Zvi Ben-Dor Benite is professor of history at New York University and the author of The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (2005) and The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (2009).Stefanos Geroulanos is professor of history at New York University. He is the author of Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present (2017) and coauthor of The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (2018).Nicole Jerr is assistant professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy.

That sovereign power is often fragile and never established once and for all is the startling proposition that organizes this spectacularly interesting sequence of investigations. Sovereignty is impossible to study, the essays propose, without attention to its ‘scaffolding,’ defined as all the symbolic management that power continually requires. Leaping across time and spanning the world, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty showcases scholarly gems that together reflect how the crown of sovereignty is kept in place—and sometimes slips.

• Foreword, by Dick HowardEditors' Introduction, by Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole JerrPart I. StagesPreface1. Sad Stories of the Death of Kings: Sovereignty and Its Constraints in Greek Tragedy and Elsewhere, by Glenn W. Most2. Contested Sovereignty: Heaven, the Monarch, the People, and the Intellectuals in Traditional China, by Yuri Pines3. Nurhaci's Gambit: Sovereignty as Concept and Praxis in the Rise of the Manchus, by Nicola Di Cosmo4. The Living Image of the People, by Jason FrankPart II. CourtsPreface5. Public Health, the State, and Religious Scholarship: Sovereignty in Idrīs al-Bidlīsī's Arguments for Fleeing the Plague, by Justin Stearns6. The Dancing Despot: Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the Performative Symbolism of Power, by Stanca Scholz-Cionca7. Liberal Constitutionalism and the Sovereign Pardon, by Bernadette Meyler8. The Vanishing Slaves of Paris: The Lettre de Cachet and the Emergence of an Imperial Legal Order in Eighteenth-Century France, by Miranda Spieler9. Re-touching the Sovereign: Biochemistry of Perpetual Leninism, by Alexei YurchakPart III. ActsPreface10. Hijra and Exile: Islam and Dual Sovereignty in Qing China, by Zvi Ben-Dor Benite11. The Neurology of Regicide: Decapitation Experiments and the Science of Sovereignty, by Cathy Gere12. The "Millennium" of 1857: The Last Performance of the Great Mughal, by A. Azfar Moin13. Exit the King? Modern Theater and the Revolution, by Nicole JerrPart IV. ShiftsPreface14. Revolution in Permanence and the Fall of Popular Sovereignty, by Dan Edelstein15. Exile Within Sovereignty: Critique of "The Negation of Exile" in Israeli Culture, by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin16. Affective Sovereignty, International Law, and China's Legal Status in the Nineteenth Century, by Li Chen17. The Sovereignty of the New Man After Wagner: Artist and Hero, Symbolic History, and the Staging of Origins, by Stefanos GeroulanosList of ContributorsIndex