20世纪80年代之后出现的针对纪念日的研究，大多采取民族国家的视角，而非全球史的视角。对纪念日的研究可以也应该被纳入到全球思想史的研究范围内，这是因为纪念日从创设到实践，都会呈现不同群体对特定观念（如民族和帝国）的理解，呈现不同观念之间的影响。本讨论采用以“时间”为核心的分析工具，扩充现有全球史对时间问题的分析视角，以前人研究相对匮乏的帝国日作为研究对象。通过比较和分析帝国日的不同变体及其在时间上的选择，可以厘清这一组纪念日所试图传递的理念是否产生效果以及如何发挥影响，并将此作为全球思想史研究视域下的一种尝试。

After the 1980s, most of the studies on commemorative days have taken a national rather than a global historical perspective. This paper highlights that it is proper and possible to include the study of commemoration days in that of global intellectual history, for the design and practice of a commemoration day reflect participants’ understanding of interacted ideas such as nation and empire. Methodologically speaking, this paper adopts the analytical tool centered on “time”, expands the approaches to the issue of “time” in the global history and takes Empire Day as the key subject, which have rarely been studied precedentially. By comparing the choosing of dates of Empire Day and its variations, this paper, as a tentative investigation from the perspective of global intellectual history, discloses reasons as well as narratives behind these choices in order to find out whether and how the ideas that commemoration days attempted to spread imposed influence.