The concluding chapter reflects on the contribution that this book makes to world-literary analysis, postcolonial theory and Victorian studies. My intervention offers the analytical rudiments that might enable future comparative approaches to better conceptualise the imperial hierarchies and structural reciprocities existing between the semi-peripheral literary productions of core and non-core capitalist zones. Other aspects holding out promise for world-literary studies lie in critical perspectives that are empowered to identify uneven literary constructions of the British world-system within the capitalist core itself, including distinguishing more effectively between rural and urban points of contact with, and indeed counterposing different class approaches to, the imperial world-system. This type of work, in turn, enables a more solid grasp of how postcolonial theorists have over-relied on bourgeois metropolitan authors for their reading of imperial politics whilst ignoring oppositional stances taken by working-class writers such as Hardy. Finally, this monograph develops a stronger awareness of the unevenness of the flows of people, commodities and capital than has so far been possible through other Victorian studies of global horizons in Hardy’s prose outputs.