Chapter 4 develops readings of Collins, Berdoe, and Hadwen’s novels, and introduces two others: Ouida’s Toxin: A Sketch (1895) and H. G. Wells’s scientific novella The Invisible Man (1897). The preoccupation with legibility extends beyond the textual in literatures of vivisection; by figuratively re-casting bodies as text and by encouraging readers to assume a keen but sympathetic gaze concerned with legible surfaces, these works forward ways of looking allied with alternative sciences such as physiognomy, anthroposcopy, and psychology. Ultimately, however, fictional vivisectors remain simultaneously transparent and opaque. Their powerfully returned gaze is marked by a paradoxical combination of clinical detachment and zealous absorption in the experimental subject in whom they inscribe their own meanings. The greatest threat posed by fictional vivisectors, the chapter argues, is not only that they themselves are unreadable, but that they might make others so too.

This chapter develops the main argument of the book. It posits that some displacement strategies – namely, forced relocation – act as a mechanism for sorting the population in wartime. The argument focuses on how the territorialization of political identity in civil wars and the tendency for combatants to utilize informational shortcuts impels them to use relocation to identify opponents through “guilt by location.” It also shows that relocation can create “zones of appropriation” that facilitate the mobilization of the population into the war effort, without requiring combatants to invest in resource-intensive methods of territorial occupation. To demonstrate the logic and plausibility of each aspect of the "assortative" theory of displacement and illustrate its central causal claims, the chapter provides empirical examples from a wide range of civil wars, from the Revolt of the Camisards in eighteenth-century France, to colonial wars in British, French, Japanese, and Portuguese territories, to modern conflicts in Angola, Bangladesh, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Rwanda, and Sri Lanka. The chapter also discusses a set of hypotheses and observable implications of the theory.

This chapter captures the extent to which journalism fields marginalize African journalists in the coverage of international events unfolding on the continent. This marginalization leads to a continuation of bifurcation in the field that was also present during colonization. It shows that the effect of this bifurcation is that African audiences primarily learn about events happening across the continent from the Global North as opposed to African journalists. Chapter 4 shows how African journalists are marginalized in their fields and how they understand and explain this marginalization.

This chapter probes the mobilization of liberated Africans, convicts, slaves, and vagrants to build the Casa de Correção between 1834 and 1850. Drawing from research on how modernizing political elites developed administrative, technical, and identification technologies to render peripatetic peoples legible for the purpose of taxation and labor control, the chapter investigates how the construction of the Casa de Correção evolved into a project of legibility to regulate the effects of the campaign against human trafficking. Through its punitive and labor discipline roles, the penitentiary evolved into an important site of racialization of the poor along cleavages that assigned differentiated treatment by legal status – slave or free – and ethnic origins – European immigrants, Brazilians, or Africans. The penitentiary reinforced existing divisions in Brazilian society between slaves and free, foreigners and nationals, while blurring the lines of distinctions among these categories through the regime of labor and confinement.

Returning to the Myanmar government's ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people, this chapter argues: how could Facebook not have known that its platform was being abused to promote genocide? The answer draws on longstanding scholarship across political science, urban studies, economics, and other fields relating to the problems that centralized governors have in drawing together knowledge from the peripheries of their territories. It is argued that the appropriate solution to problems of knowledge in the platform context is to design democratic and polycentric governance institutions permitting ordinary people to have influence over company decisions.

From the first hours of the US colonial conquest in August 1898, the Philippines served as the site of a social experiment in the use of police surveillance as an instrument of state power. During the decade of pacification that followed, the US army plunged into a crucible of counterinsurgency, forming its first field intelligence unit, the Division of Military Information, which combined voracious data gathering with rapid dissemination of tactical intelligence. At this periphery of empire, freed from the constraints of courts, constitution, and civil society, the US imperial regime fused new technologies from America’s first information revolution to fashion what was arguably the world’s first full “surveillance state.”

This chapter broadens the scope of the analysis to assess whether blunt force regulation is unique to China. It reveals that blunt force regulation is a widespread political phenomenon found in both advanced industrial environments (like the UK) and weak institutional environments (like India and the Philippines). When political leaders confront urgent or overwhelming enforcement problems, they sometimes resort to unreasonable, one-size-fits-all measures to ensure that enforcement actions are effective. Through analyzing these cases, this chapter concludes that blunt force regulation is one of a set of potential responses to the inevitable principal–agent problems of regulation. However, the character of blunt force regulation – including how forceful or indiscriminate it is – is shaped by institutional features such as a state’s resource capabilities and coercive capacity.

The preface to a mid-seventeenth century edition of Verbum Sempiternum declares that “though the Volume and the Work be smal, / Yet it containes the sum of All in All.” A miniaturized devotional work, it uses its size to frame a tension between human and divine scale, and in doing so, it demonstrates the way in which all kinds of miniature texts of the eighteenth century played with the idea of a large subject in small form. This chapter uses examples of a series of miniature books published across the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to explore questions of materiality, utility, scale, and legibility. Miniature books worked on the premise of totality made accessible through compression. We might see them as a kind of epistemological comfort blanket, the promise of a world of knowledge and information that their readers could own, wear, display. And in the virtuosity of their execution, their acts of precision engraving, typesetting, and binding, they offered fine examples of human ingenuity. But at the same time, in reducing the most important documents of Western faith and civilization into compact form, they also raised questions about their own credibility.

Judicial performance evaluation systems, such as The Case Quality Assessment System (CQAS), examined in this chapter, provided the baseline institutional incentives for Chinese judges and determines the stakes for judges’ career-related decisions, setting up dynamic interactions between legal processes, forms, and substances in urban China. In the terms of ecology-based socio-legal theory, judges in these distinct strata act to enhance their own survival in a process of “competitive co-operation.” Judges’ navigation of the CQAS is critical to understanding the influence of stratified local legal markets in urban China on judicial selection institutions and personal autonomy.

The second chapter revisits the work of Henry Fuseli, an artist whose notoriously distorted representations of the male nude puzzled viewers. Yet Fuseli remained significantly invested, intellectually and artistically, in the legibility of the body: for more than two decades, the Swiss-born, London-based artist collaborated with his childhood friend Johann Lavater on a treatise on physiognomy, the study of the face to determine man’s inner traits. As part of his effort to transform physiognomy into a modern empirical science, Lavater placed great emphasis on the physical correspondence between the external appearance of the body and its internal, imperceptible truths. However, Fuseli often represented bodies that could not be read according to the criteria of Lavater’s system. In doing so, the artist called into question not just physiognomy but the underlying claims on which it was based, unveiling a world in which “appearance” and “truth” fail to correspond.

Chapter 3 focuses on relationships and accountability and looks at the role of colonial rule in contributing to continuing state fragility in Africa today. This chapter also considers colonialism from the perspective of internal and external relationships. The implications of colonial governance and legal structures for accountability and recourse in instances of harm are also discussed.

This chapter examines probate inventories and other primary documents to chart the integration of Bahia’s dendê economy within the post-abolition transitions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It reconstructs four socioecological processes fundamental in that synthesis: the expansion of dendê cultures and landscapes in and around nineteenth-century Salvador; the interactive emergence of transatlantic economies, landscapes, and religions on the bay island of Itaparica; the persistent proliferation of dendê landscapes despite official disregard and illegibility; and the complementary intensification of dendê and cacao production on the post-abolition Southern Coast. This chapter demonstrates how networks of people, plants, places, and power interacted across time and space to assemble and reproduce a transatlantic dendê economy combining nourishment, ecology, and spirituality.