Contact, Conquest and Colonization brings together international historians and literary studies scholars in order to explore the force of practices of comparing in shaping empires and colonial relations at different points in time and around the globe.

Introduction: On 'Doing Comparison' - Practices of Comparing PartI: Women, Marriage Practices, and Morals 1. Bridging the Gap: Jesuit Missionaries' Perspectives on Marriage in the Philippines in the Period of Contact 2. Constructing the Literati: The Jesuits' Attempt to Understand China's Confucian Elite by Dint of Comparison 3. 'Our' Women, 'Their' Women: Domestic Space and the Question of Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Colonial India Part II: Politics, Polemics, and Propaganda 4. Entre Nos: Comparison and Authority in the Epistolary of Antonio Valeriano 5. Global Benchmarks of Princely Rule in the Early Eighteenth Century? Transcultural Comparison in the Political Series of the German Publisher Renger (1704-1718) 6. Spain and its North-African 'Other': Ambivalent Practices of Comparing in the Context of Modern Spanish Colonialism around 1860 7. Propaganda, Cultural Diplomacy, and the Politics of Comparison in the Early Cold War, 1945 to the 1960s PartIII: Literature, Science, and Literary Discourse 8. Same Sky, Different Soil: Geographical Difference in Eighteenth-Century Astronomy and its Impact on Literature 9. Between Nature and Culture: Comparing, Natural History, and Anthropology in Modern French Travel Narratives Around 1800 (François-René de Chateaubriand) 10. Comparison as Context in Sir William Jones's Translations of Eastern Literature Part IV: Race, Civilization, and Religion 11. Colonizing Complexions: How Laws of Bondage Shaped Race in America's Colonial Borderlands 12. Tocqueville's Compass: On History, Race and Comparison in A Fortnight in the Wilds 13. Climates, Colonialism, and the Politics of Comparison: The Construction of U.S.-American Tropicality in Colonial Medicine and Public Health, 1898-1912 14. Between 'Cannibals' and 'Natural Freemasons:' The (Anti)Colonial History of Comparing Freemasonry to African Secret Societies Concluding Observations: Modes of Comparing and Communities of Practice