It emerged centuries ago; some leading practitioners are Voltaire (1694–1778), Hegel (1770–1831), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), and Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975).
The field became much more active (in terms of university teaching, text books, scholarly journals, and academic associations) in the late 20th century.
A synoptic view of universal history led some scholars, beginning with Karl Jaspers,[3] to distinguish the Axial Age synchronous to "classical antiquity" of the Western tradition.
[3] "World history is not a thing, but an activity, and various physical forms of expression such as lectures, books, journal papers and classroom lessons are criteria for it.
'[7] The advent of world history as a distinct academic field of study can be traced to the United States in the 1960s, but the pace quickened in the 1980s.
After 2000 years Sima Qian's model still dominates scholarship, although the dynastic cycle is no longer used for modern Chinese history.
[15] In Ancient Greece, Herodotus (5th century BC), as the founder of Greek historiography,[16] presents discussions of the customs, geography, and history of Mediterranean peoples, particularly the Egyptians.
His contemporary Thucydides rejected Herodotus's all-embracing approach to history, offering instead a more precise, sharply focused monograph, dealing not with vast empires over the centuries but with 27 years of war between Athens and Sparta.
[18] Rashīd al-Dīn Fadhl-allāh Hamadānī (1247–1318), was a Muslim physician from Persian speaking family, polymathic writer, and historian, who wrote an enormous Islamic history, the Jami al-Tawarikh, in the Persian language, often considered a landmark in intercultural historiography and a key document on the Ilkhanids (13th and 14th century).
[19] His encyclopedic knowledge of a wide range of cultures from Mongolia to China to the Steppes of Central Eurasia to Persia, the Arabic-speaking lands, and Europe, provide the most direct access to information on the late Mongol era.
One Muslim scholar, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1409) broke with traditionalism and offered a model of historical change in Muqaddimah, an exposition of the methodology of scientific history.
Ibn Khaldun focused on the reasons for the rise and fall of civilization, arguing that the causes of change are to be sought in the economic and social structure of society.
Voltaire, when writing History of Charles XII (1731) and The Age of Louis XIV (1751), instead choose to focus on economics, politics, and culture.
[22] Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) in Italy wrote Scienza Nuova seconda (The New Science) in 1725, which argued history as the expression of human will and deeds.
Vico outlined a conception of historical development in which great cultures, like Rome, undergo cycles of growth and decline.
Documents produced during a historical period, such as journal entries and contractual agreements, were considered by Hegel to be part of Original History.
These documents are produced by a person enveloped within a culture, making them conduits of vital information but also limited in their contextual knowledge.
[23] Reflective History, Hegel's second lens, are documents written with some temporal distance separating the event which is discussed in academic writing.
This criticism of Reflective History was later formalized by Anthropologist Franz Boa and coined as Cultural relativism by Alain Locke.
He believed that progress, which could be achieved through individuals pursuing commercial success, would bring us closer to a perfect society; but we would never reach one.
With the gathering of people into agricultural villages, laws and social obligations needed to be developed so a form of order could be maintained.
[32] The theory divides the history of the world into the following periods:[33][34][35][36][37] Primitive communism; Slave society; Feudalism; Capitalism; and Socialism.
Influential writers who have reached wide audiences include H. G. Wells, Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, Pitirim Sorokin, Carroll Quigley, Christopher Dawson,[40] and Lewis Mumford.
It deepened the post-World War I pessimism in Europe, and was warmly received by intellectuals in China, India, and Latin America who hoped his predictions of the collapse of European empires would soon come true.
[46] T. Walter Wallbank and Alastair M. Taylor co-authored Civilization Past & Present, the first world-history textbook published in the United States (1942).
According to the Golden Anniversary edition of 1992, the ongoing objective of Civilization Past & Present "was to present a survey of world cultural history, treating the development and growth of civilization not as a unique European experience but as a global one through which all the great culture systems have interacted to produce the present-day world.
Louis Gottschalk, William H. McNeill, and Leften S. Stavrianos became leaders in the integration of world history to the American College curriculum.
Professors Patrick Manning, at the University of Pittsburgh's World History Center; and Ross E. Dunn at San Diego State are leaders in promoting innovative teaching methods.
For example, Leopold von Ranke, probably the pre-eminent historian of the 19th century, founder of Rankean historical positivism,[50] the classic mode of historiography that now stands against postmodernism, attempted to write a Universal History at the close of his career.
Reynolds sees the relationship between African and world history as a measure of the changing nature of historical inquiry over the past century.