Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0742517675 ISBN 13: 9780742517677

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001

Synopsis

This innovative work offers the first comprehensive transcultural history of historiography. The contributors transcend a Eurocentric approach not only in terms of the individual historiographies they assess, but also in the methodologies they use for comparative analysis. Moving beyond the traditional national focus of historiography, the book offers a genuinely comparative consideration of the commonalities and differences in writing history. Distinguishing among distinct cultural identities, the contributors consider the ways and means of intellectual transfers and assess the strength of local historiographical traditions as they are challenged from outside. The essays explore the question of the utility and the limits of conceptions of modernism that apply Western theories of development to non-Western cultures. Warning against the dominant tendency in recent historiographies of non-Western societies to define these predominantly in relation to Western thought, the authors show the extent to which indigenous traditions have been overlooked. The key question is how the triad of industrialization, modernization, and the historicization process, which was decisive in the development of modern academic historiography, also is valid beyond Europe. Illustrating just how deeply suffused history writing is with European models, the book offers a broad theoretical platform for exploring the value and necessity of a world historiography beyond Eurocentrism.

About this title

About the Author:

Eckhardt Fuchs is an assistant professor at the University of Mannheim. Benedikt Stuchtey is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute, London.

Review:

Ambitious in conception and rich in content, these essays on history writing around the world break the usual quarantines of national history by joining considerations of Latin America, Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America within one useful and thought-provoking volume. (Carol Gluck, Columbia University)

About this edition

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0742517675
• ISBN 13: 9780742517677
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432
• Editor: Fuchs Eckhardt, Stuchtey Benedikt