In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History , Ann Laura Stoler makes compelling arguments for locating empire on the site of “the intimate,” or the particular, everyday lives, relationships, and experiences of both colonizer and colonized. Stoler maintains that “these ties are not microcosms of empire but its marrow.” 1 In this volume of collected works, each author is driven to explore comparative contexts of empire by engaging with Stoler’s essay titled “Tense and Tender Ties.” All the while, Stoler exhorts her readers and students of imperialism more broadly to mind their comparisons, ensuring they are contextualized, specific, and “peopled.” 2 When done in this manner, comparative approaches to histories of imperialism can reveal shared circuits of knowledge and similar strategies for dominance, even as varying contexts point to important differences. One fruitful site for the examination of empire are the so-called benevolent practices of imperial pow...