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A Global History of Modern Historiography. By GEORG G. IGGERS and Q. EDWARD WANG with contributions from supriya mukherjee. Harlow, England: Pearson Education, 2008. 448 pp. $48.00 (paper).
This book deals with the transformations of historical writing in the world from the late eighteenth century until about 2007. Its main argument is that the history of historiography should no longer be studied with a focus on the West and on different nation-states but from a global and comparative perspective. This takes into account the transcultural exchange across different areas of the world over the last two and a half centuries, which was driven by processes of globalization, Westernization, and modernization. The book analyzes interactions of historical thinking and writing between the West and other regions of the world, most notably East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. Especially, but not exclusively, it thereby focuses on the dissemination, adoption, and adaptation of methods and approaches developed in Western countries in non-Western areas of the world.
Although lacking a proper conclusion summarizing the book's main findings, the book argues for a globalization of historical studies since the late eighteenth century. Until then, relatively separate traditions of historiography existed in the West, the Middle East, India, and East and Southeast Asia. Later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, academic and nationalist historiographies developed in many countries of the world, first mainly in the West, and...