While historiography in France and Anglo-America in the course of the twentieth century had moved away from traditional, state-oriented narrative history to broader social science approaches and increasingly after the 1970s to cultural history, historical writing in Germany, before 1990 in the west, and then in a united Germany, moved much more hesitantly away from older patterns. One exception was the social science-oriented Gesellschaftsgeschichte initiated by Hans-Ulrich Wehler at the University of Bielefeld which beginning in the early 1970s concentrated on the analysis of social structures and processes generally focused on Germany as a national unit. A comparative note entered into Wehler's work to explain why the political development of Germany in an age of industrialization did not develop democratic institutions that characterized western modern societies, but went a way of its own (Sonderweg) and ultimately ended in National Socialism. Jürgen Kocka, the coeditor with Heinz-Gerhardt Haupt of this volume and a close associate of Wehler, introduced a much more comparative transnational note in his work, including a major project on the European middle classes (Bürgertum).

In 1975 the journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft (History and Society) was founded as the organ of what its editors described as a “historical social science” (historische Sozialwissenschaft).The contributors to this volume came from this tradition. They all stressed the need for comparative studies, but they saw the limits of such studies as generally practiced. Comparative history, Haupt and Kocka stress in the introductory chapter to this book, seeks “similarities and differences between two or more units of research.” These units are frequently defined in national terms, but the task of the historian is to “insist on relationships, transfers, and interactions” (p. 2). “Comparative history” is thus distinguished from what the authors of the various essays in the book call “entangled history,” Verflechtungsgeschichte, or histoire croisée, the latter a term initiated by French historians. The result is that the units of study need no longer be nations. Nations can no longer be viewed as homogeneous societies; they are rather heterogeneous, multicultural societies (Jürgen Osterhammel, Sebastian Conrad). Entangled history, histoire croisée, “deals with transfer, interconnection, and mutual influences across boundaries” (Haupt, Kocka, p. vii).

All the authors in this volume seek to go beyond comparisons to the study of the relationships between societies and cultures. Kocka has already pointed the way in his Bürgertum project. Only one, nevertheless excellent article, follows traditional forms of comparative history, Thomas Welskopp's comparison of German and U.S. labor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which in an explanatory manner takes up Sombart's question why socialism had so little appeal to American workers. An article by Dieter Langewiesche focuses on the remaining relevance of the nation for historical study. In all the other articles, there are two central notes, the need to overcome Eurocentrism and the critique of modernization theories. As Haupt and Kocka point out in the introduction, there is a danger in overemphasizing Europe's coherence and homogeneity (p. 11). There are various social and cultural strains in Europe that transcend borders. Philipp Ther points at the transfer of music throughout Europe and beyond, taking Wagner as an example. Dirk Hoerder points at how migrations have transformed European and North American societies and at the multicultural identity of the migrants and their impact on their home countries. Several articles (Haupt and Kocka, Osterhammel, Conrad, Shalini Randeria, Monica Juneja and Margrit Pernau, and Andreas Eckert) stress the interaction of Europe and its colonies, including Germany despite its brief colonial reign. And they see this as a two-way encounter with not only the European powers shaping the colonies, but also with the colonies exerting their influence in shaping European identities.

The discussion of the colonial experience leads directly to the critique of the concept of modernization which had played a central role in social science approaches to history. As Haupt and Kocka point out (p. 8), even in Europe there are multiple modernities. Jörg Requate demonstrates the limits of convergence theories in central Europe by comparing economic developments in the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and West Germany during the Cold War. Most articles, however, deal with modernization in the relation of the west to the non-Western formerly colonial world. As Juneja and Pernau stress, modernity is “a notion grounded in European experience that relegates non-European societies to the ‘waiting room’ of history” (p. 110).

The volume is to be welcomed as a German contribution to current international discussions in social and cultural history. “Entangled history,” as the editors acknowledge, by no means obviates comparative history (p. 2), but enriches historical writing and points at the complexities of history. There is validity to the critique of modernization theory that sets the west up as a norm. But the critique is also one-sided, as it is in Randeria's essay “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities,” when she argues that affiliations with caste are by implication seen wrongly as “signs of backwardness,” while civil rather than traditional communal societies are viewed “as modern and desirable” (p. 77). This overlooks the extent to which there are elements of modernity which, although they originated in the west, are also parts of the non-West, not only advances in science and technology but also in human rights and civil society. As another Indian historian, Sumit Sarkar, emphasized elsewhere, much of the European Enlightenment tradition had become part of modern Indian political culture with its commitment to civil, democratic, feminist, and liberal individual rights. This side of modernity needs to be taken into account even in the face of diversity. These are excellent essays. I only wish that they had not only developed a critique of modernization, which is central to much postcolonial history, and with which I largely agree, but had also dealt with the limits of this critique.