Starting with George Lukacs’ complaint that naturalist works are incoherent because of their superfluous detail, this chapter argues that incoherence was in fact an effective literary aesthetic for seeing and managing details at a large scale. The large scale that was particularly salient to American naturalism was the global one of American imperial expansion during the Progressive Era, and the essay argues that American empire is a useful framework for understanding naturalism as a literary movement because it brought together an investment in incoherent form with statistical and biopolitical technologies that, like naturalist works, proliferated details. Naturalism in this American context isn’t a failed version of realism. Nor does its incoherence register an inability to represent empire as an emergent global order. Instead, naturalism developed the realist project with a set of conventions that powerfully (and problematically) expressed the form of an emerging and efficacious large-scale global order.