The first meeting is this Friday and features mini-presentations on our new Special Issue (hopp.uwpress.org/content/66/2) and meet-and-greets with new collaborators.

Have an odd pharmacopeia that you’d like to consult on? Could the platform assist you in your studies of related materials? Interested in contributing to the growing dataset?

We meet on the first Friday of the month at 9:30 am NY time via Zoom. Email mcooley@hamilton.edu for the link.

The first two chapters - by Maria Portuondo and Joe Dennis - show the making of two different guidelines.

We go back in time with @lxslcs.bsky.social's elegant chapter on the precedents for the guidelines, "Imperial Territorial Data before the Age of Print: “Illustrated Guidelines.”

How did states a world apart develop similar documentary techniques to know the dominions under their control, and how do these techniques help us understand the state in question?

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, centrally appointed imperial officials in both China and the Spanish Americas were instructed to gather, compile, and submit information about the locales they administered, following a centrally issued, itemized compilation guideline or questionnaire.

Sources drawn from the originals, and artwork designed by Olivia Buckton and June Lee, mentored by Zoë Sadokierski, University of Technology Sydney School of Design.

Thank you to everyone who took part in the conversation at the core of this book.

Last but not least, we need global histories that aren't all about loose connections. World history is full of similar inventions to solve similar problems.

As a Europeanist by training, may I also say that we need to take seriously the scale of Chinese history, and what we can learn from scholars who have navigated its incredible documentary troves.

We need more serious conversations about the early modern world that take seriously the deep knowledge of area studies without missing parallels and connections.

Barbara E. Mundy, Qun Che, He Bian, Jeremy Mikecz, Mårten Söderblom Saarela, Marcella Hayes, Zhang Xianqing, Stuart M. McManus, Niping Yan, and Dejanirah Couto.

Please check out the great chapters by María M. Portuondo, Joseph Dennis, Alexis Lycas, Shih-Pei Chen, Patricia Murrieta-Flores, Diego Jiménez-Badillo, Mariana Favila-Vázquez, Mario Cams, ...

Over the next few days, I'll be posting about each part of the book: Knowing the State, Structures of Knowing, Knowing Space, Knowing Nature, Knowing People, Connections and Transfers, and Empires of Informal Knowing.

Through a new methodology of “juxtapositional comparison,” we read the difangzhi 地方志 (local gazetteers) of China and the relaciones geográficas of the Spanish world in parallel.

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.

This is a book about how 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.

It has been a delight to work with Huiyi Wu, The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and
@leverpress.bsky.social during the research, writing, and publication of this book.

Such a pleasure to work with Lever on this book!