“Knowing an Empire: Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Worlds in Dialogue” unveils how the Chinese and Spanish empires, despite being separated by thousands of miles, developed comparable systems to gather, order, and wield knowledge about their local worlds. 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 (relational geographies) of the Spanish world in parallel. 

With contributions from leading scholars across Latin American and Asian Studies, this book synthesizes political, environmental, and socioeconomic history with historical anthropology to highlight parallel governance and knowledge structures. 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. 

Co-editors Mackenzie Cooley (Hamilton College) and Huiyi Wu (Centre Alexandre-Koyré, online) together with two Berlin-based commentators—Lasse Hölck (LAI) and Henning Klöter (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)—will discuss the book on the evening of November 25 at the Lateinamerika-Institut (LAI) of Freie Universität Berlin (Rüdesheimer Str. 54-56, 14197 Berlin, near the U3 Breitenbachplatz station.  

The book is open access: https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/8p58pg80j .