For the potential of cross-national, comparative studies to achieve these and other things, see especially G. M. Frederickson, 'From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent Developments in Cross-National Comparative History', Journal of American History 82 (1995), 587-604 (pp. 587-8, 604); Hopkins, 'Back to the Future', p. 217. 22 See, for example, C. Daniels and M. V. Kennedy (eds.), Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500-1820 (New York: Routledge, 2002, which argues for peripheries occupying a more central position in the early modern colonial world, and carrying more power in relation to metropolitan centres than scholars have often allowed.