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Book Review
| Writing World History, 1800–2000. Edited by BENEDIKT STUCHTEY and ECKHARDT FUCHS. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 367 + viii pp. $99.00.
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One would think that a volume with the title Writing World History, 1800–2000 would reveal a level of thinking about world history that stretched back further than normally thought. Here we might expect, if not the "New World History," at least useful discussions of figures such as Johann Gottfried von Herder, G. W. F. Hegel perhaps, and certainly some attention to Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Fernand Braudel, Geoffrey Barraclough, and other pioneers. In that expectation, the reader would not be disappointed. There are frequent discussions of these and other predecessors that remind us that our subdiscipline is not entirely new. We meet here discussions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Weltgeschichte, histoire universale, and histoire générale that extend the provenance and purview of world history. This is a strength of the volume. |
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The fourteen essays gathered here originated as papers presented at a conference sponsored by the German Historical Institute of London in 2000. The goal of the conference was to explore various traditions of world history throughout the world during the last two hundred years. Like most published conference proceedings, the essays are of uneven value, however. There are contributions that will definitely interest world historians, notably those by Jerry Bentley, Patrick O'Brien, and Michael Adas, but many of the essays will disappoint, in part because they were not written by world historians. |
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