THE PRODUCTION AND PROTECTION OF DIFFERENCE

Students of European imperial formations have long taken the construction of difference and consolidation of distinctions as central to the political viability and organization of those polities. But from a non-European center, that hallmark feature is more open to question. All empires are composite polities of varied human social forms, but not all are invested in producing differences to the same degree. New studies of the Chinese, Russian, and Ottoman empires set our sights on a different tension: between the production of difference and its protection, less on exclusion alone than on a principled tolerance of religious, cultural, and linguistic variations. The production of difference in the Ottoman case operated in different manners and over a far greater span of time than did nineteenth century European empires with which colonial studies has been so preoccupied.
Imperial formations practiced tolerance and discrimination to different degrees. The statement would be less striking were it not for the fact that studies of European empire rarely imagine the concept of “tolerance” as a relevant one. Ussama Makdisi traces a genealogy of tolerances that turns conventional historical accounts on their head. Ottomans accommodated religious difference, unlike US imperial agents who more often refused different forms of faith. Here the “politics of comparison” is played out at several striking levels: one, between Ottoman and US agents of empire but also among different and seemingly incommensurate US imperial ventures themselves. US officials and missionaries viewed their choice of strategies in the Middle East in direct light of what they could not accomplish among Native Americans in the 1830s.
As importantly, Makdisi’s essay confronts the task of thinking creatively about convergent and dependent histories. It is not only that failed efforts in one place open the possibility for another venture: traces of that earlier seemingly distant Native American history are plaited through the latter Ottoman one, the knowledge of one shaping how historical actors once knew and how historians today can know the other. Makdisi’s essay demonstrates the vast gap in understandings of religious difference between Ottoman communities and Protestant missionaries. The Ottomans embraced tolerance of different religious communities under assumptions of hierarchy, rigid separation, and no crossing of boundaries. Missionaries, on the other hand, based on their experience with Native Americans in the US, assumed uncritically the superiority of Anglo-Saxon peoples. They embraced a transformational ideology that stressed the need for total conversion from one faith to another, and saw the Ottoman empire as filled with oppressed people who longed for liberation from their backward, stagnant religious and social environment. Focusing on the ambiguous case of one individual, As’ad Shidyaq, who seemed to have converted to Protestantism, Makdisi’s account underscores the dramatic intersection of different visions of what imperial subsumption entails.
Imperial formations neither imagined uniform sorts of rule, nor subscribed to uniform vocabularies. As such, they demand that our analytic lexicon stretch to these shifting spaces as well. Jane Burbank argues that what constitutes a “composite state” or “composite empire” in Russia does just that, offering a compelling vocabulary to think about the enduring and varied politics of difference and particularity that guided some imperial polities more than others.^[1] Key to her analysis is recognition of a differential distribution of rights based on the granting of privilege by the state to the various groups that comprised it. The tsarist state kept control of a polity containing extraordinary degrees of cultural difference without creating comprehensive classifications coherently organized around religion, ethnicity, territory, or language. Equally, its legal codes allowed local courts to recognize a range of customary practice. Stressing imperial practice instead of official ideology, Burbank highlights the great diversity of the empire instead of the monotonous autocracy of a centralizing ideology dominated by St. Petersburg.
The accommodation of difference, the importance of legal categorizations of subjects’ privileges, and the “ongoing tension between universalizing, homogenizing ends and pragmatic differentiated practices” are key issues that empires beyond Europe bring into relief. What Burbank calls the “pragmatic politics of social inclusion” ensured long life for the empire in ways that demand we ask why and how people chose to participate in it. Even rebellions against the imperial order, for example, often only claimed to reassert privileges guaranteed by the tsar and did not try to overthrow the tsarist state. The persuasions and comforts of habitus explain this in part, but most provocatively, Burbank posits an “imperial social contract” that may account for the enduring qualities of an empire state, a social contract that not only allows but also actively supports social particularity.
If from a Russian perspective, one could hold “difference as normal,” from a Soviet perspective one can decidedly not. Adeeb Khalid, impatient with the quick rush to write Soviet history as an imperial one, makes a strong case, from the vantage point of Central Asia, for why an expanded notion of empire may be neither accurate nor appropriate. Khalid demonstrates how the Soviets broke sharply with tsarist accommodation by introducing, with great violence, a radical modernizing project designed to pull all of the Soviet Union’s diverse peoples toward common Soviet citizenship in pursuit of the ultimate goal of building communism. He denies, however, that this developmental project was Russian imperialism. Throughout Central Asia, Soviet goals overlapped with those of many native intellectuals. Unlike the historiography on European empires, in which the distinction between citizen and subject is more often taken for granted, Khalid reminds us that the threshold between the two is wider and more ambiguous than is often acknowledged.
Khalid identifies a critical distinction between imperial technologies of rule that operated in nineteenth-century Russia and those used by a Soviet macropolity. He asks not how to assess empire outside of Europe, or how to reassess European empires, but when and why the category of empire is historically applicable. “Where,” he queries, “does empire end and other forms of non-representative or authoritarian polities begin?” Khalid’s skeptical approach to the current vogue of colonial and postcolonial theory in Russian studies provides welcome pause to our overall project. External domination is not a guaranteed indicator of imperialism, nor do once imperial polities seamlessly morph into new imperial formations. Thus, territories once colonized by Russia are not simply converted into Soviet colonies under the USSR. Instead, Khalid argues that the genealogy he traces for the Soviet state is not an imperial but a modernist one in which the “activist, interventionist state… seeks to sculpt its citizenry in an ideal image.”^[2] Khalid’s attention to the politics of the label of “empire” in the tsarist/Soviet context further focuses our attention on post-WWII, Cold War framings of imperialism. As he states, the “lines connecting empires to mere states are not easy to discern.”
Why has the passage from empire to nation produced such a violently racist ideology? Peter Perdue asks this critical comparative question, but in a way that students of European imperial history might pose quite differently. He looks at how Han Chinese writers in the 1900s drew new sharp distinctions between themselves and their Manchu rulers, mobilizing a virulent form of racial nationalism. Three converging global processes supported their project: the latent discourse of racial exclusion in the Chinese classical heritage, as reinterpreted by activist scholars and students at the end of the Qing dynasty, global ideologies of scientific racialism, transmitted from Europe and the US to China via Japan, and the experiences of Chinese overseas students and migrants in Japan, Southeast Asia, and the United States.
Chinese discussions of “barbarian” nomads had always alternated between visions of racial exclusion and cultural inclusion. The Qing dynasty, as a Manchu conquest dynasty bringing both Central Eurasian and Han peoples under a single imperial gaze, faced these tensions of empire in particularly heightened form. The late nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century sharpened the contradictions so much that the Manchu empire could not survive. Anti-Manchu mobilization was not simply a passing moment in Chinese nationalism, but one of its foundational principles. These imperial contradictions, which echo European racial discourse since the sixteenth century, still persist in the nationality policy of the People’s Republic of China today. Even though modern China perceives itself as heir to a two-thousand-year old continuous imperial tradition, it still contained tensions in its ideology and practices that are fully recognizable as characteristics of more recent imperial formations across Eurasia.

RETHINKING BOUNDARIES, IMAGINARIES, EMPIRES

Imperialism is not always a colonial endeavor. Indeed, Prasenjit Duara contends that empire without colonialism is the “new imperialism” of the twentieth century. In his formulation, imperial strategies of the US, Soviet Union, and Japan depart from the organizing strategies of European colonial empires. Instead of colonial polities marked by difference and extraction, this new imperialism creates or incorporates peripheral states, modernizing and developing these regions in service to their own global aspirations. If Duara’s specific case of Japanese Manchukuo fits this model, its extension to the US cannot sidestep difference or extraction so quickly, nor remain solely in the twentieth century. Fernando Coronil pushes us back further, calling for a renewed analytics of earlier American imperial formations. The multiple configurations of US imperialism index an imperial agility not beholden to the obligations of a publicly acknowledged empire. As Coronil argues, this flexibility is evident in a historical trio of imperialisms – colonial imperialism, national imperialism, and global imperialism – that may coexist within any one imperial power. These forms are not historically prior to one another. In the present world, he contends, all three forms are operative.
What sort of subjects does an empire without colonialism produce? What does it mean, as Carole McGranahan asserts, that “to be an imperial subject was not necessarily to be a colonial one?”^[3] It is not just a matter of a direct versus indirect relationship to empire, nor a question of one status being more pernicious than the other. Both categories signal an imposed relationship to empire, an imposition that persists even as the categories and relationships themselves shift. In Latin America, Fernando Coronil suggests that a relationship to empire is experienced as “a common sense understanding of reality” in that US imperialism is an unmarked category.^[4] As imperialism folds into everyday life, it is simultaneously diffuse and tangible. This does not always mean it is subtle: a short list of US imperial domains alone would be evidence of this: Okinawa, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Iraq to name but a few. It is not only the US or other postcolonial empires that create and maintain non-colonial imperial subjects. European colonial empires did as well. Relationships to empire are never of one’s own choosing, but there are individuals, whole communities even, who did choose to “live in someone else’s empire.”^[5]
British India is one example: in the early twentieth century, the Himalayan hilltown of Kalimpong had a diverse community of colonized and non-colonized peoples alike (along with a range of UK citizens, Europeans, and Americans with varied connections to empire). Tibetans resident in Kalimpong were imperial, but not colonial subjects and thus both safeguarded from but also disadvantaged by a colonial list of rights and regulations. McGranahan’s narrating of the dilemmas of Tibetan non-colonials in British India emphasizes the “troubled importance” of the imperial-colonial gap for subjects and imperial agents alike. McGranahan suggests that these sort of imperial experiences are “out of bounds,” i.e., askew to received notions of where imperial interests lie. The non-colonial and other supposedly peripheral spaces of empire are not easily factored into standing discussions of colonialism, yet the unease they introduce is itself an important facet of imperial projects and scholarship. Given that the imperial boundaries were never limited solely to directly colonized territories, studying empire out of bounds should sharpen rather than dilute how much our analytics capture what are imperial effects.
Categorical boundaries for such imperial formations extend in several different directions. In the period following decolonization, certain spaces opened for imperial subterfuge while others closed. Empire did not necessarily go away (as the terms decolonization and postcolonial each imply), but reorganized itself in forms publicly contrary to the classic nineteenth- and twentieth-century European model. As McGranahan specifies, decolonization provided a cover for new imperial formations, allowing them to refuse the labels “imperial” and “colonial.” For Tibet, both the People’s Republic of China and the US fit this category. China’s current rule of Tibet is certainly imperial, if not colonial, yet Chinese disavowals of either category go mostly unchallenged. If China established its anti-imperial stance as an anti-capitalist one, then the US asserts its anti-colonialism in developmental terms. US “interventions” on behalf of development and democracy may be a different sort of imperialism, but one no less influential for Tibet than the interventions of British officials in earlier decades. For example, CIA efforts to support Tibetan resistance against China drew Tibetans into the orbit of yet another global power, whose interests were not the same as their own. Like many volume authors, McGranahan zooms in on local manifestations of imperial force fields, showing how grand plans hatched in metropolitan centers turned into quite different projects on the ground and in the minds of Tibetan actors.
Such domestic disconnect might itself be a historical project, what Prasenjit Duara calls the “fault lines” of empire. In considering how the Japanese interpreted the possibility of the incorporation of non-Japanese as equal citizens, calls for assimilation ran up against claims of the primacy of blood and race. This story – one familiar also to China as Peter Perdue demonstrates – blurs boundaries between empires and nations. Duara sees imperialism as both a goal of nationalism and as an important means of its formation. His focus on different forms of affiliation with empire underscores one of our central claims: that gradations of sovereignty are the rule of empire-states not the exception. He places Manchukuo, the independent state established by Japan in northeast China in 1931, beyond the nominal borders of the Japanese empire or the Chinese nation-state. In this out of bounds sense it resembled Tibet. What should we call Manchukuo exactly in international geopolitics? Was it a nominal nation not recognized by any state except Japan, a “client-state” lying between full colonies like Korea and truly independent nations under military rule, or an inalienable part of China taken over by alien military conquest? Japan’s multiple forms of domination in East Asia show many similarities to European forms elsewhere.
The developmental state was also an important component of many imperial formations. Japan set up Manchukuo as an independent nation, but imposed on it programs of industrialization and agricultural development to serve its own military needs. Some Chinese, however, endorsed the Japanese project and worked with it to serve their own goals. Manchuria, as a region only recently colonized by Han Chinese as well as Japanese, became a frontier space of experimentation, where imperial promoters invoked discourses of civilization, pan-Asianism, racial war, and pseudo-kinship to mobilize East Asians in a common enterprise. In Duara’s view, Japanese practice actually recognized and promoted difference, in the form of popular religion and local ethnicity more actively than did the Chinese nationalist regime, which tried to suppress both ethnic and religious diversity in order to strengthen a centralized state.
Such imperial circuits, the exchange of tactics and practices among imperial officials, past and present, persist with or without our debates over categories and classifications. Fernando Coronil asserts that imperial circuits were never only rooted in empire, but in the spaces between regions, in the networks of capitalism that linked empire to imperial territories as much as to colonial ones. Capitalism, he argues, is central to imperial formations in their present and past forms. Other authors in the presented volume, especially McGranahan (but also Perdue, Duara, and Khalid), find significant imperial activities beyond the bounds of European capitalism. His arguments, however, hinge on using capitalism to open our categories of empire, to see where and how capitalism interlocks with imperialism as a political formation defined by domination, be it political or economic, formal or informal. Here it is not so much a question of the form of a given imperial formation, but its effects among people trying to “make sense” of their “experiences of inequality, exploitation, and domination.”^[6]
Of the many blueprints available for assessing imperial formations and effects in the present, Coronil turns to September 11, 2001. Specifically, he thinks through the differences in September 11s – 1973 in Chile and 2001 in the US. If the September 11, 1973, overthrow of Salvador Allende (with US complicity) draws our attention to imperialism, the September 11, 2001, bombings in the US draw our attention to empire. Coronil urges us to tend to both, to continue asking how much US imperial domination is founded on the denial of that history. His argument extends beyond the Americas to ask how to make the concept of imperialism “useful” in the present. As a first step, he suggests a broadening in chronological as well as geographical terms. In extending empire’s temporal scope backward to sixteenth century Spain and forward to the twentieth century US, those empires without colonies assume “singular relevance for considering the present.”

NEW GENEALOGIES OF EMPIRE

Perhaps one of the most important moves that colonial studies has contributed over the last decade is to reverse the trajectory that imagines the modern as a European invention. More than just “laboratories of modernity,” as Gwendolyn Wright once called the colonies,^[7] colonial situations demand a recasting of the relationship between empire and the modern. The contributions here take that impulse in new directions. Empire primed the modern state through expectations, habits, and tribulations. Bureaucracy, sovereignty, nationalism and other attributes of the modern state were developed – at least in part – through imperial practices abroad and in response to the anxieties they often generated in Europe.
Rethinking statecraft is one critical way of unbracketing imperial practices from what has been cordoned off as European history proper. In so doing, it challenges claims to what constitutes the originally modern. New work on the Spanish empire pulls our modern genealogies back from the nineteenth century and south of northern Europe, while work on cornerstone empires such as Great Britain and France shows how empire threatened rather than merely supported or proved training ground for the European state.
Irene Silverblatt sees the Spanish Inquisition as a key source of modern practices of statecraft. The Inquisition, as implemented in colonial Peru, developed a large bureaucratic institution stuffed with paperwork, as it attempted to purify the empire through well-documented legal procedures. At the same time, the Inquisition reflected deep-seated fears about disloyalty of subject populations, as it mobilized the “pure-blooded” colonial elite against those with suspect allegiances. Hannah Arendt argued that totalitarian states in twentieth-century Europe used racial ideologies to support bureaucratic state interests in a racial system that could be traced back to Inquisitional Spain; Silverblatt relocates those racial practices in colonial Spanish policies in Peru. The contest for control over the dreaded outsider, the heretic, or the racial alien, which lies at the heart of modern state formation, expressed itself very early in European colonial history.
Indeed, Silverblatt argues that we must trace modernity back to the seventeenth century in order to fully grasp the effect of colonialism on the European state. Shifting our focus from Britain and France to Spain and Portugal reveals that “the mix of ‘civilizing,’ bureaucracy, and race-thinking at the heart of modern experience” developed out of the empires of southwest Europe. Challenging this northern European dominance of the imperial form upsets the genealogies of modernity that start both earlier and elsewhere. Silverblatt is careful to show the multiple ways that practices of the Spanish Inquisition fashioned a modernity suitable for Europe and the colonies, albeit one that has been overlooked in favor of other times and other empires, and of our experiences and relations.
Nicholas Dirks “writes empire back into the history of the West” in yet another fundamental way. Suggesting that our understandings of sovereignty have been dislocated from their imperial underpinnings, he traces the expansion of the East India Company on the South Asian continent and the discussions in Parliament about the relationship between Company authority and Crown control. Edmund Burke, as both political theorist of imperial relations and as the prosecutor of Governor-general Warren Hastings for corruption in India in 1788, emerges as a critical figure enunciating the doctrines that closely linked British sovereign rule in India with the “ancient constitution” at home. Scandal was key to the development of the idea that empire was dangerous to British sovereignty, that the Company needed to be reigned in for sake of the fledgling nation. Dirks contends that this sense of empire as crisis for sovereignty has dropped out of our understandings of modern sovereignty.
In undoing common assumptions of British empire in India as the archetypal imperial form, Dirks sketches a new view of just how contentious imperial projects in India were for the metropolitan British state. The building of empire was neither orchestrated by officials in London, nor consonant with their ideas of what empire should look like; instead, empire had an unexpectedly influential role in the shaping of modern Britain. In Dirks’ formulation, however, imperialism and capitalism worked together to craft modern Britain in unforeseen ways. Rather than paving the way for the nation-state, imperial realities (if not ideals) threatened to disrupt the very bedrock of national sovereignty. Using the trial of Warren Hastings to demonstrate this potentiality of empire, Dirks further contends that attention to the erasure of empire evident in the trial and in the histories it has generated allows us to reanimate the story of both empire and sovereignty then and now.
As we have repeatedly insisted, one of the few things certain about imperial formations were the ambiguities on which they thrived – as Frederick Cooper writes, they were a “space that was neither sharply differentiated nor wholly unitary.” Such gaps and openings provided room – small though it may have been – for maneuvering within and beyond structures of domination and difference. Taking two points at the beginning and the end of France’s trajectory between Revolution (the Haitian-French revolution, l789-l804), and decolonization after World War II, Cooper shows that at both times French leaders were not thinking of France as a singular nation-state ruling dominated colonies, but as presiding over multiple units, each with a different relationship to ruling institutions. Not only could the terms of incorporation and differentiation be manipulated to preserve the imperial polity, but some of the most important critics and opponents of the colonial status quo hoped that those structures could be manipulated in different ways, not turning empire into nation, but into a more egalitarian form of multinational polity. In between one does not find a stable relationship of colonizer to colonized, of citizen to subject, but unequal struggle over forms of inclusion and differentiation.
As importantly, Cooper argues that views of France as the epitome of modernity – modern empire, modern nation, modern state – fail to adequately explain nineteenth- and twentieth-century French history. Holding that “France became national at the same time as its colonies” Cooper takes on the project of “provincializing France.” This is not, he argues, a new project, nor one derivative of recent work in postcolonial studies, but an endeavor to be recommenced. In the 1940s, in both Senegal and France, progressive local leaders and colonial officials sought to reframe French empire in order to advance new ideas about the plurality of imperial community. The awkward fit between the multiple allegiances of empire and the homogenizing impulses of nationalism was put to use by elites such as Senegalese political activist and President, Leopold Sedar Senghor. During decolonization, Senghor and others effectively invoked French ideals of citizenship to promote their power within the French imperial system (as well as at home). Cooper suggests that the historical reassessment of both empire and nation that this case requires is one that needs to be routed through Napoleon’s France just as much as through French Morocco, Algeria, or Senegal. It is France as much as the empire that needs to be rethought.

WRITING IN THE IMPERIAL PRESENT

We write in a time in which the concept of empire appears and disappears as a political analytic. Urgently called upon and debated when the war in Iraq began, empire was then almost abruptly left aside, despite the war’s continued virulence. But such is the strategic invocation of empire at other times as well. Those large territorial states that do dominate different cultures and suppress resistance from them (e.g., China in Tibet and Xinjiang, Russia in Chechnya, Israel in Palestine) have claimed and continue to claim these territories as essential parts of the nation, not as imperial possessions. Some might argue that there are few colonies left.^[8] But we would not concede that point so quickly. Imperial vocabularies have narrowed over time such that the French range of meanings for colonie with which we began appears merely metaphorical in the present, rather than definitional or operational. The histories behind the terms often tell different stories. Discarding the term “colony,” therefore, also “discards the histories that have found quiet refuge within it.”^[9] In its contracted, singular form – of formal, often overseas, settler colonies – the colonial is the target of critiques from all sides.
Twentieth century anti-colonial sentiment cleared the way for the quiet persistence of colonies officially sidelined by the narrower model. As a result, several authors from the presented volume – especially Prasenjit Duara – suggest that empire without colonization is the prevalent twentieth-century model.^[10] In this dual formulation – of empire without colonies and of colonies as a singular form – US global hegemony is the case par excellence. While current US actions in Afghanistan and Iraq are the impetus for much of the renewed debate about imperial formations, part of our collective motivation is to provide a framework within which to consider American empire in the broader range of imperial formations and in the specific genealogy of American imperialism that well predates the Cold War.^[11]
How we imagine the history of imperial formations to work as effective knowledge today remains the pressing question, for some more than others. Frederick Cooper urges us not to get caught in marking out genealogies but “to look at what possibilities were available to people at different moments in history and not only to see where those concepts in use today come from.”^[12] Others insist that genealogies of a longer duree provide purchase on a more telling history of the present. Fernando Coronil endorses the latter, urging that our concerns should address imperial effects on people subject to the organizing power of contemporary imperial forms.
Most papers in the presented volume do both, tracking imperial possibilities and practices as well as the spatial and temporal genealogies that inform them. Some work in close, in the familiar quarters of everyday lives amidst imperial projects, or inside the muddle of imperial projects themselves – Makdisi’s missionaries and converts, Perdue’s emperors and authors, McGranahan’s rebels and soldiers, Cooper’s intellectuals and officials, and Dirks’ politicians. Others track imperial formations at broader levels, assessing constructs, intentions, and consequences across wider geographic, historic, or institutional sweeps – Burbank’s detailing of rights and inclusions, Khalid’s analysis of the interventionist state, Duara’s outlining of a developmental imperialism, Coronil’s scrutiny of imperial effects and persistence, and Silverblatt’s tracing of a new colonial biography for modern torture. In the context of specific empires, such authors address analytic questions that are shared but are not one and the same.
Despite the range of topics covered, some things slip through. Questions of gender and race are minimal, the voices of imperial subjects are few. We had not anticipated how easily the project would move away from the microsites of rule, those arenas of the domestic and intimate that have so transformed our understanding of imperial governance – of how and where it takes place.^[13] We have no simple answer to explain this slippage. As we collectively worked to assess imperial formations not just as historical polities, but as a flexible analytic term – one relevant and at work well beyond (and before) nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe – this project on refiguring the imperial took root at a different level. If our labor here tends more to the institutional or the familiar than the domestic or intimate, our questions in general (and some of our collective findings) open to both, to an institutional and intimate analytics of imperial formations representative of the multiplicity of communities caught within and between empires.
Analyzing such systems of imperial domination via “their significance for subjected populations, rather than solely by their institutional form or self-definition”^[14] is as much an ethnographic venture as it is historic and textual. Sitting down with imperial agents and subjects, as Carole McGranahan does with former CIA agents and Tibetan guerrilla soldiers,^[15] is not the same as reading their stories in the archives. A different set of seductions is involved in each venture such that these are complementary but not interchangeable projects.^[16] Effective histories of contemporary empire need both. Catherine Lutz makes an appeal for more ethnographies of contemporary empires, arguing astutely that “empire is in the details.”^[17] As Ann Stoler has long argued, such details are deeply embedded in the changing social and affective lineaments of the everyday.^[18] The “human and material face and frailties of imperialism” at home and abroad haunt the present in ways that put new methodological demands on us all: to recognize both the complex interiorities of those living in and off empire and the creative terms of critique of those living under the imperial spotlight or in its shadows.^[19]
One thing is clear: we need more than more examples from a wider field to unsettle prevailing models. Stockpiling cases is hardly the point. Collectively, if differently, we seek to reconceptualize what constitutes imperial forms, and to ask what advantages are gained for whom by doing so. Rather than rush to distance ourselves from a field declared as fraught with traps, we choose instead to pause; to take advantage of this moment when efforts to rethink empire are coming not only from the North Atlantic center, but taking place in many locales, among people with different stakes and political agendas.^[20] We stay resolutely concerned with the politics of comparison to foreground the relational quality of imperial formations and the uses to which knowledge of them is and should be put.