Knowing the Empire

This is a book about two empires that generated systematized knowledge of local worlds and how those knowledge economies set the precedent for ruling through an ideal of comprehensive information. Global historians of science, economy, and politics have all come to emphasize the inherent overlap between state-building, economic order, and the growth of scientific practice. This book consolidates this research momentum with a comparative study on the kindred managerial toolkits and territorial data corpuses that emerged independently on opposite ends of the globe: the difangzhi 地方志 (local gazetteers) in late imperial China and the relaciones geográficas in the Spanish Empire. Through these portals that generated centralized truth across diverse places and peoples, this book shows the complex entanglement of ruling and knowing inside these large polities. It offers a highly innovative and inherently dialogic approach to comparative studies of empires, with major implications for East Asian, Spanish, transnational and global history.