Abstract
Comparing empires is an ongoing attempt to put into context a specific group of nations who expanded into countries with trading posts and colonies overseas. In approaching the expansion of western European nations beyond Europe, I am going back into an explanation of the title and reverse its terms by discussing “empire” before “comparing.” The cultural connotations of the word “empire” and the related terms “imperialism” and “imperial” have probably always been laden with semantic intricacies and led to emotional responses depending on which side of the divide of power a person or culture inhabited. That there would be contradictory and ambivalent situations, responses and representations within Europeans and their states and within the people and peoples they encountered is something that complicates the idea of empire. The textual messiness—the descriptions, opinions, proclamations, asides and other forms of verbal record and report—makes difficult any single notion of imperial expansion. By comparing cultures in these empires and by comparing empires, some of the complexity of these expanding nations and the places and peoples they came into contact with begins to arise. Comparison can be useful in decentering national pride and shame while not taking away what each nation and culture has said and done. What seems like an accomplishment to one person, nation, generation might come to appear like an embarrassment to the next.
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Notes
T. O. Lloyd, The British Empire 1558–1995, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; rpt. 2000), v.
One of the key related texts we studied in school, which took the sea as one of its main themes, was J. H. Parry, The Establishment of the European Hegemony: 1415–1715: Trade and Exploration in the Age of the Renaissance, 3rd edition revised (1949; New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
See Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 2; my translations.
Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, Comparative Literature (1886: New York and London: Johnson, rept. 1970), 73.
For various and often opposing views of difference, see the essays Explorations in Difference: Law, Culture and Politics, ed. Jonathan Hart and Richard Bauman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).
Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 1–17, 21–48; see 45. There were many responses to this collection, itself a response. For instance, see the many essays on the state of comparative literature in the Review of Scholarship in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 23 (March 1996). In this volume one essay concentrates on the difference between the object of study and the problem of definition; see Douwe Fokkema, “Comparative Literature and Canon Formation,” 51–66, esp. 51–53;
see also his Issues in General & Comparative Literature: Selected Essays (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1987); an early bibliographical study that begins with a few books in the late eighteenth century but concentrates most on the nineteenth is Louis-P. Betz, La Littérature Comparée: Essai Bibliographique, introduction par Joseph Texte, Deuxième Édition Augmentée, Publiée, Avec Un Index Méthodique, par Fernand Baldensperger (1904; New York: Greenwood Press, 1969);
a few examples of books on the topic of comparative literature over the past 35 years or so are Harry Levin, Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); Comparative Literature: Matter and Method (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969);
Henry Gifford, Comparative Literature: Concepts of Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969);
Robert J. Clements, Comparative Literature as Academic Discipline: A Statement of Principles, Praxis, Standards (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1978)—he sees ancient roots to the comparing of national literatures (see p. 2);
Claudio Guillén, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, trans. Cola Franzen (Spanish original, 1985; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993);
Yves Chevrel, Comparative Literature Today: Methods & Perspectives, trans. Farida Elizabeth Dahab (French original, 1989; Kirksville, MO: The Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1995).
H. C. Gutteridge, Comparative Law: An Introduction to the Comparative Method of Legal Study & Research, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), 12–13; the first edition was published in 1946.
For other suggestive discussions of comparative law and its method see O. Kahn-Freund, Cornparative Law as an Academic Subject (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), esp. 5;
George E. Gloss, Comparative Law (Littleton, CO: Fred B. Rothman, 1979);
Rudolf B. Schlesinger, Comparative Law (New York: The Foundation Press, 1980), esp. 1–45;
Jeffrey Seitzer, Comparative History and Legal Theory (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 2001), esp. xiii—xviii;
Andrew Harding and Esin Örücü, eds., Comparative Law in the 21st Century (London, the Hague, New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), esp. vii—xiii.
Jerome Hall, Comparative Law and Social Theory ([Baton Rouge]: Louisiana State University Press, 1963), 3.
Gabriel A. Almond, G. Bingham Powell, Jr. and Robert J. Mundt, Comparative Politics: A Theoretical Framework (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 3.
This work builds on the earlier text, Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell Jr., , Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966).
See, e.g., Mosche M. Czudnowski, Comparing Political Behavior (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1976), 11.
See, e.g., Philip Burnham, “Pastoralism and the Comparative Method,” Comparative Anthropology, Ladislav Holy, ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 165.
Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 5, see 1–20.
Talal Asad, “Afterword: From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the Anthropology of Western Hegemony,” ed. George Stocking, Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 314, see 315–24; see Herzfeld, Anthropology, 73.
Herzfeld, Anthropology, 76. On “thick description,” see Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973);
see also Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973)
and Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French History (New York: Basic Books, 1984);
for microhistory, see Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
Peel, History, Culture and the Comparative Method, 89. See John Stuart Mill, System of Logic (1843; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), ch. 6.
See James E. Lewis, Jr., The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783–1829 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
On the position of Spain in an earlier period, see James Muldoon, The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for the Conquest in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).
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© 2003 Jonathan Hart
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Hart, J. (2003). Introduction. In: Comparing Empires. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980656_1
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