C. A. Bayly - Remaking the Modern World 1900--2015: Global Connections and Comparisons

The Blackwell History of the World

General Editor: R. I. Moore

This edition first published 2018

2018 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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ISBN 9781405187152 (hardback)

ISBN 9781405187169 (paperback)

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There is nothing new in the attempt to grasp history as a whole. To understand how humanity began and how it has come to its present condition is one of the oldest and most universal of human needs, expressed in the religious and philosophical systems of every civilization. But only in the last few decades has it begun to appear both necessary and possible to meet that need by means of a rational and systematic appraisal of current historical knowledge. Until the middle of the nineteenth century history itself was generally treated as a subordinate branch of other fields of thought and learning of literature, rhetoric, law, philosophy or religion. When historians began at that time to establish its independence as a field of scholarship in its own right, with its own subject matter and its own rules and methods, they made it in practice not the attempt to achieve a comprehensive account of the human past but the history of Western Europe and of the societies created by European expansion and colonisation. In laying the scholarly foundations of their discipline they also reinforced the Enlightenment's belief in the advance of civilization and, more recently, of Western civilization. In this form, with relatively minor regional variations, it became the basis of the teaching of history almost everywhere for most of the twentieth century. Research and teaching of the histories of other parts of the world developed mainly in the context of area studies like those of ancient Greece and Rome, rooted in philology, and conducted through the exposition of the canonical texts of their respective languages.