World history holds an awkward place within the historical discipline. It is evoked most frequently in America as the framework for a survey course for undergraduates, where it is often seen as a sort of fast food solution, a means for honoring diversity by introducing the existence of other societies and of a very long past to students without the preparation or patience for a more nutritious diet. Yet world history has also always been associated with profound and fundamental questions. Once called philosophy of history and enjoying ancient ties to religion, world history tended in academic study to flatten into generalizations about wealth and power – usually involving the path to them and their use in different eras – accompanied by some analysis of the pattern of their rise and fall. Increasingly, however, world history responds to a growing awareness of the world as a whole – an awareness incised in the cemeteries of wars called world wars, the globe encircling tentacles of the cold war, and the widespread sense that we are all affected by events elsewhere, from civil conflicts to tsunamis. Appreciation of the complex ways in which any part of the world may be relevant to our own immediate concerns stimulates fresh recognition that the past may have something to say to the present.
