Metropolitan and colonial social reforms created the commensurabilities that constituted the imperial field.

Evidence

As far-flung colonial contexts were refocused through an Indies lens, so too were metropolitan ones, reminders of the fact that nineteenthcentury social reform and its concomitant solutions to pauperism, poverty, and recalcitrant workers were not only being played out on a broad imperial field; rather, such practices created the commensurabilities that constituted that imperial field itself. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 653

Categorization

• XREF: Anti-essentialist account of imperial comparisons — the imperial field is constituted by practices rather than pre-existing — connects to constructivist accounts of colonial knowledge production in the reader’s archive.
• SEED: Could support an essay on how ‘comparison’ itself is an imperial epistemic practice — the act of commensuration across colonies as constitutive, not merely descriptive.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that reform practices generated the very commensurabilities that constituted the imperial field is dense and paradigm-shifting within colonial studies — it refuses both metropolitan-centrism and a simple periphery model.