World studies, which are more commonly referred to now as global studies, have become an increasingly important field of study, both in the social sciences and humanities since the early 1970s. Beginning with discussions among economists and political scientists who sought to reconceptualise distributive and interactive dynamics between states and societies located in different parts of the world at the height of the Cold War, the boundaries of global studies have since widened as they gained the attention of geographers and sociologists in the final decades of the twentieth century. Their contribution to the institutionalisation of global studies in academia has mainly involved fresh approaches that enhance our understanding of the often unequal relationships between developed and developing countries. Keywords such as “interactive zones”, “world systems” and “free markets” have become indispensable in any discussion about the world as a whole. The justification for the need to develop new vocabularies, promulgate new generalisations and invent new methodologies lay primarily in the assumption that humankind was facing “globality” and “globalisation”, a condition and a process whereby traditional boundaries of space, knowledge and power are broken down, compressed, and intensified, by the advancement of information and transportation technology.

Where do scholars of the humanities fit into these developments? Historians in particular had a great deal to contribute to global studies, both as an academic discipline and as a subject of wider general interest after the Second World War. Historical monographs that sought to explain the evolution of human societies from earliest times up to the advent of modernity had long preceded the social sciences. Works such as William McNeill's Rise of the West (1963) and Marshall Hodgson's threevolume The Venture of Islam (1974) quickly come to mind. These two books represented a new wave of scholarship aimed at decentering the cyclical models of human development that had earlier been developed by Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. And yet the global perspectives that characterised these writings were quickly overshadowed by the pertinent concerns of the time. The dismantling of empires, the creation of new states and the outbreak of revolutions and insurgencies across the globe called for more formulaic, if not social scientific, approaches to understanding societies.