian empires. Similar treaties in the early eighteenth century solidified them. Kangxi initiated a geographical survey spanning the country. This significantly impacted Korea, which made efforts to secure its border, altering perceptions of the state. Russian expansion along the Pacific coast raised concerns in Japan. From the late eighteenth century, Japanese intellectuals explored the Ezo region – areas that had held little interest. These developments introduced fresh concepts like territory, borders, and exclusive ownership (often considered European inventions) into traditional notions of imperial land. The new ideas didn’t supplant existing understandings, or engender a new interpolity system in East Asia.

This chapter reflects on modern and contemporary narratives surrounding the modern ‘racing’ of the inhabitants of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt by focusing on two cases, each of which pertains to a local woman. Both of these women’s bodies have become, two millennia or so after their death, a racial canvas at best, and a battlefield at worst. The first woman is the one portrayed on a funerary portrait on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The second woman needs no introduction: She was Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of Macedonian-ruled Egypt.