Ntina Tzouvala's monograph, Capitalism as Civilisation – A History of International Law, is, among many things, an elegant, profound and discursive account of reading and readings. Through reading as a methodological approach and processual mode, Tzouvala engages symptomatically and materially with international legal texts and terrain. And her readings of international law, located in a reconciliation of Marxism and deconstruction, vitalise civilisation as a conceptual category in new and enduring ways. By embedding the dynamic of difference in the ever-expanding logic of capital and capitalist production, she brings to the fore the very contradictions that make the 'standard of civilisation' categorically tenable and conceptually imperishable. Oscillating between the two oppositional points of the 'logic of biology' and the 'logic of improvement', the 'standard of civilisation' is a shapeshifting, moving target placed onto dynamic iterations of the capitalist state at every stage.