George M. Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997)

Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)

Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)

In The Comparative Imagination, historian George Fredrickson insists that ‘would-be comparativists originally trained as conventional historians need to become interdisciplinary’. He argues that scholars ‘should immerse themselves in the literature on their thematic interest (race relations in my case) produced by sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and even those in the new and controversial field of cultural studies. One does not have to become a theorist to use theory productively’.