Chapter 3 investigates the French nationality decrees promulgated in 1930 and 1936, which recognized the claims métis people had been making for decades: they were French and entitled to French legal status. These new legal pathways to French citizenship and demarcations of parameters of belonging were tied to concepts of how race and multiracial identity mapped onto French legal status. The decrees codified multiracial people as a specific category in French colonial thought and society, but within the context of how multiracial people themselves claimed multiracial selfhoods. The claims of métis people who petitioned for citizenship deepened the debates about race and racial identity and changed the very idea of Frenchness. The burden of proof on petitioners hinged on questions of paternity and French cultural competency. However, maternal kin and African communities played an essential role in the legal process. Métis obtainment of French citizenship was consequential for hierarchies of status within African societies. At the same time, it both contested and created hierarchies of social and legal status and privilege based on changing racial thought.

Forensic psychiatry is a medical discipline, developed from the foundations of the asylum era, which focuses on the assessment and treatment of offenders with mental disorders. The complexity of the patient cohort is arguable reflected in the complexity of their clinical pathways, which necessitates some understanding of the legal system that for most patients, works in parallel to that of health and social care. In this chapter, we briefly review the historical context through which modern forensic psychiatry has emerged within England and Wales. This includes some high-profile individual cases that led to the development of concepts such as fitness to plead and the psychiatric defence of not guilty by reason of insanity. We then provide an outline of how inpatient secure services are structured, the relevant criminal sections of the Mental Health Act at each stage of the trial process and some of the challenges associated with managing this complex cohort of individuals.

This scene-setting chapter charts out the challenges Europe’s monarchies had to face in the wake of the French Revolution and the key means they employed to achieve their survival – among them an alliance with nationalism and imperialism, constitutional development and public relations techniques. It also introduces royal heirs as individual agents – and the process of succession more widely – as an essential part of this political arsenal. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the main contexts within which the lives and functions of a nineteenth-century heir had to unfold: the constitution, the royal family, the public sphere and the court.

Chapter 3, ‘The Mines and the Court’ is set both in the Ore Mountains and at the court of Dresden under August of Saxony (1553–1586). It offers a broader picture of the vibrant intellectual life in mining cities, illustrated here by the example of Annaberg. Local officials and technicians developed remarkable skills in arithmetic and geometry, on which rulers came to rely to map their realms and tame their capricious landscapes. I focus on the careers of two dynasties of practitioners, respectively subterranean surveyors (the Öders) and reckoning masters (the Rieses). After both patriarchs contributed to the economic rise of the city, their descendants became versatile engineers and courtiers of the Saxon Electors. They collaborated with university professors and instrument-makers, using their skills all over the Electorate and beyond, temporarily turning the court of Dresden into a centre of practical mathematics.

The court assembled around the prince consisted of his family and ministers, but also attracted all those who might need to seek royal authority for their own affairs. Molière was one of the King’s officers and was well acquainted with this milieu, which took form throughout the seventeenth century. During the first decades of his reign in particular, Louis XIV used entertainment to keep the members of his entourage in place by offering them opportunities to meet and experience his power in a pleasant way. The Parisian theatre troupes were regularly invited to appear before the King and Molière displayed a notable talent not only in presenting his own plays but also in combining within a single spectacle – the comedy-ballets, which were the highlights of these usually composite entertainments, and which were particularly well-suited to their context – spoken drama with music, meals, balls, and even fireworks. Devised to suit the individual circumstances, theatre could thereby offer a welcome moment of relaxation, particularly during the carnival period – a true breathing space in this environment where all was constrained according to the power relations in operation.

This introduction begins by surveying earlier scholarship on the Roman imperial court, arguing that the landmark works have been unduly confined to the court in the city of Rome, to particular time periods, and to certain narrowly defined themes. It then discusses the definition of ‘court’, presenting the social definition used in the book, namely a circle of people in reasonably regular personal contact with the emperor. The introduction also considers what kinds of historical knowledge in relation to the Roman court are possible. The sources lack the focus and detail needed for a narrative history of the court; nor can we convincingly posit a model that encapsulates the impact and operation of the court over c. 300 years. Instead, one should identify features of court life and culture that recur, even if they did not exist (or are not evidenced) under every emperor.

There were several Latin and Greek terms that roughly correlated with our concept of ‘court’, including aula, palatium, and (from the late third century) comitatus. Roman authors were also capable of making generalizations about their court as an entity, many of them moralizing and negative, but some of them panegyrical. This conceptual framework regarding the court was partly inherited from the Hellenistic world. This chapter presents a selection of literary and epigraphic sources that illustrate the Romans’ conception of their own court as a distinct entity.

Why do autocrats use courts to repress when the outcomes are presumed known from the start? This chapter introduces the puzzle of political trials in autocratic regimes and provides a theoretical framework for rethinking repression from a judicial perspective. I introduce the main theory, which is outlined in three parts: the function of political trials, who goes to trial, and the dynamics of a cooperative judiciary. I then explain the analytical approach and empirical focus of the book: comparative historical analysis of postcolonial regimes in postcolonial Anglophone Africa.

This chapter unpacks questions of judicial compliance in autocratic regimes. On what basis can we assume that judges will dutifully execute the autocrat’s agenda? What can autocrats do to ensure that judges do cooperate? To answer these questions, I focus on the obstacles African autocrats confronted in the postcolonial period when they attempted to use courts for repressive ends as well as the strategies and tactics they used to overcome them. I find that postcolonial autocrats faced a trade-off in judicial design: Professionalizing the judiciary restricted who was eligible to serve on the bench. Facing a shortage of locally qualified jurists, autocrats instead recruited judges from abroad. Drawing on a variety of archival sources, I show that African and British officials worked together to expand the supply of judicial candidates across the British Commonwealth, which not only undermined the power of indigenous African judges but also helped cultivate more compliant courts.

This chapter generalizes patterns of judicial and extrajudicial repression in cross-national context. Using original archival data on regime threats and coup plots in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa, I provide statistical evidence that patterns of punishment adhered to strategies of repression as predicted by the main theory: Insider elites were significantly more likely to go to trial; outsider elites were significantly more likely to face extrajudicial repression. I also explore variation in judicial and extrajudicial repression outcomes.

This chapter offers reflections on the broader implications of the theoretical framework and draws parallels between patterns of past and present. I consider scope conditions of the argument, how strategies of repression have evolved over time, and raise questions for future work.

This chapter evaluates the mechanisms of political trials in autocratic contexts. Focusing on Kenya since independence, I explore when and why judicial strategies of repression were used to punish regime insiders. My analysis specifically examines how the spectacle of a sedition trial was used to restore confidence in the autocrat when regime cohesion was under strain. Using careful process tracing and rich archival documents, I provide evidence that political justice helped restore obedience and dissuade dissent when the autocrat’s authority was contested.

This chapter develops a theory of judicial repression to explain when, where, and why autocrats use courts to punish rivals. My central claim is that judicial punishment enforces obedience where power is contested. By invoking the proceedings of court, autocrats show the consequences of defying authority through judicial spectacle, displays which can enforce obedience and dissuade dissent. I argue that this process is particularly useful when confronting threats to regime cohesion. I then explain how the effectiveness of this strategy requires a cooperative judiciary and explore what measures autocrats can undertake to minimize the risk of judicial rebellion.

This chapter uses case studies of postcolonial Tanzania and Sierra Leone to examine pathways of persecution and punishment during pivotal moments of autocratic contestation and consolidation. Through careful process tracing, I analyze how the politics of the early independence period, which were fundamentally shaped by the struggle for national control, influenced strategies of judicial and extrajudicial repression in the years that followed. My analysis draws on a variety of archival sources that provide a rare window into the challenges faced by new autocrats, including how threats to autocratic survival were perceived in real time.

Chapter 2 explores Afro-Cuban responses to stereotypes that connected blackness, dirtiness, and servitude. Using black newspapers and the legal petitions of black women in Santiago de Cuba, the chapter examines the tension between “racial uplift” – the notion that African-descended people could prove their worthiness as citizens by behaving “respectably” – and the lived realities of many black Cuban women. The chapter uses legal petitions from eastern Cuba to show how African-descended domestic workers advocated for themselves to the new national government. African-descended Cubans of the middle classes tended not to discuss the problems of their working-class counterparts, resulting in an almost complete absence of discussion of domestic service or domestic servants in black newspapers or magazines. Chapter 2 offers a pluralistic perspective on blackness in twentieth-century Cuba, showing the connections between and divisions among people in the same racial group.

Court talk is not the style that early modern courtiers use to speak to one another. It is an ersatz substitute for that style, an outsider’s fantasy about insider talk. Taken from conduct manuals, prose romances, poems, and plays, court talk is an overdone approximation of how courtiers are imagined to speak. Tracking the efflorescence of this style, this chapter turns to the still-neglected plays of John Lyly, which sell to their audiences the fantasy that their highly decorated style was the argot of the Elizabethan court. It is a fantasy that prompts aspirants from the period to weave Lyly’s style into their own conversations, even though it is only an exaggerated version, an erudite caricature, of the way Elizabethan barons and lords actually spoke. The failure of court talk to approximate courtliness is exactly what makes it into a synecdoche for a burgeoning social imaginary that I call the courtly public sphere. Through its relentless isocola, court talk expresses what Lauren Berlant might call the “cruel optimism” of this social imaginary: the emptiness of its promise of belonging, and the impossibility of ever letting that promise go.