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Now that global history has become an established genre, it is high time that historiography itself should be analysed from a global perspective. Reference works by many hands provide a useful point of departure, but the work under review is the first coherent global synthesis of history-writing. Georg Iggers is a leading and long-standing authority on the Western historical tradition; Q. Edward Wang and Supriya Mukherjee contribute their expertise on China and South Asia respectively. The resulting narrative is seamless and well organized. The initial survey of non-Western history-writing, extending from the dynastic histories of China and Japan to the imperial historiography of the Ottoman empire, is masterly. By emphasizing the evidential modes of learning already established within these societies before their exposure to the influence of European historiography, the authors give an intelligible account of the intellectual syncretism that characterized the Eastern development of the historical profession. However, the book is harder going than it might have been. Little impression can be gained of the character of the many historiographies described because hardly any passages of actual history-writing (as opposed to programmatic statements) are reproduced: a few well-chosen extracts would have brought vitality to the somewhat lifeless summaries of national schools of historiography. But this is a formidable work of scholarship, whose bibliography and references are an achievement in themselves. It is to be welcomed as a genuine attempt to see historiography in a...