Knowing an Empire
Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Worlds in Dialogue
Revealing dynamic dialogues between early modern China and Latin America through a new methodology
Description
Knowing an Empire: Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Worlds in Dialogue unveils how these two vast empires, separated by thousands of miles, developed comparable systems to gather, order, and wield knowledge about their local worlds in the process of empire-building. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, officials in both empires compiled large quantities of structured data on the climate, topography, natural products, languages, religions, and more of their locales, creating a vision of their empires as diverse yet unified. Through a new methodology of “juxtapositional comparison,” the book reads the difangzhi 地方志 (local gazetteers) of China and the relaciones geográficas of the Spanish world in parallel.
Knowing an Empire does not see the conveyance of information across an empire as a top-down process with an active center as a knowledge-maker. Instead, it amplifies a blend of voices that speak as much to imperial bureaucracy as to the rich local and Indigenous cultures, revealing these two early modern empires as diverse polities whose equilibria were constantly rebalanced among local powers. Comprised of 18 chapters, this edited collection reflects on the historical evolution and inner structures of the imperial epistemologies, as well as the many ways historians today read difangzhi and relaciones geográficas to understand the spatial, natural, and social order in both the Chinese and the Spanish empires. At once a comparative and a connected history, it places Chinese and Spanish imperial knowledge in the globalizing early modern world, highlighting the migration of people, goods, and ideas and revealing how these wide-ranging influences are reflected—or not—in the difangzhi and the relaciones. The book concludes by broadening our scope beyond China and Spain to reflect how other early modern empires, such as the Portuguese, failed to develop such systematized imperial genres.
With contributions from leading scholars across Latin American and Asian Studies, this book synthesizes political, environmental, and socio-economic history with historical anthropology to highlight parallel governance and knowledge structures. The contributors challenge conventional binaries of Western versus Eastern, and colonial versus non-colonial, presenting a nuanced perspective of early modern empires as dynamic, interconnected entities through the shared challenges of scale, diversity, and increasing globalization. Through these dialogues, Knowing an Empire illuminates the complex entanglement of ruling and understanding. This groundbreaking collection offers a highly innovative and dialogic approach to comparative studies of empires, with major implications for Asian, European, Latin American, transnational, and global history.
Mackenzie Cooley is Associate Professor of Early Modern History of Ideas at Hamilton College. Her books include The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2022) and Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds (Routledge, 2023).
Huiyi Wu is a historian of early modern Sino-European relationships and a permanent research fellow at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in France. She is the author of Tranduire la Chine au XVIIIe siècle (Translating China in the Eighteenth Century, Honoré Champion, 2017).
Reviews
“Knowing an Empire provides sharp analysis on the early modern Chinese and Spanish empires: their limits and challenges in knowing and governing their domains and the role of the indigenous groups and other people on the ground in acquiring knowledge about these empires. It presents various perspectives and interpretations on the intricacies of imperial knowledge production and demonstrates the richness of data that can be culled from the difanzhi and the relaciones geográficas, which are very important source materials for future studies.”
- Jely A. Galang, University of the Philippines, Diliman
“Timely and ambitious, Knowing an Empire offers a new framework for comparative histories. It does more than examine relationships between empire- and knowledge systems-building and how their developments informed scientific practice, economies, transformations of natural environments, and perceptions of diverse populations. Cooley and Wu’s collection dismantles assumptions about the Scientific Revolution and its absence in China and the Spanish empire. It forces us, from the perspective of our world of big data and digitized knowledge systems, to think critically about how all knowledge-making involves processes of objectification and othering.”
- Junko Takeda, Syracuse University
“Knowing an Empire demonstrates the possibilities for cross-cultural understanding offered by comparative approaches to global history. In doing so, it offers new strategies for going beyond exceptionalism and exploring alternatives to histories of connection. Knowing an Empire brings new legibility to landscapes of knowledge and power across the early modern world.”
- Julia McClure, University of Glasgow
“The authors of this edited volume explore the intriguing parallels between two distinct imperial knowledge systems: the relaciones geográficas of Spain and the difangzhi, or local gazetteers, of China. This timely and indispensable comparative study examines how both empires aimed to systematize, centralize, and control information about their vast territories through independently developed standardized questionnaires and instructions for compiling local gazetteers.”
- Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Colgate University
“This book is an intellectual delight and a comparative joy—an invitation to revel in the play of likeness and divergence. Comparison here is no mere tool, but a portal: a passage into two imperial knowledge projects—the Spanish relaciones geográficas and the Chinese difangzhi—that, though born of distinct political worlds, pursued strikingly similar aims. Each sought to render distant realms legible through questionnaires, maps, images, and ordered prose. A must-read for every historically minded reader.”
- Dagmar Schäfer, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
“The focus of this ambitious edited volume is a technique of governance used in the early modern Chinese and Spanish Empires alike: the demand from the capital for local officials to compose geographic descriptions of the provinces…The comparison of [the difangzhi and relaciones geographicas] proves a fruitful endeavor.”
- Peter Haskin, Hispanic American Historical Review
“This extraordinary book does something that has never been attempted before: it compares the official knowledge-making projects of two very different early modern empires, the Habsburg Monarchy and Ming/Qing China."
- Ricardo Padron, Journal of Historical Geography