Kaleidoscopic patterns

An entire cascade of further case studies could have added many facets to our picture of global history as a wider academic trend. For instance, it would certainly have been interesting to investigate more closely the scholarly communities in India where world historical thinking can be related to a myriad of contexts, ranging from political struggles over national identity to the rather complicated relationship between the local historians' guild and postcolonial theories in Western societies. Significant insights could also have been gained by looking more closely at various other academic realms in places ranging from Japan in the East to Argentina in the West, and from Australia in the South to Russia in the North. In each instance, transnational and world historical scholarship has certainly been characterized by complex interplays between global entanglements and local specificities. The latter includes factors ranging from particular sociocultural and political conditions to distinct academic structures, funding systems, forms of historical memory, and modes of global consciousness.