Historisk Tidskrift is institutionally anchored within the University of Stockholm and published with the support of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquities, as well as through the Scientific Council of the Swedish Historical Society. The editor is also secretary of the Swedish Historical Society, and a two-tier editorial board includes historians both working at Swedish universities and based abroad. Articles written in Swedish are accompanied by English summaries and, since 2006, all articles have keywords in English, greatly facilitating the use of the electronic archive. The parallels with Annales are striking, both in terms of theoretical orientation and of physical structure, but it is usually distinctly ‘Swedish’ in the selection of topics, contributors, and reviewed publications. Most contributions deal with aspects of Nordic history, while those dwelling on wider problems often do so in terms of comparison with the Swedish or Nordic experience. Historisk Tidskrift thus represents a successful example of ‘local history’.

However, one issue per year is devoted to a specific theme, and the issue reviewed here deals with aspects of internationalization, a theme of interest to global historians. The precise meaning of the term (internationalisering, internationalization) is discussed in an editorial introduction, in both English and Swedish. For this issue, the editors decided to invite contributions written in English, ‘our new, much loved and much despised lingua franca’, with summaries in Swedish. The views of nine authors are presented in the main article section.

David Ransel (Indiana University, Bloomington) takes the lead, with his ‘Reflections on transnational and world history in the USA and its applications’. With much emphasis on Soviet and Russian history, Ransel provides a bird's-eye view of the efforts by American historians to produce genuine examples of ‘world history’, providing macro-analyses of trade flows and human migration patterns, of cultural, intellectual, and technological exchange. Bartolomé Yun Casalilla (European University Institute, Florence) then applies the methodological discourse of ‘localism’ within global and transnational history to the area of his own specialization, namely the history of the Spanish empire. Casalilla pours cold water onto the, at times, heated debate over ‘correctness’ in historiographic terminology by reminding us that all history since Herodotus is transnational, and that the primary instinct of historians has always been ‘global’. In terms of sources and methodology, Toynbee, Braudel, or McNeill would have recognized the same fundamental approaches in ‘global history’ as in ‘entangled history’ or ‘histoire croisée’. The simultaneous rise of a preoccupation with local sources and with a vertical, localized approach can be perceived as a backlash against globalization within our profession. Not infrequently, this may be due to the prevalence of English as the ascending medium in (global) history. This newly shared international language may be well suited for the pursuit of general, comparative studies but not for specific problems, which can only be explained with concrete reference to local conditions, and which can often only be understood with reference to documents in local languages. Casalilla, however, cautions against such a withdrawal into the caves, urging ‘local’ historians to retain a healthy balance with the greater context.

A modern ‘European’ dimension is introduced by Dirk Jan Wolffram (University of Groningen). The author contrasts two currents among international historians, namely those promoting the comparative study of states and those seeking social movements as agents of historical change. With an eye on contemporary Europe, this distinction certainly also has political connotations. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (EUI, Florence and University of Bielefeld) continues Casalilla's argument of the continuity of comparative (‘global’) history. However, as a recognized methodology the comparative approach only succeeded in establishing itself much later in history than in the social and economic sciences. Peaking in the 1970s and 1980s, the approach found a more ardent following in countries where analytical traditions outweighed those of a more narrative nature, that is, in central and northern Europe as opposed to France, Great Britain, Italy, or Spain. More recently, however, the comparative approach has come under attack as being too general and as reinforcing stereotypes, with Michel Espagne as one of the main opponents. A synthetic approach is championed by the authors of the final article, Katarina Friberg (Södertörn University College, Huddinge), Mary Hilson (University College London), and Natasha Vall (University of Teeside, Middlesborough). Based on their own experience in comparative Swedish and English urban social and economic history, the authors conclude that the deficiencies of transnational comparison have been overemphasized, and that the comparative approach, at the very least, forces historians to question the methodologies employed, following their own specific national characteristics. While the authors argue that the national context has assumed the function of a heuristic device, the same is indubitably true of its comparative alternative.

The last essay in the ‘overview’ category is provided by Lennart Samuelson and Andrej Sorokin. This article, on the Russian ‘Archival Revolution’, analyses the current state of Russia's archives and the changes occurring in Russian historiography. The authors assign the veritable explosion of published archival documents in recent years to a strong sense of collective curiosity and to the desire to prevent new myths from arising out of the ashes of the past. Public fascination is invariably focused on Joseph Stalin and on the institutions created under his aegis (for instance, the ‘children's gulags’). Documents on the Anti-Jewish Campaign and on the deportations of entire ethnic groups ensure that this interest is not merely shared by a narrow ‘Russian’ public. The authors point out that the sheer volume of archival publications marks a milestone in the history of the Russian state – Tsarist, Soviet, and under Putin.

The rest of the issue contains reviews, conference announcements, recently published works, and a list of doctoral dissertations in history completed in Sweden in 2006, which do not share the international focus of the essays.