 Our main research question is what do actors do when they compare? This sounds like a very simple question with an easy answer. You just take two things, let's say apples and oranges, and ask for their common features and the differences. If you think a little bit about what is going on here, you suddenly realize that of course you can also compare cucumbers, apples and oranges, for instance in respect to their sweetness. But you know that cucumbers do not have any sugar in it, so why then still can you compare them to oranges and apples in respect to their sweetness? This is because comparing is less about the features of the entities compared, but it is more about the actors who carry out comparisons within a specific context and for a specific reason. What we are interested in basically is really the practice of comparing and how this practice of comparing changed over time. Given that general interest in the question of what do actors do when they compare, in my own research I'm looking at a concrete and very telling case. I'm looking at Cuba in the long 19th century at race comparisons specifically. And this is so interesting because Cuba was a very heterogeneous society. During the long 19th century many African slaves were brought to Cuba, but there were also migrants from other world regions, of course from Spain and from the US, but also forced migration from China. So we have a very complex, very colorful and hybrid society in Cuba. And now for ordering this society comparisons were everywhere. We have a huge amount of different comparisons within Cuba from different actors from different world regions, and now we can look how did they find ways and how did they make up stereotypized comparisons during the long 19th century. For better understanding how they made up these stereotypes, we look at many different sources such as statistical data at travel logs, but also at scientific essays and articles and publications and discussions on how to do a population census. We look at many different sources and try to figure out how did this society make up race comparisons that at the end of the century were clearly cut, categorized and clearly defined. We have finding on different levels. I would say that on a very general level we could show that comparing is a very complex activity. The doing of comparisons changed over time, so it's not a static activity, but it has a history. And this history tells us a lot about the societies in which the comparisons were carried out. So the first finding is it's a complex activity and it's changed over time. We also have finding on a more concrete level. If you look for instance at the Cuban society and their race comparisons during the long 19th century. While at the beginning of the century we can see that comparisons have been carried out within a very pluralistic and complex setting. People were compared in respect to their religion, to their societal status, if they were free or unfilled and also in respect to their skin color. So the feature of skin color was just one feature among others. While at the end of the century or at the beginning of the 20th century we can see that race comparisons were most prominent and race comparisons were in addition really narrowed down to a black and white dichotomy. Why was it so? I think that we can really substantiate the thesis that this has been an effect of the encounter between the US army and the Cuban army in the late 19th century. The US army helped the Cuban army to throw out the Spanish colonizers and this encounter of such differently organized armies on the one hand the very colorful heterogeneous Cuban army and on the other one the segregated armies of the US army shaped the way comparisons were carried out in the Cuban society until or before World War I. We also have findings on a methodological level. For a long time it has been very fruitful to analyze what has been called othering of the colonizers when they looked at the colonized people. They really looked at the differences what makes them their variants and what makes us the civilized people that allows us to colonize the barbarians. So othering practices has been the most investigated subject. If we now extend that paradigm to an analysis of the practices of comparing we can all of a sudden see that the story was more complex and we can now distinguish different shades of similarity and differences that really changes the whole picture of the colonial encounters. We nowadays in many societies experience a revival of racist comparisons. With our research we could show first that the categories such as race are made up with the help of comparisons so that they are constructed and secondly and this might be even more important we could show that with the help of comparisons these categories are what we called naturalized so that we feel as if they were objective. So this is a very circular argument but it is very important for a better understanding how difficult and sometimes also dangerously comparisons can be employed within political contexts, within power relations within nowadays societies but also within historical societies. During the last years we have shown that the practices of comparing changed over time and the next step would be to ask whether or not comparisons also provoke historical change which means that institutionalized comparisons foster in a way societal change. We believe that the emergence of rankings in so many different societal fields are a solid hint that the doing of comparison really is a driver and a force behind societal changes.