Increased flows of people, capital, and ideas across geographic borders raise urgent challenges to the existing terms and practices of politics. Comparative political theory seeks to devise new intellectual frames for addressing these challenges by questioning the canonical (that is, Euro-American) categories that have historically shaped inquiry in political theory and other disciplines. It does this byanalyzing normative claims, discursive structures, and formations of power in and from all parts of the world. By looking to alternative bodies of thought and experience, as well as the terms we might use to critically examine them, comparative political theory encourages self-reflexivity about the premises of normative ideas and articulates new possibilities for political theory and practice. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory provides an entry point into this burgeoning field by both synthesizing and challenging the terms which motivate it. Over the course of five thematic sections and thirty-three chapters, this volume surveys the field and archives of comparative political theory, bringing the many approaches to the field into conversation for the first time. Sections address geographic location as a subject of political theorizing; how the past becomes a key site for staking political claims; the politics of translation and appropriation; the justification of political authority; and questions of disciplinary commitment and rules of knowledge. Ultimately, the handbook demonstrates how mainstream political theory can and must be enriched through attention to genuinely global, rather than parochially Euro-American, contributions to political thinking.

The writings of a small group of scholars known as the ilustrados are often credited for providing intellectual grounding for the Philippine Revolution of 1896. Megan C. Thomas shows that the ilustrados' anticolonial project of defining and constructing the "Filipino" involved Orientalist and racialist discourses that are usually ascribed to colonial projects, not anticolonial ones. According to Thomas, the work of the ilustrados uncovers the surprisingly blurry boundary between nationalist and colonialist thought. By any measure, there was an extraordinary flowering of scholarly writing about the peoples and history of the Philippines in the decade or so preceding the revolution. In reexamining the works of the scholars Jose Rizal, Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes, Pedro Paterno, Pedro Serrano Laktaw, and Mariano Ponce, Thomas situates their writings in a broader account of intellectual ideas and politics migrating and transmuting across borders. She reveals how the ilustrados both drew from and refashioned the tools and concepts of Orientalist scholarship from Europe. Interrogating the terms "nationalist" and "nationalism," whose definitions are usually constructed in the present and then applied to the past, Thomas offers new models for studying nationalist thought in the colonial world.