This graduate seminar critically considers the theoretical impact and methodological rigor of Comparative Historical Analysis (CHA) in political science. Studies in this tradition employ a variety of research approaches, address a wide array of topics, and explore every imaginable region of the world. Yet its practitioners are “united by a commitment to offering historically grounded explanations of large-scale and substantively important outcomes.” In the seminar’s opening weeks, we situate CHA in wider methodological and disciplinary contexts, and consider whether and how historically specific arguments might advance the quest for causal generalization in the social sciences. In subsequent weeks, we pair up readings on specific methodological themes with substantive CHA works on what we might broadly term “political development.” Specifically, we will be examining CHA research on topics such as state-building, nationalism, democratization, religion, revolutions, and colonial legacies, among others. Each student must turn in a final written project, which can take one of two forms: a research proposal outlining a future or ongoing student project incorporating CHA methods; or an analytic review of an ongoing substantive debate in the CHA literature.