In Staging the World Rebecca Karl argues that contemporary approaches to the study of nationalism are too narrow.  Benedict Anderson sees nationalism as defined by the state even as it defines the state, and analyzes nationalism’s development primarily as an internal politico-cultural process.  Prasenjit Duara, Karl says, goes just he opposite direction and uses local history to oppose the idea that nationalism exists in any way but the contrived narrative produced by a governing body trying to define and legitimate its control over geographically, culturally, and economically disparate areas.  Rather than these narrow approaches, Karl argues that Chinese nationalism at its inception was a complex set of intellectual conceptions not circumscribed by the existence or position of the Chinese state, nor defined by processes within China alone.  Instead, Karl posits the possibility that Chinese intellectuals perceived China as a national entity by way of a growing sense that China was a part of the world, and that there were certain analogues for China’s problems in other places in the world from which the Chinese could learn and by which China could be reimagined as a modern state.  This sense of China in the world Karl calls “globality’, and it is her position that China discovered itself by creating histories of other places within the colonized world (Turkey, Japan, Hawaii, South Africa and the Philippines, among others) that served as tropes for thinking of China’s problems, opportunities, and identity in the intellectual world of 1898-1911.