The author uses ‘contingency of modernity’, as the title might be translated, as a rubric to describe those works of history that centre around processes of exchange between continents and civilizations, and not as a definite historiographical term. Convincingly, from this school of historiography he derives the thesis that the origin of European and US-American modernity is located in processes of exchange, and not in purely endogenous developments. In particular, industrialization in England can hardly be explained without taking other centres of the ‘industrious revolution’ into account. Andrea Komlosy has put that concept into the concrete formula ‘Chinese silk, Indian calicos and Manchester machine-spun yarn’ (in Margarete Grandner and Andrea Komlosy, eds., Vom Weltgeist beseelt, Vienna, 2004). Knöbl goes on to argue, that such ‘contingency’ of the origins of the Industrial Revolution calls the classical sociological teachings of Weber, Durkheim, and others into question, since they rest on Eurocentric assumptions.

The author sketches the history of modernization theory till its ‘death’ in 1967, its life after death in the following decades, and its resurrection following the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1990. He identifies the theories of world system, of world society and of globalization as the heirs of modernization theory, and develops the history of these theories historically – from Wallerstein to Luhmann and Castells. But he also extends his argument to Jasper’s ‘axial age’ and Eisenstadt’s ‘multiple modernities’. Following the California school, Knöbl argues that even Eisenstadt’s concept has to be reworked. In this context he takes up the discussion on how those religions that developed in the ‘axial age’ were able to reproduce themselves in the following millennia, after the charismatic founders were gone. He also raises the question whether the concept of civilization is not derived from religions relying on revelations to such a degree that it may not be transferred to groups of people following other types of religions, for instance those relying on meditation.

Knöbl offers a convincing contribution to the critique of classical macrosociology, and to that end uses history. How might historians (like the author of this review) use Knöbl’s book? First of all, it offers an intellectual history of scientific work in the humanities over the past century. It is useful to read a book that puts the sociological texts that many historians have read into the context of their own discipline. We have the pleasure of overviews of books we know: for instance, reading his review of Bin Wong’s famous China transformed we note more than in first reading that Wong is emphasizing the differences between Europe and China in the development of the fiscal state. Second, we learn about different uses of terms. A historian might use the term secularization to describe the transfers of wealth that accompanied the history of Christianity since the Carolingians, and since the seizure of monasteries in Protestant England and Germany in the sixteenth century, and in Russia, Austria, and France in the eighteenth century. But the term is also useful to put into context twentieth-century ‘nationalizations’ of church property in the Soviet Union, including Muslim Wakf’s in Turkestan. In addition, historians find it useful to apply the term in a transfer of meaning, for instance to the history of language. But in sociology, Knöbl argues, there was a school interpreting the whole change to ‘modernity’ as secularization, which is interesting to learn about but looks like pars pro toto for a historian.

Knöbl will not be able to convince everyone of his arguments. For instance, he seems to undervalue the importance of state forms. In this regard, the sociologist Wallerstein, who wrote chapters on empires and states in the first volume of the Modern World System (New York, 1974), has more to offer a historian than Knöbl does. Marxism meets a strange fate. Since Knöbl considers Wallerstein a Marxist, although ‘pure’ Marxists such as Brenner contest that and see him as a follower of Adam Smith, he misses the point that Soviet Marxism always argued for ‘contingency’. To put it in into its own terms, Soviet Marxism argued that fundamentally equal modes of production came into existence in different cultures (for instance feudalism in Japan and India, as in Europe) and eroded spontaneously. The existence of regional modes of production (such as the Asiatic mode) was questioned, however. Transitions were not supposed to happen exactly at the same time; rather they might follow one another like squadrons of airplanes, but they were not dependent on one squadron flying first.

Historians will welcome Knöbl’s proposal for more sophisticated designs of research on the relationship between the general process of history and the individual histories of a region or a person. This point has been one of the fundamentals of research in world history for many years. See, for instance, Reinhard Wittram on the possibility or impossibility of world history, published in his Das Interesse an der Geschichte (Göttingen, 1957), or the debate on the relation between area and global studies, which is still going on today (see, for example, Birgit Schäbler, ed., Area-Studies und die Welt, Vienna, 2007). Historians start their trade with the notion that they are best able to reconstruct the history of small entities, of a town, a region, an enterprise, or a nation, not least because these institutions tend to have archives. To reconstruct world history is a much less safe endeavour, relying on generalizations in books that other people have written, and on concepts offered by other disciplines (such as sociology). And then there are the difficulties of translation. It is difficult enough for a historian of the holocaust to learn the three or four languages spoken in, say, Belarus in 1941–44, but how many languages used in historiography would a historian have to learn when writing global history?

Knöbl does add two cases in Area Studies. He argues in favour of an interpretation of the history of the American South that diverges from old interpretations of this as a ‘backward’ or ‘peripheral’ entity, and he argues against considering the ‘colonial past’ as the main reason for the lesser development of South America in contrast to North America. These are interesting essays, which should be taken into account. To sum up: Knöbl’s book is interesting and helpful. It should be taken as an invitation for cooperation between the disciplines, and it offers a few ideas for that process.