This is an important book, the first comprehensive transnational examination of the role that global approaches play in historical studies today. Despite its broad scope, however, there are two limitations to the work. It is spatially limited in restricting itself to three countries. And it avoids any attempt to define what constitutes global history. These limitations are intentional on the part of Sachsenmaier and reflect his understanding of what constitutes a history of historiography. According to him, all attempts at global history must be understood in terms of ‘the entanglements of global and local elements’ (p. 10), primarily in their national, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Considering the resulting diversities, the limitations that Sachsenmaier stresses are justified. Nevertheless, the book clarifies where historical studies stand in the present global age.

In his first chapter, Sachsenmaier deals with the transformation of historical studies into an academic discipline along the nineteenth-century German (Rankean) model, not only in the West but, in the twentieth century, in the non-Western world as well. This transformation has to be seen in a broader context, in which the professionalization of scholarly practices and standards was related to the ‘overall professionalization of work’ generally, as part of a process of modernization (p. 37). Everywhere, ‘the direction of historical research followed new national realities ranging from the availability of funding and other research incentives to the growing importance of national archives’ (p. 20). This explains Sachsenmaier's almost exclusive concentration on academic scholarship, to the exclusion of forms of history produced outside the academy, except for occasional references to film and television.

The following chapters examine the movement away from Western, nation-oriented paradigms in the United States, Germany, and China over recent decades and towards global perspectives, which, however, did not involve the abandonment of history as a professional discipline. This movement was most advanced in the United States. Sachsenmaier notes that the developments leading to a growing interest in transnational and global history in the United States have to be at least partly understood in the context of the significant social and institutional transformations that the United States has experienced in the last few decades, which in turn were closely related to the changed geopolitical situation after the Second World War. The universities expanded after 1970; hitherto marginalized sections of the population of social, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds and women gained access to higher education, leading to an increasing diversification of the student and faculty body. This was accompanied by an opening of new fields such as gender studies and histories of ethnic minorities and of the subordinated classes. The nation was now no longer seen as a fixed political and social unit but as containing these diverse social elements, which thus required a new historical approach. That approach reflected uneasiness about the values and outlooks of the Western world that had served as a universal norm, including the belief in scientific objectivity that had been central to the ethos of professional history. Yet, despite the increasing openness of American historical scholarship to the world, there were definite limits. Thus, as Sachsenmaier remarks, writings on global theory originating in China and in the Arabic world carried little weight in the United States, even if they were available in English (p. 40). During the 1990s, thirteen times more books in the social sciences and humanities were translated from English into Chinese than vice versa.

Germany was the least affected by these new trends in historical studies. There the critical confrontation of German historians with their catastrophic past led to a concentration on German national history and a marginalization of non-German and particularly of non-Western history. Nevertheless, the changes in German society, including an increasing migrant population, led to an opening (albeit still limited) to new currents similar to those pursued by American historians.

Perhaps the most valuable chapter for the Western reader is that on current developments in Chinese historiography, which have been largely marginalized in the West. Sachsenmaier makes two very important points. He puts an end to the notion of a historiography isolated from the outside world, undergoing few changes over the centuries, and points out that before the nineteenth century China had already witnessed developments that in some ways paralleled the growing importance of critical source work and systematic historical studies in Europe (p. 176). Second, he maintains that, in contrast to popular notions of continued cultural solipsism, ‘forms of global consciousness have played much more central roles within the community of modern Chinese historians than among their peers in most Western academic systems’ (p. 172); this also involved a break with Confucian traditions (p. 177). This orientation toward the outside world focused for a long time primarily on the West, and was closely related to conceptions of modernization at a time when these conceptions were already being questioned in the West. The last two decades have seen a revival of nationalist orientations, which have sought to reconcile modernity with Confucian traditions, without, however, giving up a global perspective.

This review may seem critical in pointing out the limitations of this book. But I fully understand Sachsenmaier's approach, which reflects the complexity of current historiography. The choice of the three countries makes sense, not only because of the significance of the contribution of American and Chinese historians to global perspectives – Germany has played a lesser role in this process – but also because no historian has been as actively involved in the scholarship of these three countries as Sachsenmaier has. I see the book as a contribution to a broader comparative study, including other parts of the world (notably India and Latin America, to mention just two). Sachsenmaier is aware of the need for these studies. He was right in focusing on the national contexts of global histories and concluding that ‘the globalization of university-based historiography did not lead to a standardization of scholarship all over the world’ (p. 11). Nevertheless the question remains how one can move beyond the nation-oriented scope of this book to a global history of modern historiography cutting across national lines.