This small collected volume, a pocketsize book of 200 pages, is a historiographical work concerned with global history. The title suggests a focus on how processes of globalization have shaped academic efforts at its historical understanding; this dimension is addressed in a rather scattered fashion throughout the eight essays. The essays work well, however, for the editors’ fundamental purpose: namely, situating and accentuating the importance of global history within the canon of historical studies. Global history is presented through an outline of its agenda (its central topical and methodological concerns), and is compared with other historiographical approaches at the same time as being placed within its own traditions. Altogether, the general characteristics of global history – the timeliness of its questions and its plurality of approaches – together with a lively discussion about its profile, are well captured by the authors, who all come from German-speaking academic contexts.

It may be due to this background that all contributions elaborate on the meaning of the terms they use. This is beneficial for the reader, who will most likely be someone looking for an introduction to this field rather than a scholar already engaged in it. As a result, diverging viewpoints are easily cognizable, and the reader is given a clear picture of what binds the essays together, despite the different routes they take. All seem to share a conception of globalization as a genuinely open and anything but unidirectional process, and as a continuously contested and multifaceted historical phenomenon. Of course, the concrete notions differ: Dietmar Rothermund and Matthias Middell focus on large-scale patterns in the organization of connectivity between cultures and societies (e.g. processes of territorialization); Andreas Komlosy concentrates on the dynamics of cross-continental interactions; and Wolfgang Schwenkter focuses on the experience of decreasing distances caused by border-transgressing entanglements. Nevertheless, the parallelism and interdependence of global integration on the one hand, and efforts at delineation and protection of autonomy on the other, are the common ground from which the articles explore how the history of globalization can be examined.

Fortunately, the editors have avoided a common trap: namely, that of only collecting papers on ‘Western’ global history writing, thus implying that this approach is limited to these areas or is very much the same elsewhere. In a concise overview, Susanne Schweiglin-Schwiedrzik follows the changing position and shape of world history in China. ‘Modern’ Chinese historiography emerged with the writings of Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and, although he conceptualized it as national history, it clearly positioned China within the wider world – understandably so, since historical studies were to Chang an instrument by which China could compete with Western countries for significance in global affairs. He also formulated a theme that would run through historiographical discussions up to the present: the relationship of the particular (national history) and the universal (world history). In the 1920s and 1930s, various models were developed of how China’s past could be integrated into larger developments, and these were accompanied by Marxist interpretations after the Cultural Revolution in 1949.

Julia Adeney Thomas argues that Japanese world history served chiefly to comprehend the ‘other’, the unfamiliar, the ‘barbarians’. Whereas in many cultures these are located abroad, in Japan the ‘mysterious’, or ‘other’, is conceived of as being inside. However, although Japanese historians were concerned more with Japan than with the worlds beyond their borders, they were, nevertheless, globally oriented. Thomas demonstrates this by sketching five stages of Japanese world-historical thinking, from the 1600s to the 1970s. Although her remarks on each of the periods are necessarily brief, what she writes is detailed enough to invite comparisons. For instance, during the Meji (1868–1912) and Taisho periods (1912–1926), three concepts of world history emerged (one in the style of Ranke’s internationalism, one following evolutionary thoughts, and one based on Marxist dialectic). After 1945 a progressive model developed, concerned with Japan’s position in contemporary geopolitical transformations. Similar interpretations can be observed elsewhere during the same time periods, as Matthias Middell points out; furthermore, a plurality of approaches is hardly new. Marcus Gräser presents the US case, arguing that a transnational disposition (‘Gestus’, p. 186) is constitutive of US historiography. Whether it is as unique as the author suggests remains an open question, but surely the imperial ambitions of the country and its later hegemonic role helped to stimulate world history in the USA, even before the institutionalization of the field that has occurred since the 1990s.

Most contributions contain brief sketches of the main topics and methods currently in use in global history (understood as the history of globalization), which need not be repeated here. Two articles are worth singling out, however, since they follow up specific aspects more deeply. Andrea Komlosy deals with the issue of periodization, which poses a serious problem insofar as global interpretations are confronted with different local, regional, national, and worldwide chronologies that are not easy to correlate. Any proposed structuring of time in global history should remain sensitive to the fact that different spaces have their own times, as do cross-cultural?interactions. Nevertheless, if the stability, quantity, and quality of intra- as well as interregional contacts are taken as criteria, one can still distinguish certain periods from a global perspective. Hans Heinrich Nolte presents the world system concept and its application in historical work as an instrument to combine the methodologies of transfer studies and comparison – which are presented throughout the book as the two key methods of the field. He provides a lucid survey of the core arguments of that approach, the criticism it provoked, and the diverging directions of the debate in Germany, France, and the Anglo-Saxon world.

One issue that is raised recurrently concerns the differences between global, universal, and ‘world’ history. Opinions are divided on how new the orientation and the practices of current research are, and thus how sharply it differs from earlier accounts of the ‘global’ dimension of the past. Rothermund (pp. 14f.) and Schwenkter (pp. 41f.) highlight the progress orientation, the universalist and Eurocentric stance, and the containment of border-transcending phenomena within fixed spatial entities (civilizations, regions, nation-states) of the older historiography. In contrast, recent writings are seen as efforts to avoid these pitfalls by remaining empirically grounded instead of perpetuating the previous philosophical outlook. Today’s engagements in interdisciplinary work and transnational collaborations are also given as evidence that much has changed. Doubtless, world historians have found very different formats and narratives for describing global cohesions. However, these, like any schematic polarizations, will not capture the plurality of the practice of world history, now as in the past. Neither will they allow us to understand the concrete process of change –who sought to reorient the approach to world historical phenomena, and when, how, and why did they do so – nor to illuminate which ways were tested but proved dead ends and for what reason, something towards which the history of historiography aims. In line with the editors, one can understand current global history as the study of processes of globalization in reaction to real-world developments. Since globalizing processes are all but recent phenomena, one must assume that there likewise existed efforts at such historical understanding in the past. Then the popular scheme ‘from universal to global history’ begins to appear as a reduction of the many and diverging approaches in previous times. Efforts to think more thoroughly about the relationship between earlier traditions and current undertakings may start from Matthias Middell’s remark that the different labels, being still in use, are less indicative of conceptual differences than they are part of political negotiations. World history in the US emancipated itself from its European origins by distancing itself from the universal histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Currently, world and global historians in Europe are negotiating their intellectual heritage. Both viewpoints meet in transatlantic discussions, which are shaped by the same power relations that are formative for other areas.

Since the volume provokes these and many more reflections on the writing of global history, it makes valuable reading. It introduces perspectives from non-English-speaking research contexts, and thus enriches the discussions in a field that used to be dominated by Anglo-Saxon historians. Finally, it is valuable because it documents the debates extant around the year 2004, when the articles were prepared for a conference at the University of Luxembourg. Since many of the debates are still proceeding, the volume shows what has been achieved in the meantime, and which issues are still pending.