Sachsenmaier, Dominic. The Evolution of World Histories

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The evolution of world histories

dominic sachsenmaier
Trajectories outside of academia

Reflecting upon the evolution of world history leads us to some foundational
questions about historiography at large.1 After all, we need to leave the
international landscapes of modern-day universities behind and consider
multifarious ways of dealing with the past, throughout the world. Particu-
larly if we are regarding a wide variety of cultural contexts, history and
historiography are rather hard to define. Quite a lot of scholars have debated
the demarcation lines between history and other genres such as literature.
For example, there is the question whether to include oral traditions such as
legends, myths or even songs into the picture. The same is the case with
religious texts, which played an important role in the genesis of historical
scholarship.2
In recent years, academic historians have become somewhat more reluc-
tant to use modern Western definitions as the universal standard from which
“historiography” can be understood. This growing willingness to pay more
attention to other genres and cultural possibilities also impacts the ways in
which we conceptualize the trajectories of “world history.” When we have to
be more flexible with the meaning of “history,” it will be impossible to define
the “world” in “world history” as a space of clear-cut, universal dimensions.
In any culture and time period, the history of the world could only possibly
mean the history of one’s own world, that is, the world one was exposed to
through lived experiences, personal travels and the accounts of others. In that
sense, the worlds of a fourteenth-century Maya, a Northern European, a
1 Research for this chapter has been supported by an Academy of Korean Studies Grant
funded by the Korean government (AKS-2010-DZZ-3103).
2 Peter Burke, “History, myth and fiction: Doubts and debates,” in José Rabasa, Masayuki
Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo, and Daniel Woolf (eds.), The Oxford History of Historical
Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), vol. iii, pp. 261–81.
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Japanese or a Polynesian were certainly unlike each other. Yet at the same
time they had a decisive element in common: they all reached far beyond
single political realms or cultural habitats.
Seen from this perspective, world history differed from other forms of
history in the very basic sense that it not only focused on one’s own heritage
but also sought to include “others” into the picture. If we define world
history along those very basic lines, we certainly find important examples for
it all over the globe. This is even the case with societies that did not transmit
historical information through writing but rather orally, often using special
mnemonic techniques.3 For instance, in Australia Aboriginal legends and
songs dealt with the history of the known world and its peoples.4 An African
example are the Arokin, a professional group in the Yoruba kingdom in
present-day Nigeria, Togo and Benin, whose task has been to remember
experiences and recount them orally.5 Already at a rather early stage, the
accounts of Arabic travelers and traders impacted this tradition by providing
information about other parts of the world. In return, Sub-Saharan oral
traditions were an important source for written Muslim reports, which found
their ways into Arabic “world historical” scholarship. As this example sug-
gests, already at an early stage there was no categorical divide between oral
and written forms of world history.6
It would be flawed to treat such oral – mythological and other – traditions
merely as the precursors to today’s world historical scholarship. This would
assume that these earlier traditions of world history have ceased to exist and
university-based approaches largely came to replace them. Yet up until the
present day oral accounts and legends play a strong role around the world,
and so do decidedly religious visions of world history. For the latter, one
only needs to think of the pluriverse of today’s religious schools, a large
number of which disseminate their own interpretations of the world and
its history. Examples range from history education at many Islamic madrasas
to the wealth of Christian world history textbooks in the United States.
Particularly in fundamentalist circles, many of these texts are written from
3 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
4 Paul Faulstich, “Mapping the mythological landscape: An Aboriginal way of being in
the world,” Philosophy & Geography 1 (1998), 197–221; and Margaret C. Ross, “Australian
Aboriginal oral traditions,” Oral Tradition 1 (1986), 231–71.
5 Falola Toyin, “History in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Stuart Macintyre, Juan Maiguashca,
and Attila Pók (eds.), The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. iv, pp. 597–618.
6 For example about Isidore O. Benin, Once Upon a Kingdom: Myth, Hegemony and Identity
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
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unambiguously Islamic or biblical perspectives, sometimes even demonizing

other societies and cultures.7
Hence there is little reason to render religious traditions of world history
to a distant past, and the same is the case with oral traditions. Both are
vibrant genres, and as such they continue to influence the world historical
interpretations of countless people around the world. Given the state of the
art of scholarship dealing with the evolution of world history, this chapter
will not be able to systematically cross the divide between religious and
secular forms of world history; neither will it be able to provide a balanced
perspective between elite and other interpretations of the global past.8 I will
chiefly concentrate on educated circles and highbrow texts, and for my
discussion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this means that
I primarily focus on academic literature.
Early written traditions

Already more than two thousand years ago, there were quite a number of
scholars – some of whom we may duly call “historians” – who paid much
attention to cultural experiences outside their own societies and traditions.
In European antiquity, one of the most prominent examples is Herodotus
of Halicarnassus who lived between c. 484 and 425 bce and has often been
labeled as the “Father of History.”9 His masterpiece, the Histories, an account
of the Greco-Persian War, is often praised for trying to depict different
conditions and traditions from a neutral perspective. This might be an
exaggeration since the work’s narrative is structured around a somewhat
problematic juxtaposition of the Greek polis as the harbor of freedom
and the Persian Empire as a stronghold of tyranny.10 In many regards, the
Histories display a great cultural and political self-confidence against which
other civilizations are measured.
7 See for instance Jerry H. Bentley, “Myths, wagers, and some moral implications of
world history,” Journal of World History 16 (2005), 51–82; and R. Scott Appleby, “History
in the fundamentalist imagination,” Journal of American History 89 (2002), 498–511.
8 For such movements in the field of intellectual history see Anthony Grafton, “The
history of ideas: Precepts and practice, 1950–2000 and beyond,” Journal of the History of
Ideas 67 (2006), 1–32.
9 See for example Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global
Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and David Christian, “Scales,” in Marnie
Hughes-Warrington (ed.), Palgrave Advances in World History (London: Palgrave, 2006),
pp. 64–89.
10 For more details see François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the
Other in the Writing of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
58
Similar statements could be made about the massive, 130-chapter-long work

Historical Records (Shiji) by the Chinese historian Sima Qian (d. 86 bce). While
the great Han-scholar also included China’s neighboring peoples in his his-
torical portraits, his depictions were nevertheless based on the idea of China’s
elevated civilizational and political status.11 While Sima’s work covers topics
ranging from music to politics,12 his main narrative strings moved chiefly
through the Middle Kingdom and adjacent areas. Even though at his time
some information on places such as India or the Central Asian kingdoms was
available, Sima’s work did not seek to cover their history. Still, in his work
Sima Qian professed to be as accurate as possible: analogous to the (albeit
unproven) claims of Herodotus to have traveled through much of his world,
he undertook extensive journeys while working on his Historical Records.
The works of scholars like Herodotus or Sima Qian were certainly excep-
tional in scope and depth but one should avoid portraying them as the sole
representatives of “world historical” thought within their respective cultures
and epochs. For instance, in ancient Greece also scholars like Ephoros (d. 330
bce), Polybius (d. c. 118 bce) and Diodorus (d. 21 bce) were making efforts to
consider at least some outside experiences when writing about history.
Similar statements could be made about quite a number of Chinese histor-
ians during the Han period such as Ban Gu (d. 92 ce).13 The same is the case
with the subsequent dynasties – an important scholar to be mentioned in this
context is Cheng Hao (d. 1085), one of the most important thinkers during
the Song period who famously emphasized that the histories of different
countries follow specific timelines.14
A particular combination of “universal” historical scopes, geographic
depictions and ethnographic accounts was flourishing in parts of the Islamic
World. Already starting from the seventh and eighth centuries, many learned
travelers published accounts of the world that they had either seen them-
selves or had been informed of, for example by trusted couriers.15 Such texts
11 See for example Stephen W. Durrant, The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the
Writings of Sima Qian (Albany: State University of New York, 1995).
12 Interesting reflections on Sima Qian’s methodology: Grant, Hardy, “Can an ancient
Chinese historian contribute to modern Western theory? The multiple narratives of
Ssu-ma Ch’ien,” History and Theory 33 (1994), 20–38.
13 See Q. Edward Wang, “History, space, and ethnicity: The Chinese worldview,” Journal
of World History 10 (1999), 285–305.
14 For more details see Masayuki Sato, “Comparative ideas and chronology,” History and
Theory 30 (1991), 275–301.
15 S. Akbar Muhammad, “The image of Africans in Arabic literature: Some unpublished
manuscripts,” in John R. Wills (ed.), Islam and the Ideology of Slavery (London: F. Cass,
1985), pp. 47–74.
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could contain quite a lot of historical information, as in the case of the

Baghdad-born traveler Ali ibn al-Husayn al-Masudi (d. 956), who in one of
his works dealt with both pre-Islamic or non-Islamic world regions.16 Other
writings were based more on ethnographic descriptions but also contained
important historical references – an example is the Spanish Muslim Ibn
Jubayar’s (d. 1217) account of his pilgrimage to Mecca.17
Among a wealth of learned Islamic accounts of other world regions, it is
particularly the work of Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) that deserves special men-
tion.18 Unsurpassed during its own time and long after, the work of the
Tunisian-born thinker offered historical interpretations of areas ranging from
Sub-Saharan Africa to Persia. He went far beyond mere descriptive accounts,
for example by developing some cyclical theories of the rise and fall of great
powers. He furthermore reflected on patterns of society and trade, and did so
in ways that today are often interpreted as precursors to modern sociological
and economist traditions. While Ibn Khaldun developed theories of general
historical patterns, his work was still based on the idea that the Muslim
World was exemplary and unique.
Compared to such Islamic accounts of the world, the Christian genre
of universal histories was typically framed around even more immediate
religious worldviews. Christian universal histories were repeatedly writ-
ten in a spirit that sought to divide divine truth from heretical view-
points. They had their origins in the later Roman Empire where they
were famously represented by such scholars as Eusebius (d. 340) or
Orosius (d. 417). However, they also blossomed during the European
Middle Ages when they had such renowned representatives as Otto the
Bishop of Freising (d. 1158).19 They remained important until the eight-
eenth century and even after. Like many ancient Greek texts, Christian
universal histories often contained ethnographical descriptions of distant
peoples. Yet they typically followed biblical timelines with events such as
the creation, the deluge or the incarnation of Christ as the main modes of
periodization.
16 Tarif Khalidi, Islamic Historiography: The Histories of Mas’udi (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1975).
17 Ian R. Netton, “Basic structures and signs of alienation in the ‘Rihla’ of Ibn Jubayr,”
Journal of Arabic Literature 22 (1991), 21–37. _
18 Allen Fromherz, Ibn Khaldun: Life and Times (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2010).
19 Otto, Bishop of Freysing, The Two Cities: A Chronicle of Universal History to the Year 1146
AD (New York: Octagon, 1996).
60
World historiography during the

early modern period
Starting from the late fifteenth century, the European conquests began
having massive impacts on entire world regions, particularly the Americas
and the coastal regions of Sub-Saharan Africa. This also heavily influenced
conceptions of history and “world” in societies that were being colonized by
European powers. By contrast, in regions such as China or the Arabic World,
European influences on historical thinking remained far more limited, and
they did so until the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Yet European
expansionism was not the only transformation of power systems that proved
to have a strong influence on “world historical thought” in important
regions. For instance, Indian conceptions of the world were affected by the
Moghul conquests and the ensuing influx of Islamic literature.20
The growing information about an increasingly interdependent world
characterized by trans-continental flows of silver, spices and other commod-
ities was chiefly gathered by European agents. But it also left its mark outside
of Europe.21 For example, Jesuit annotated world maps, which contained
historical information, met such a degree of interest in early seventeenth-
century China that there were multiple editions within a year of their first
publication.22 A telling example are also the annals by the Franciscan-educated
Meso-American nobleman Chimalpahin who in his native Nahuatl language
recorded both local history as well as events from Europe to Japan.23 In
addition, important Ottoman schools, which emerged during the expansion
of the empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, incorporated some
newly obtainable facts about other parts of the world. For instance, already
during the 1500s some historically oriented works dealt with the Americas.24
In Europe, travelogues and learned accounts about distant lands and
peoples appeared and dramatically widened the amount of information
available on different parts of the world. An important example is Gonzalo
20 Daniel Woolf, A Global History of History: The Making of Clio’s Empire from Antiquity to
the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 178–229.
21 See for example Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993), vol. iv.
22 See for example Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese
History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999); and D. E. Mungello, The Great
Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
23 Serge Gruzinski, Les Quatre Parties du Monde: Histoire d’une Mondialisation (Paris:
Martinière, 2004).
24 Thomas D. Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of Tarih-i-Hind-i
Garbi and Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1990).
61
Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés’ Historia General y Natural de las Indias, which

was first published in 1535. Additional works include a history of China
written fifty years later by the Augustinian Juan Gonzáles de Mendoza,25
as well as the writings of Richard Hakluyt (d. 1616) and his students who
portrayed British explorations in different parts of the globe.26 These reports
were often highly constructed and written through decidedly Christian or
other European lenses. Yet at the same time they provided information
about other world regions and their cultural heritage that could hardly be
ignored by “world historical” scholarship.
The growing knowledge about different world regions fed into the epi-
stemological crises of European historiography.27 During the early modern
period, many societies experienced their own “culture wars” or “history
wars,” for example between religious and proto-secular narratives. In this
context, newly accessible non-European chronologies and historical records
gave the debates on the nature and purpose of historiography a very peculiar
spin. Especially Europe’s universal historical traditions were being challenged
through them: for instance, translations of Chinese, Japanese and Indian
chronologies ran counter to biblical modes of historical periodization.28 After
all, Chinese timelines, of which proven records seemed to exist, preceded
the assumed dates of events such as the deluge. This was obviously incom-
patible with the idea that such events had affected the entire world at the
same time. Still, many later universal historians did not abandon the idea of
global biblical timelines but instead chose to re-compute them. An important
example for a work of this kind is Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s Discourse of
Universal History (1681).
As part of a more general trend, however, the connotation of “universal
history”29 became more disentangled from its biblical meanings. Now the
25 Juan González de Mendoza, Historia des las Cosas Mas Notables, Ritos y Costumbres, del
Gran Reyno de la China (History of the Most Notable Things, Rites and Uses of the
Great Kingdom of China) (Rome: Grassi, 1585).
26 See Diogo R. Curto, “European historiography of the East,” in Rabasa, Sato, Tortar-
olo, and Woolf (eds.), Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. iii, pp. 536–55; and Kira
von Ostenfeld-Suske, “A new history for a ‘New World’: The first one hundred years
of Spanish historical writing,” in Rabasa, Sato, Tortarolo, and Woolf (eds.), Oxford
History of Historical Writing, vol. iii, pp. 556–74.
27 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “On world historians in the sixteenth century,” Representations
91 (2005), 26–57.
28 See Edwin J. van Kley, “Europe’s ‘discovery’ of China and the writing of world
history,” American Historical Review 76 (1971), 358–85.
29 Like “world history,” the term “universal history” also dates back to premodern times,
and both concepts never categorically differed from one another. “Universal history” is
62
term increasingly referred to works that covered most, if not all, parts of the
known world – no matter whether these works were based on Christian
timelines or not.30 Partially reflecting the growing specialization of area
expertise among scholars in most branches of historiography,31 the eight-
eenth century witnessed the publication of some prominent multi-authored
erudite universal histories. An example is the 65-volume Universal History that
was mainly edited by the Arabist George Sale between 1747 and 1768.
It was particularly during the Enlightenment period when world historical
reflections enjoyed an elevated standing among Europe’s intellectual circles.
Some of the most renowned thinkers of the time chose to engage in cultural
or civilizational comparisons in order to accentuate their own ideas. For
instance, Jean-Marie de Voltaire (d. 1778) or Christian Wolff (d. 1754) referred
to Jesuit and other reports from China in order to espouse their ideal of
political order without legal privileges for aristocrats and clergymen. An
interesting development during this period is the growing number of cultural
or civilizational comparisons. An example, which continues to be renowned
up until the present day, is Charles de Montesquieu’s (d. 1755) Spirit of the
Laws. The work is centered on the idea that climate has a strong influence on
forms of political, social and legal order.32 Other scholars focused on different
topics, for example Joseph de Guignes (d. 1800), who even compared
historiographical methods and traditions across cultural boundaries.
The rising presence of comparative scholarship should not lead us to
hurriedly celebrate Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, however. Thinkers like
Voltaire may have referred to outside cultures in order to accentuate their
critique of conditions at home. Yet at the same time they regarded European
culture as a uniquely enabling framework for human reason – and it was
reason that they appreciated more than any other human quality or talent.
Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Lord Kames (d. 1782), William
Robertson (d. 1793) or Adam Ferguson (d. 1816) tended to operate with even
more clearly defined conceptions of civilizational maturity when theorizing
about changes in political, social and economic systems. In most works, the
main narrative put European regions ahead of other civilizations, at least in
respects considered to be crucial for the progress of societies. At the same
no longer widely used in Anglophone publications but the expression remains rather
common in some other languages, including French.
30 Tamara Griggs, “Universal history from Counter-Reformation to Enlightenment,”
Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007), 219–47.
31 For the following see particularly Woolf, A Global History of History, pp. 281–343.
32 Charles de Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des Loix (Geneva: Barrillot & fils, 1748).
63
time, both Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and their counterparts in the rest
of Europe still regarded “civilization” chiefly as a pluralistic category. The
idea that every epoch and people was characterized by distinct principles and
hence could not be evaluated by universal criteria was particularly enunci-
ated by thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder (d. 1803).
During the 1600s and 1700s, European world historical scholarship cer-
tainly had no parallels in China, India or elsewhere in terms of the amount
and quality of information available about other world regions. Yet at the
same time, it would be erroneous to celebrate historical scholarship during
the European Enlightenment as the global cradle of critical inquiry and multi-
perspectivity. As discussed, most world historical works coming out of the
European Enlightenment carried more belief in European exceptionalism
than is often assumed. Furthermore, around the same time other parts of the
world also experienced intellectual movements that criticized homemade
notions of cultural superiority. For instance, during the late Ming dynasty
some Buddhist texts argued that India ought to be understood as the “Middle
Kingdom” rather than China.33
The professionalization of historical scholarship

and world historical ideas
World historical narratives depicting Europe as a self-enveloping culture of
rationality became even more pronounced and widely shared during the
nineteenth century. Moreover, they now started gaining more ground out-
side of the West. Eurocentric interpretations of the world’s past were
conditioned by the present: the global frameworks of a century in which
much of the planet’s landmass was subjugated under European rule. During
the 1800s and early 1900s it was particularly the spread of history education
systems and university-based departments that helped to translate Eurocen-
tric world orders into commonly accepted ways of world historical thinking.
In an intricate and drawn-out process, history departments with professors
employed as civil officials were being established, first in parts of Europe and
North America and subsequently in other world regions.34
33 See for example Marsha Smith Weidner (ed.), Cultural Intersections in Later Chinese
Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001).
34 See for example Gabriele Lingelbach, “The institutionalization and professionalization
of historiography in Europe and the United States,” in Macintyre, Maiguashca, and Pók
(eds.), Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. iv, pp. 78–96.
64
Modern historical scholarship around the world came to be characterized

by similar criteria for obtaining degrees such as the doctorate, and it culti-
vated identical tools such as the use of the footnote. Furthermore, societies
with highly divergent epistemological traditions developed similar definitions
of what was acceptable into the canon of academic historiography.35 There
was a growing demand for Western-style scholarship that, however, did not
lead to a complete homogenization of historical thinking across the globe.
Rather, locally specific traditions continued to season patterns and paradigms
even within new forms of university-based historical scholarship.
Also in the field of historiography, the emerging global academic system
did not operate on the logics of a flat world. Rather, the power patterns of a
colonial or imperialist world order left a deep imprint on the professional
milieu of academic historians, which was nationally divided but at the same
time transnationally entangled.36 In other words, from its very beginnings the
global system of academic historiography, the single national units were not
horizontally aligned. As a global network of knowledge, academic historiog-
raphy was characterized by significant hierarchies that reflected nineteenth-
and twentieth-century Western dominance. In this pattern, the position of
central societies and peripheral ones became clearly visible in daily academic
practice. For example, historians in societies such as Germany, France, Great
Britain or the United States only needed to be familiar with scholarship in
some supposedly “advanced” key societies in the West. By contrast, their
colleagues in other parts of the world, ranging from Chile to Japan, could
hardly build a career as historians without even considering (either through
translations or through reading relevant texts in English) the most relevant
literature produced in the West.37
These hierarchical sociologies of knowledge also impacted the ways in
which world historical narratives developed in different societies around the
globe. In Europe, the tendency to narrate the history of the world while
assuming the privileged position of a higher civilization got even more
accentuated during the 1800s. Moreover, the notion that European learning
was equipped with unique amounts of information about other cultures
35 Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997).
36 Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and
Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
37 For more details see Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History:
Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), Chapter 1.
65
added further stimulus to the idea that as a global powerhouse, the continent
was uniquely equipped with the potential to develop master narratives for
the rest of the world. Whereas many Enlightenment thinkers had at least
professed the ideals of civilizational learning, the most influential world
historical works of the nineteenth century were written from the posture
of a higher civilization. The readiness to accept alternative cultural perspec-
tives as viable options decisively declined.
There was also a shrinking interest in scholarship that was trying to relate
Western history to other cultural experiences in a rather equal manner.
Many of Europe’s most influential thinkers now envisioned history ultim-
ately as a progressive force that was no longer driven by providence but by
civilizational achievements. An important example is the positivism of
Auguste Comte (d. 1857), who regarded evolvement toward higher forms
of sociopolitical order as one of the main principles of history. His positivism
was based on the idea that scientific knowledge, which was seen as universal
and basically without cultural attributes, was a key to achieving progress.38
Needless to say, he regarded parts of Europe as the cradle of scientism, which
seemed to elevate their history above any other cultural experience.
In addition, historical interpretations by representatives of German ideal-
ism, most notably Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (d. 1831), were committed
to the idea of human progress but operated on different assumptions. Hegel
doubted the existence of absolute truths and rather assumed that all ideas
were closely interconnected with their own historical contexts. According to
him, historical interpretations progressed with the self-realization of human
kind at large. For Hegel this meant that only at the end of human progress,
which he understood as a self-enveloping process of individual and collective
freedom, would it be possible to gain a holistic perspective of the meaning of
history. In Hegel’s eyes, it was European societies, most notably Prussia,
which had come close to establishing the societal and political conditions of
human freedom. His verdict on other civilizations was that they were either,
like Africa, without any kind of historical progress or, as in the case of China,
stuck in rather early stages of it.
Such crude Eurocentrism was by no means limited to positivism and
German idealism but also dominated many other nineteenth-century
38 For the rise of scientism and the nation state paradigm in Western and East Asian
historiography see for example George G. Iggers, Q. Edward Wang, and Supriya
Mukherjee, A Global History of Modern Historiography (Harlow: Pearson Longman,
2008), pp. 117–56.
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philosophical schools, including Marxism.39 Even Max Weber’s civilizational

comparisons, which stemmed from very different academic traditions, were
chiefly based on the hypothesis that in contrast to all other cultures, Europe
had given birth to a civilization with uniquely rational and hence universaliz-
able character traits.40 While Weber certainly was not a blind advocate of
progress, his famous introduction to The Sociology of World Religions is
centered on a cascade of questions about what character traits of European
civilization were lacking elsewhere in the world.41
Certainly, also in the West there were counter-currents to this Eurocentric
mainstream. Yet at the same time, nineteenth-century European cultural iden-
tities and visions of world order not only manifested themselves through chang-
ing world historical narratives. They also grew visible through the changing
position of world history within the guildhalls of historians. Universal history
or world history as a genre itself became far more marginalized in Europe than
it had been before. As an overall trend, knowledge about world regions outside
of the West was less and less regarded as belonging to the standard portfolio
of modern education. Generally speaking, the rest of the world was seen as too
far behind the Western engine to be seriously studied as a guide or reference.
Around the same time, the study of world regions such as China or India was
segregated into special fields like sinology or indology, which were largely
philologically oriented and primarily focused on the premodern period.42
In the newly established history departments it was the new national
histories that were commonly regarded as defining the rhythm of the field.
In addition to other intellectual transformations this meant that macroscopic
cultural and social comparisons declined both in number and impact. Within
this changing intellectual climate, world historical accounts continued being
written but were often regarded as emerging from a fading genre. Moreover,
many world histories now tended to brush over territories where national
states had not yet been established. This neglect of large swaths of Africa,
Central Asia and other parts of the world reflected the now common idea
that the nation state constituted the highest form of political order.
39 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
40 See W. Schluchter, The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
41 M. R. Naffrisi, “Reframing Orientalism: Weber and Islam,” Economy and Society 27
(1998), 97–118.
42 Immanuel Wallerstein, et al. (eds.), Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian
Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1996).
67
While (or after) this was happening in Europe, a related trend took place in a
growing number of societies elsewhere. The outcome of this transformation
did, however, often point in a very different direction. In many societies, ranging
from the Ottoman Empire to China and from India to Japan, “world history”
started gaining a more prominent standing rather than declining in importance.
It did so in conjunction with the growing appeal of national historiography and
new, scientific methodologies. The new importance of world history in a good
number of countries outside of the West reflected an important intellectual
transformation spreading across several influential opinion camps: Western
powers were often not only regarded as almost worldwide hegemons but also
as the source of ideas that were central for modernization efforts. As part of the
same trend, a large number of historical works written on all continents did
either explicitly or implicitly endorse the idea that Europe was a uniquely
dynamic civilization whose rationalism, dynamism and opportunities for free-
dom carried a high potential for the other parts of the world.43 Through studying
the example of advanced societies many historians between Latin America and
Southeast Asia hoped to gain knowledge that they regarded as immediately
relevant for their own societies’ modernization drives.44
As a consequence, the history of Europe received much attention at both
the levels of research universities and the general education system. In
numerous states history education developed a dual concentration, focus-
ing on national or regional history on the one side, and Western history on
the other side. The latter was often institutionalized as “world history.” For
instance, historiography under the Tanzimat reforms in the late Ottoman
Empire, treated “Europe” as an important reference space.45 Also the
efforts toward gaining new conceptions of history in Japan were heading
in similar directions, even though in this case Rankean influence was more
accentuated than in Turkey.46 At the same time, the Japanese education
system put great emphasis on Western history or “world history” in addi-
tion to national history. Likewise, in China after the revolution of 1911 West-
ern history became part of the middle school and, a little later, of university
43 For more details see Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History, Chapter 1.
44 See for example Woolf, A Global History of History, pp. 399–454.
45 Ercüment Kuran, “Ottoman historiography of the Tanzimat period,” in Bernard Lewis
and P. M. Holt (eds.), Historians of the Middle East (London: Oxford University Press,
1962), pp. 422–9.
46 See Masayuki Sato, “Historiographical encounters: The Chinese and Western trad-
itions in turn-of-the-century Japan,” Storia della Storiografia 19 (1991), 13–21.
68
curricula47 – which reflected a common tendency to conceptualize the

pathways of Western Europe and the Atlantic as the epicenter of a global
transformation.48
Outside of the West, this triumph of Western-oriented national history
could occur in both independent countries and under colonial conditions. In
both types of situations, parts of the local elites displayed a strong interest in
historiographical concepts and methodologies of Western provenance.49
They played a strong role in nation-building programs of independent or
newly decolonized societies ranging from Japan to Egypt. But also under
colonial rule the cultures of historiography could acquire a dual character of
this kind. Here historical thinking was often forced onto the binary lines of
national/local history on the one side and the history of the colonizer or
Europe at large on the other side. An illustrative critique of a colonial history
education system was articulated by the Caribbean historian and first prime
minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams (d. 1981).50
Rivaling schools during the twentieth century

The Eurocentric orientation of historiographical cultures in general and
world history in particular continued during much of the twentieth century.
Within a global constellation that clearly differentiated between “advanced”
and “backward” societies, it is small wonder that rather Eurocentric master
narratives of world history remained strong in different societies and lan-
guages. In many history education systems, “world historical” scholarship
often boiled down to the study of advanced societies, most notably Western
powers. No matter whether in Africa, in South Asia, East Asia or elsewhere:
voluminous works narrated the history of the world chiefly as the rise of
the West.
The important position of Western history, which was often labeled as
“world history,” is evidenced by the very fact that some of the most influen-
tial minds behind nation formation efforts published their own reflections on
Western and world history. Examples across various generations range from
47 See Q. Edward Wang, “Between myth and history: The construction of a national past
in modern East Asia,” in Stefan Berger (ed.), Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 126–54.
48 See Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern
China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
49 Stefan Berger, “Introduction: Towards a global history of national historiographies,” in
Berger (ed.), Writing the Nation, pp. 1–29.
50 Eric Williams, Education in the British West Indies (Port of Spain: Guardian, 1946).
69
the Japanese reformer Fukuzawa Yukichi (d. 1901) to the Chinese scholar and
public intellectual Liang Qichao (d. 1929) and the Indian scholar and states-
man Jawaharlal Nehru (d. 1964). Nehru’s famed Glimpses of World History,
written in prison during the colonial period, was openly critical of Western
imperialism and not driven by the concern that India needed to emulate
Western experiences. Yet at the same time the text did not abandon the idea
that as a civilization, Europe’s rise carried great cultural, political and intel-
lectual implications for societies in other parts of the world.51
Eurocentric conceptions of world history could (and still can) be observed
within rather different political contexts. For instance, in line with Marxist
traditions world history was granted a strong institutional presence in a
rather wide spectrum of Communist countries. There were certainly signifi-
cant differences between the cultures of historiography in single socialist
societies, and yet among them the field of world history shared many
elements in common. The field was typically dominated by nation-centered
perspectives and teleological outlooks that ascribed European history a key
role in international developments that would supposedly culminate in a
global communism. At certain times, historians in countries like the Soviet
Union or the People’s Republic of China had quite some leeway to maneuver
around the conceptual blocks of historical materialism. Yet as a general
tendency, world historical works produced in Communist countries were
framed around Marxist-Leninist theories and timelines that had been derived
from the study of European history. For example, during the Mao period
entire cohorts of Chinese historians were seeking to relate the Chinese and
global past to concepts such as “bourgeoisie” and “feudalism” even though
these had been derived from the European context.52 Moreover, Chinese
world historical works tended to focus on the history of the West and the
Soviet Union, thereby marginalizing other parts of the world.
Certainly, local factors, ranging from institutional settings to political
conditions and from intellectual traditions to funding structures, continued
to season national and world history in different countries and world regions.
Moreover, there were prominent counter-movements to this overarching
51 Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to His Daughter,
Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People (London:
Lindsay Drummond Limited, 1939). Gandhi was one of the few Indian independence
leaders who expressed great concern over the new conceptions of history.
52 See for example Q. Edward Wang, “Encountering the world: China and its other(s) in
historical narratives, 1949–89,” Journal of World History 14 (2003), 327–58.
70
trend.53 For instance, during the interwar period several European societies
witnessed the publication of very well-known works seeking to leave nation-
and Europe-centered perspectives behind. An example is Oswald Spengler’s
(d. 1936) Decline of the West, which was first published in German between
1918 and 1922.54 The work challenged the notion of universal science and, as
an alternative, it was framed around the idea of rather independent civiliza-
tional cycles. Within that structure, Spengler portrayed the trajectories of
Western modernity as the forces of a civilizational downward movement –
which gained him much fame in conservative circles across Europe.
Whereas Spengler had openly positioned himself against the historio-
graphical establishment at universities, another famous world historian of
the time, Arnold J. Toynbee (d. 1975), operated from the firm basis of various
British institutions of higher learning. In his magnum opus, A Study of
History, published in twelve volumes between 1934 and 1961, Toynbee
sought to grasp the history of humankind and global interactions while
carefully avoiding Western triumphalist narratives. Toynbee focused on
cultural and spiritual factors (rather than political and materialist patterns)
as the driving forces of history. Not convinced by national perspectives,
civilizations were his preferred main containers when thinking about
history on a worldwide scale.
Also in other parts of the world, there were numerous voices criticizing
Eurocentric teleologies. For example, transnational groups such as the
Négritude Movement openly articulated their doubts about the promises
of materialism, scientism and other “white mythologies.”55 Moreover, quite
a number of intellectuals in Asia at least partly directed their critique
of Western epistemologies against interpretations of Europe as the cradle
of worldwide progress.56 Whereas some prominent historians like the
aforementioned Eric Williams and the late Liang Qichao partook in intel-
lectual movements of this kind, history departments in many countries
remained hardly affected by such critical interventions.
53 See for example Jürgen Osterhammel, “World history,” in Axel Schneider and Daniel
Woolf (eds.), The Oxford History of Historical Writing (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012), vol. v, pp. 93–112.
54 The English edition was published in 1926. The original German title is Der Untergang
des Abendlandes.
55 Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York:
Routledge, 1990).
56 Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic
and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
71
Similarly, historians like Toynbee and Spengler found little resonance

within the historians’ guildhalls in Europe and the United States. Certainly,
especially after the Second World War there were some important examples
for world historical works seeking to explore new horizons. Some of them
even gained considerable fame, for example The Rise of the West by William
McNeill, who taught at the University of Chicago and had worked with
Arnold Toynbee.57 In this work, McNeill did not seek to provide a triumph-
ant account of North Atlantic societies but rather sought to relativize the era
of Western dominance by placing it into wider world historical contexts. He
emphasized that prior to the sixteenth century, the continental nexus of
Eurasia and Africa had been characterized by other large-scale power systems
that had not been centered on Europe. McNeill actually left the question
open whether other global power constellations beyond Western hegemony
would emerge in the future.
Yet despite the rather enthusiastic reception of McNeill’s work, world
history in the United States long remained a field that had its institutional
basis in small colleges. Likewise, it did not play a more pronounced role in
Europe. Arguably the most active historical research field, which already at a
rather early stage paid much attention to global connections and entangle-
ments, was economic history. For example, Immanuel Wallerstein’s The
Modern World System, the first volume of which appeared in 1974,58 was
widely influential among economic historians. Departing from earlier theor-
etical schools, Wallerstein provided an elaborate study of what he saw as the
emergence of a geographically expanding economic system based on
unequal exchanges. Within this system, entire countries and world regions
figured as centers while others took a peripheral or semiperipheral status.
According to Wallerstein, the world system’s patterns largely determined
factors such as the global distribution of wealth and the topographies of free
and unfree labor.59
As a general tendency, however, historiography in most parts of the world
remained remarkably conservative in the sense that the vast majority of its
practitioners stuck to national frameworks and in their own research did not
57 William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1963).
58 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 4 vols. (New York: Academic Press,
2011).
59 For a general overview of global economic history during the Cold War and after see
Peer Vries, “Global economic history: A survey,” in Schneider and Woolf (eds.), The
Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. v, pp. 113–35.
72
systematically seek to challenge Eurocentric paradigms. It was only around

the end of the Cold War that one could observe a growing interest in themes
like global connections and cross-regional entanglements. This was much
later than the beginnings of similar developments in other academic fields
like, for instance, sociology or anthropology. This movement within histori-
ography arguably occurred decades after new global connections had
become blatantly visible in economic, cultural and social life. For this reason,
the historian Akira Iriye assumes that toward the end of the Cold War, one
could actually observe “historians falling behind history.”60
Developments since the 1990s

Since the late 1980s or 1990s there has been a sharp increase in scholarship
seeking to explore cross-regional connections, flows and entanglements. As a
consequence of recent developments, transnational and world historical
scholarship is no longer regarded as a marginal exception to a nation-
centered disciplinary reality. Quite to the contrary, bordercrossing studies
are frequently seen as important centers of innovation. The underlying
change in scholarly predilections took place as a diffuse process within most
branches of historiography, ranging from cultural history to political his-
tory,61 and no area of research figured as a clear epicenter. To put it in a
different way, transnational and world historical research has flourished in
many different branches of historiography, ranging from economic history to
cultural history and from environmental history to labor history.
In contrast to the main body of world historical scholarship during the
Cold War and before, much of the more recent literature emerges from
primary source-based projects. Up until the 1980s, large-scale historical
accounts, textbooks and trade books constituted the core of the field. Cer-
tainly, great works narrating the history of the world or the global history of
entire centuries continue being written but in contrast to the Cold War
period and before, these works can now draw on a rich body of research
literature that explores single topics and themes from global and
60 Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present and Future (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 19.
61 In addition to books mentioned above the following works provide accounts of this
research trend, Jerry H. Bentley, Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholar-
ship (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1996), vol. xiv; Sebastian
Conrad, Globalgeschichte: Eine Einführung (Global History: An Introduction) (Munich: C.
H. Beck, 2013); and Manning, Navigating World History.
73
transnational perspectives.62 As a general trend, the narrative frameworks of

such macroscopic works have become more complex, and an increasing
number of authors now pay more attention to topics like non-Western forms
of global agency.
In many regards, this development has come to challenge some of the
disciplinary cultures and structures that had long supported the mental maps
of historiography. An increasing number of scholars are now pursuing topics
that had long been rather neglected due to the institutional set-ups of history
departments. For example, more and more historians have grown interested
in the historical relations between South Asia and East Asia, or between Latin
American and African regions. For a long time, not much attention had been
paid to connections of this kind. Certainly, fields like East Asian history or
South Asian history had not been completely ignoring past interactions
between their region and the rest of the world. But scholars chiefly concen-
trated on entanglements with the West, thereby marginalizing the multifari-
ous historical interactions between East Asia, South Asia and other regions.
For instance, modern historiography paid only comparatively scant attention
to the partly dense interactions between societies such as China and India.
One of the main reasons underlying this problematic pattern is that hardly
any historian of East Asia (including scholars who were based in countries
like China, Japan or Korea) had received significant training about an add-
itional world region outside of the West. This situation has not changed
dramatically but a growing number of historians now feel willing and able to
bridge the gaps created by area-specific expertise.
The question has been raised whether this new research movement can still
be called “world history” or whether other field designations need to be found.63
After all, “world history” long primarily stood for grand perspectives that were
often structured around Eurocentric master narratives. For this reason, quite a
number of scholars prefer the term “global history” as a marker for the new
research trends unfolding since the end of the Cold War. Also other concepts
such as “transnational history” or “entangled histories” have appeared on the
62 Examples of the wealth of new macroscopic studies, published in various languages

and commonly seeking to decenter world historical narratives, are C. A. Bayly, The
Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2004); Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19.
Jahrhunderts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009). The English translation is “The Transform-
ation of the World: A History of the 19th Century.” Shirong Qi and Yujin Wu (eds.),
Shijie shi (World History), 3 vols. (Beijing: Gaodeng jiaoyu chubanshe, 1994).
63 For example Bruce Mazlish, “Terms,” in Hughes-Warrington (ed.), Palgrave Advances
in World Histories, pp. 18–43.
74
scene. However, the expression “world history” has also changed its connota-
tions and now points to a rather vibrant and diverse community of approaches
that have departed widely from the earlier contours of the field. Hence it is
small wonder that many researchers have come to use terms such as “global
history” and “world history” as interchangeable with one another. In essence,
this means that a categorical distinction between them is no longer possible.
A more special case is big history, which investigates structures, patterns and
changes from the Big Bang up until the present day, thereby linking historical
inquiry with themes studied primarily by the natural sciences.64
It is very important to note that neologisms like “transnational history” or
“global history” have found their ways into many languages, ranging from
Spanish to Japanese. In fact, the growth of new forms of bordercrossing
scholarship can be observed among historians in many societies around the
world.65 It would certainly be misleading to assume that the new interest in
historical connections and translocal themes originated in the West, and that
from there it spread to the rest. The patterns and rhythms of this rather
young academic trend are in fact far more complex than any model based on
the idea of Western diffusionism could possibly grasp.66 Certainly, the
growing significance of global and world history has been related to events
in global time, particularly the end of the Cold War divides and the emerging
facets of globalization. Yet in every place it has also been impacted by
transformations in local time, that is, political, societal, institutional and other
transformations that impacted historiographical cultures as well.
Despite all intensifying academic exchanges, world historical scholarship has
not become identical all over the world. Local, regional or national elements
still continue to season the field because they have an effect on the narratives,
methodologies and debates among scholars. For example, academic funding
structures, the patterns of academic systems, opinion climates, intellectual
traditions and modes of historical memory all have an influence on the field
of world history. In that sense, current world historical research and teaching
looks different in societies such as Japan, India, France or Canada. This is not
to say that each of these academic communities operates primarily within
64 See for example David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004).
65 Examples can be found in Patrick Manning (ed.), Global Practice in World History:
Advances Worldwide (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2008); and Douglas
Northrup (ed.), A Companion to World History (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
66 For more details (also of the following paragraphs) see Sachsenmaier, Global Perspec-
tives on Global History.
75
isolated national communities; also one should not assume that there are
monolithic national or cultural traditions of world historical scholarship. The
local specificities of current world historical research are much more subtle,
and they are enmeshed with an increasingly pluralistic and transnationally
entangled landscape of bordercrossing historical studies.
In some contexts, important social changes and political transformations
could decisively influence the cultures of academic histories in general and
world history in particular. For example, in the United States the social
revolutions, which brought an unprecedented ethnic diversity to university
faculty and student bodies, had a strong impact on the ways in which the
later waves of historiography would unfold.67 Partly influenced by the
aftershocks of the civil rights movement, academic history witnessed particu-
larly strong challenges to concepts such as “Western civilization” and “pro-
gress” during the 1970s and 1980s. A growing number of scholars started
seeing these and other terms as too loaded with power interests to be useful
as analytical tools for the historian’s workshop.
This concern about hegemonic discourses, which stemmed from America’s
internal “history wars,” also had a bearing on the rather large community of
scholars (due to Cold War funding for the area studies) specializing in world
regions outside of the West. For example, many prominent historians came to
problematize the Eurocentric categories with which different world regions
such as China, India or the Middle East were being assessed and analyzed.68 This
opinion climate, which gave philosophical movements such as postmodernism
or postcolonialism a comparatively strong stance in US historiography, also left
some marks on the more recent literature in transnational and world history.
For instance, the vast majority of scholars in these fields are now reluctant to use
concepts such as “modernity” as methodological devices or descriptive terms.
In China, concepts of this kind play a much stronger role, even though
there is also a debate about the problem of Eurocentric categories and
concepts. Here the institutional contexts for the recent rise of bordercrossing
research were rather different from those in the United States. After all, for
many decades world history has already had a strong presence in most Chinese
history departments as well as in the overall education system. Nevertheless,
an increasing number of historians started actively searching for alternatives to
67 See for example Thomas Bender, “Politics, intellect, and the American university,
1945–1995,” Daedalus 1261 (1997), 1–38.
68 See Joyce Applebee, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995).
76
well-established historiographical cultures and structures. Most notably, a

wealth of transnational studies is now seeking to overcome the institutional
divides between Chinese history and world history, which have existed for
decades.69 In a related step, there have been sustained efforts to move away
from Europe-centered narratives – for instance by reflecting upon the possibil-
ity of specifically Chinese perspectives of world history. Nevertheless, com-
pared to their US-American counterparts the majority of Chinese world and
global historians are much more hesitant to deconstruct concepts such as
“modernization” when describing more recent processes of change; neither
is there a strong wave challenging the idea of the nation as a core container of
the past. Academic works trying to find new ways of thinking about the world
while at the same time leaving the idea of a national past rather intact are
certainly endorsed by the Chinese state. Yet recent generational experiences
also make numerous Chinese scholars more prone to regard global and
national perspectives not as contradictory with one another. It would certainly
be very problematic to suppose that Chinese scholarship is just “lagging
behind” and will naturally gravitate toward the Western mainstream.
There are strong reasons to assume that such local differences in world
historical scholarship are there to stay. Despite this rather obvious fact, they
have not been sufficiently debated among world and global historians yet. Even
further than that, theoretical debates within the field have not sufficiently
focused on changing the global landscapes of academic life in general historiog-
raphy in particular. However, doing so would be a decisive step in the direction
of establishing the bases for more balanced scholarly exchanges between world
historians from different parts of the globe.70 Many of the divisions and power
gaps, which characterized the global academic system since its inception during
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, remain intact today. Needless to
say, this hierarchical international pattern certainly is an obstacle to developing
the field of world history into further, promising directions.
Given this situation, it should now be a primary task of this generation
of global historians to put different scholarly traditions into more sustained
dialogues with one another. This is particularly the case with scholarly
communities from countries whose academic systems have, up until the
present day, been rather detached from one another. Especially during the
69 See for example Luo Xu, “Reconstructing world history in the People’s Republic of
China since the 1980s,” Journal of World History 18 (2007), 235–50.
70 Dominic Sachsenmaier, “World history as ecumenical history?,” Journal of World
History 18 (2007), 433–62.
77
past few decades, it was particularly Anglo-American universities that played

the role of global academic transaction hubs. A more pluralistic landscape of
such hubs and, by implication, more decentered networks of collaboration
around the world still remain largely a project for the future, even though
important steps heading in this direction have already been taken. Yet if
scholarship fails to create new sociologies of knowledge in the age of the
internet and comparatively cheap long-distance travel, it will also fall short of
its potentials for academic innovation.
Increasing levels of communication among historians from various world
regions can produce more than mere cross-fertilizations between different
research approaches. They can trigger wider debates on key concepts, epis-
temological assumptions and world-views that necessarily frame any attempt
at thinking about history on a global scale. Exchanges reaching to the very
depths of our current historiographical cultures can bring some of the excite-
ment back to a discipline whose intellectual fervor has somewhat suffered
from the logics of academic over-professionalization. The field may even come
to play important, albeit still ill-defined new public roles, particularly in
dialogues with global institutions and other civil society agents.
Certainly, world historians cannot and should not be the manufacturers of
new historical identities, be they global or regional. Unlike historians during
the age of nation formation, world historians will not have a political might
behind them rolling out historical ideas through education systems. But this
lack of political structures throwing their full weight of support behind the
study of world history is also a huge opportunity since it will grant more space
to visions of the past that run counter to the logics of political establishments
and economic power-holders. The precondition for such interventions, how-
ever, is that transnational dialogues and collaboration among world historians
and like-minded scholars are being further intensified.
Certainly, as already mentioned in the introduction, academic historiog-
raphy cannot hope to function as the figurehead of new forms of global
concern and transnational consciousness. After all, historical visions are
being disseminated to countless people through a wide spectrum of forums.
Particularly the mass media, ranging from newspapers to movies and from
internet clips to cartoons, have a strong effect on popular understandings of
national as well as world historical events.71 For instance, they influence the
71 Serap Özer and Gökçe Ergün, “Social representation of events in world history:
Crosscultural consensus or Western discourse? How Turkish students view events in
world history,” International Journal of Psychology 48 (2012), 574–82.
78
main categories and concepts with which a large number of people think about
world history, and they popularize ideas of which regions played a central role
in the global past. The same is the case with religious institutions that often
disseminate their own historical interpretations to their own followers.
Despite its limited impacts, university-based historical scholarship has a
strong influence on general education systems as well as, to a certain extent,
on the media. Yet in the future, world history and global history can only
hope to affect these spheres if they further actualize the enormous potentials
of historiography as a global professional field. The very fact that there are
trained historians based in almost all countries of the world has not been
translated into a significant worldwide community of letters because the
current academic system is still widely based on the same national divisions
and international hierarchies as before. Changing those can mean a decisive
step ahead in the trajectories of world historical thinking, writing – and the
deeper concerns that should be driving both.
further reading
Primary source materials
de Mendoza, Juan González, Historia des las Cosas Mas Notables, Ritos y Costumbres, del Gran
Reyno de la China (History of the Most Notable Things, Rites and Uses of the Great
Kingdom of China), Rome: Grassi, 1585.
de Montesquieu, Charles, De l’Esprit des Loix, Geneva: Barrillot & fils, 1748.
Nehru, Jawaharlal, Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to His Daughter, Written
in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People, London:
Lindsay Drummond Limited, 1939.
Otto, Bishop of Freysing, The Two Cities: A Chronicle of Universal History to the Year 1146 AD,
New York: Octagon, 1996.
Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West, 2 vols., London: Allen & Unwin, 1926.
Williams, Eric, Education in the British West Indies, Port of Spain: Guardian, 1946.
Secondary source materials

Applebee, Joyce, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History, New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995.
Appleby, R. Scott, “History in the fundamentalist imagination,” Journal of American History
89 (2002), 498–511.
Aydin, Cemil, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic
and Pan-Asian Thought, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Bayly, C. A., The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons,
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
79
Bender, Thomas, “Politics, intellect, and the American university, 1945–1995,” Daedalus
1261 (1997), 1–38.
Rethinking American History in a Global Age, Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002.
Benin, Isidore O., Once Upon a Kingdom: Myth, Hegemony and Identity, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1998.
Bentley, Jerry H., “Myths, wagers, and some moral implications of world history,” Journal
of World History 16 (2005), 51–82.
Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholarship, Washington, D.C.: American
Historical Association, 1996, vol. xiv.
Berger, Stefan, “Introduction: Towards a global history of national historiographies,” in
Stefan Berger (ed.), Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007, pp. 1–29.
Burke, Peter, “History, myth and fiction: Doubts and debates,” in José Rabasa, Masayuki
Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo, and Daniel Woolf (eds.), The Oxford History of Historical
Writing, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, vol. iii, pp. 261–81.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Christian, David, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004.
“Scales,” in Marnie Hughes-Warrington (ed.), Palgrave Advances in World History,
London: Palgrave, 2006, pp. 64–89.
Conrad, Sebastian, Globalgeschichte: Eine Einführung (Global History: An Introduction),
Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013.
Conrad, Sebastian, and Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds.), Conceptions of World Order: Global
Moments and Movements, 1880s-1930s, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Curto, Diogo R., “European historiography of the East,” in José Rabasa, Masayuki Sato,
Edoardo Tortarolo, and Daniel Woolf (eds.), The Oxford History of Historical Writing,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, vol. iii, pp. 536–55.
Duara, Prasenjit, The Global and Regional in China’s Nation Formation, New York: Routle-
dge, 2009.
Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995.
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3

The evolution of world histories

Trajectories outside of academia

unambiguously Islamic or biblical perspectives, sometimes even demonizing

Early written traditions

Similar statements could be made about the massive, 130-chapter-long work

could contain quite a lot of historical information, as in the case of the

World historiography during the

Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés’ Historia General y Natural de las Indias, which

The professionalization of historical scholarship

Modern historical scholarship around the world came to be characterized

philosophical schools, including Marxism.39 Even Max Weber’s civilizational

39 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

curricula47 – which reﬂected a common tendency to conceptualize the

Rivaling schools during the twentieth century

Similarly, historians like Toynbee and Spengler found little resonance

systematically seek to challenge Eurocentric paradigms. It was only around

Developments since the 1990s

transnational perspectives.62 As a general trend, the narrative frameworks of

62 Examples of the wealth of new macroscopic studies, published in various languages

well-established historiographical cultures and structures. Most notably, a

past few decades, it was particularly Anglo-American universities that played

Secondary source materials

Griggs, Tamara, “Universal history from Counter-Reformation to Enlightenment,”

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