If students of the colonial are now more ready to accept the argument that metropole and colony should be treated as one analytic field, there is far less consensus on what those contingencies look like on any specific historical ground. We remain confounded by the direct and indirect ways in which metropolitan practices shaped the face of empire and the other way around. But the conundrum is not ours alone. Working out those contingencies of confluence and commensurability, scope and scale, what bound a “community of sentiment” and what did not, were the very dilem- mas of rule and what the tools of statecraft were designed to, but could only poorly, assess.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ E…, loc. 541