Knowing an Empire: Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Worlds in Dialogue by Mackenzie Cooley, Huiyi Wu ISBN 9781643150765, 9781643150772, 1643150766, 1643150774 instant download

Knowing an Empire: Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Worlds in Dialogue by Mackenzie Cooley, Huiyi Wu ISBN 9781643150765, 9781643150772, 1643150766, 1643150774 instant download

Revealing dynamic dialogues between early modern China and Latin America through a new methodology "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. 
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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. 
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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.