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).

Table of Contents
Introduction: Comparing Parallel Imperial Epistemologies

Part 1: Knowing the State by Mackenzie Cooley and WU Huiyi
1. Questionnaires to Rule an Empire: Reporting Doubt to the Kings in the Relaciones Geográficas by María M. Portuondo
2. The Chinese Local Gazetteers: Principles of Compilation by Joseph Dennis
3. Imperial Territorial Data before the Age of Print: "Illustrated Guidelines" as Local Repositories for Knowing the Chinese Empire by Alexis Lycas
 
Part 2: Structures of Knowing
4. What One Should Know about a Locality: Analyzing Knowledge Categories in the Chinese Local Gazetteers by CHEN Shih-Pei
5. Placing New Spain through Early Modern Big Data: Developing a Geographical Text Analysis Approach to the Relaciones Geográficas de Nueva España by Patricia Murrieta-Flores, Diego Jiménez-Badillo, and Mariana Favila-Vázquez
 
Part 3: Knowing Space
6. Mapping Ming China: Modes of Mapping in the Comprehensive Geographies of the Late Ming Era by Mario Cams
7. Mapping New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and Imperial Knowledge by Barbara E. Mundy
 
Part 4: Knowing Nature
8. Arching the Yangzi River (1600-1900) by CHE Qun
9. Making Nature Spanish: Environmental Change in the Relaciones by Mackenzie Cooley
10. Politics and Scholarship of Local Products in Ming-Qing Provincial Gazetteers by BIAN He
11. Strategic Landscapes: Indigenous Knowledge of Andean Geographies as Recorded in the Relaciones Geográficas by Jeremy Mikecz
 
Part 5: Knowing People
12. Local Linguistic Knowledge in Qing Gazetteers by Mårten Söderblom Saarela
13. Black Settlers Fight for Visibility by Marcella Hayes
14. Religions and the Landscape of Faiths in Imperial Chinese Gazetteers by ZHANG Xianqing
15. Slavery in Spanish America and Beyond by Stuart M. McManus
 
Part 6: Connections and Transfers 
16. Guns, Maize, and Europeans: Early Modern Globalization in Local Gazetteers by WU Huiyi
17. Philippine Relaciónes: China and the Spanish Knowledge Acquisition in the Sixteenth Century by YAN Niping 
 
Coda: Empires of Informal Knowing
18. The Knowledge Economy of the Portuguese Empire by Dejanirah Couto
 
Bibliography