This chapter focuses on the expressive functions of tears, the face and the body on the early modern stage, to probe the deep relation between drama and the law, including their entwined but distinct investments in natural self-evidence and the rhetoric of presence. Through an interdiscursive approach, it shows how drama mines the complexities of hypokrisis through an engagement with the radical performativity at the core of law, and offers the provocation that law’s disknowledges are turned into a poetic condition of theatrical knowledge, and a forging of subjecthood and inwardness that complicates the distinction between the fiction of theatre and the reality of the law court. It ends with the suggestion that the theatre looks at, as well as beyond, the vivid invisibilities of judicial encounters to unpack the epistemic, affective and ethical impulses structuring the ‘scene’ of law.

This chapter provides a succinct overview of pre-1945 developments. Examining developments since antiquity, it stresses that the idea of ‘Europe’ did not acquire any meaningful place in ordinary people’s lives until the twentieth century. Only after the devastation of the First World War did the concept of Europe and European integration become relevant to broader sections of the population, with the emergence of ideas of political and economic cooperation. As well as liberals, the far right also talked about building Europe. It took the Second World War to move European integration from the sphere of the thinkable to the realm of the politically doable. Still, the road ahead remained rocky, and conflicting ideas and projects emerged. The earliest predecessor of today’s European Union – the ECSC – was a latecomer and built on the experience of a whole host of international organisations created between 1945 and 1950.

Legal foundations of Islamic maritime principles and regulations were and remain largely rooted in customary practices. Whereas the legal principles of Islamic merchant law were laid down by merchants and their proxies, the regulations governing the carriage of goods by water, employment of crews, personal behavior during maritime ventures, and other nautical issues were generally derived from the legal traditions and customary practices of experienced shipowners, shipmasters, captains, seamen, merchants, and sea travellers.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the book and elaborates on the significance of racial doubt as a category of analysis beyond nineteenth-century Cuba. Given that racism has deep cultural and affective roots, the skeptical analyses that humanistic research centers will remain vital, even as the institutions supporting such research are destroyed by oligarchic, race-baiting forces. Skepticism is a power that the Humanities share with racial doubt. It implies, counterintuitively, a hope – to question in order to get things right – and a pledge to knowledge – to avoid denial, ignorance, and false explanations. No matter how indispensable one’s convictions about race might be, clinging to them would mean forsaking this hope, this pledge, and the broad political alliances required to imagine a world better than our own.

Chapter 6 analyses how legal procedures were included in the Paris Peace Treaties in order to solve one of the most sensitive and politically controversial questions of the post-war order: the payment of reparations from former Central Power governments or individuals to Allied individuals. In accordance with the peace treaties, 39 Mixed Arbitral Tribunals were established after 1920 to decide on private Allied claims for damages that had occurred during the war due to acts by former Central Power governments or individuals. The fact that an international court system permitted private individuals to raise claims against foreign governments was seen as a radical novelty; and even more so since tens of thousands of claimants throughout Europe and beyond attempted to receive compensation for claimed losses. From an Allied point of view, these new tribunals served justice, deemed to be at the core of the Paris Peace Treaties system. Yet, for the former Central Power governments, their legal advisers, and scholars, the Mixed Arbitral Tribunals were nothing but elaborate examples of victor’s justice characterized by unclear competences and applicable law.