Abstract:

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.

Key words: Empire Day, global intellectual history, time