Return to the Imperial System or Pursuing Global Good Governance. Dialogue with Professor Yu Keping on Imperial Studies and Global Order

Abstract

The debate about empires and their historical role has played a rather subordinate role in western academic discussion in recent decades. The world assumed that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the history of empires had come to an end. Francis Fukuyama accordingly proclaimed the “end of history.” Although some books on this topic were published in the 2000s, such as Herfried Münkler’s book “Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the US” (2007), which primarily deals with the rise and fall of empires in the past and present and has also been translated into Chinese; “Empires of World History” by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper (2011), or a book publication of the same name by Niv Horesh (2021); their titles already indicate that these are primarily studies with a strong historical focus.