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This chapter addresses the complex and contingent interplay between liberal order and empire. It draws attention to the seemingly irresolvable dilemma that the United States maintains imperial relations with other political communities, whilst also rejecting the legitimacy of empire. The solution has been to ‘democratize’ imperial functions and to vest them in multilateral international organizations and to ensure that they as much as possible reflect the consent of the international community. Deploying an original framework of analysis based on ideal types of empire, the chapter advances the argument that imperial structures may be found embedded in at least three different variations of imperial logics in surprising settings, including inter-governmentalist liberal practices in UN peacekeeping operations and neo-trustee arrangements, such as those following the NATO intervention in Kosovo and NATO's role in Afghanistan.

This chapter focuses on the intellectuals' voluntary attachment to the ruler's service as their single most significant choice. It elucidates both the advantages of this choice and its price. Having opted for a political career, leading intellectuals had to accept their position as the emperor's servitors, which was at odds with their self-proclaimed moral superiority over the throne; and the resultant tension between their roles as the leaders and the led generated persistent frustration and manifold tragedies. Yet bitterness aside, the voluntary attachment of the intellectuals to the throne had also greatly empowered the educated elite as a whole. For two-odd millennia, members of this stratum navigated the empire through many storms and challenges, contributing decisively toward the preservation of the imperial political structure, and of its cultural foundations, against all odds.

The 1893–96 massacres constitute the collective violence committed against the Armenians during this stage. The chapter traces the initial formation of the imperial denial of the origins of this collective violence as the Ottoman state argued the violence was not domestic but was externally instigated by foreign powers. Such denial of origins, the chapter argues, emerges through the interaction of the Ottoman structure of difference with imperial modernity, on the one hand, and the transformation of imperial sentiments with the legitimating event of the 1896 Ottoman Bank raid by Armenian revolutionaries, on the other.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the history of Republican Beijing. It argues that Republican Beijing, despite its imperial structures, was definitively a modern city, especially if modernity is understood to be a condition of existence structured by large-scale capitalist-industrial production in an integrated world characterized by bureaucratic nation-states and a people's consciousness of and actions to define their position in this integrated world. The chapter explains that the approaches of the people of Republican Beijing to both the past and the future were marked by a sense of selectivity. They actively dealt with and gave meaning to the present in which they were living, believing in its significance for the future rather than waiting to shed tradition and embrace a future defined in Western terms.