Imperial comparisons required new knowledge of mistakes, statistics, and pedagogical failures.

Evidence

The frequency and urgency with which British, French, and Spanish experiments were invoked or rejected as viable comparisons mark the expanding breadth of imperial imaginaries to include new comparative knowledge of colonizing missions, of mistakes they could learn from, statistics they would now need to gather, and pedagogic failures they could avoid or redress. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 653