当专家和学者们力图探索正在形成中的新国际秩序的轮廓时，帝国作为一项议题强势回归。世界似乎已经变为后帝国时代，但等级却无处不在。我们关于帝国的一般理论是被欧洲殖民主义的视野塑造的，但就帝国的世界历史而言，这仅仅是一个特别不稳定的阶段，一个短暂的例外。本讲座试图超越欧洲经验，在一个从古代美索不达米亚到当今的长时段中，来描绘一个更广阔的帝国的世界史。帝国及其遗产远不是过去的事情，它仍以重要的方式继续塑造我们的世界，正如很多中国思想家着重强调的那样，这要求我们研究和反思欧洲之外的更广范围内的帝国经验。比如，帝国和民族（国家）通常被视为是相反的，但中国民族（国家）却是在帝国的根基之上完成的。法国哲学家阿兰·芬奇尔克劳德（Alain Finkielkraut）曾指出，世界正在变得越来越现代化，越来越非西方化。这个过程将会如何改变我们有关世界历史中的帝国经验的看法？
The question of Empire has returned forcefully to the agenda as pundits and scholars strive to probe the contours of the new international order in the making. The world seemed to have become post-imperial, yet everywhere is hierarchy. Our general theories of empire, however, were shaped by the horizon of European colonialism; but in the world history of empire, this was a particularly unstable phase, a short-lived exception. This paper seeks to transcend the European experience, push beyond, to sketch a broader world history of empire, in the
longue dur
é
e
, from Ancient Mesopotamia till the present. Far from a thing of the past, empire and its legacies continue to shape our world in important ways, and, as has been forcefully argued not least by a number of Chinese thinkers, require us to engage and reflect upon a range of imperial experiences, outside the European. While empire and nation, for instance, are normally thought of as opposite, the formation of the nation in China, by contrast, took place at the plane of the empire. The world, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has remarked, is all the time becoming more and more modern and increasingly less Western. How does this process change our perspective on the imperial experience in world history?
