Abstract
First meetings between distinct peoples raise fundamental ontological questions, yet these have not been frequently pursued by historians. The last generation or two of historians of empire have increasingly placed these meetings—variously understood or rendered as encounters, collisions, engagements, or entanglements—at the center of their work even if they have not often pursued the ontological dimensions of these cross-cultural conversations and connections. Although in 1963, W. H. McNeill famously suggested that meetings with strangers were the main drive-wheel of change in the reshaping of human communities, influential traditions of world history for a long-time neglected bodies, exhibited little interest in questions about humanity and the boundaries of culture, and failed to grapple with the weight of difference as they offered readings of the global past that operated in economistic and, at times, mechanistic modes. It has only been in the last generation of world history scholarship that cultural difference in its myriad forms has moved to the center of the field. But both in world history and work on the histories of empire, the fundamental questions raised by the meeting of very different ontological orders are rarely grappled with; all too often, our analytical departure points and idioms remain firmly anchored in western philosophical and methodological tradition, traditions that are not subject to fundamental interrogation. This reaffirms Elizabeth Povinelli’s broader argument about contemporary "political economic theory"—that it "has done little to overturn the basic tenets of western notions about the qualitative divides among humans (subject-agents), non-intentional animals (predators-prey), and objects (insentient things)."