The growth of interest in world history in recent decades has also brought an increasing concern about what world history should include, or leave out. Some seek to make a distinction between truly global history as opposed to the conventional world history of the past. Others argue that world history, in the schools at any rate, should be built around a core consisting of the history of Western civilization as the grand narrative. Still other grand narratives could deal with the rise of science and the improving technology, or the rise and fall of several “civilizations.”

The essays that follow are centered on the history of the Atlantic basin, but seen from a perspective sometimes called comparative world history, like the title of this series. The central idea behind this approach is that history cannot include everything. Selection is necessary, indeed inevitable, but the selection should be made as much as possible to show the variety of the human experience.

One of the most common criteria for deciding what to include in history is far from the perspective of world history, however valuable for other purposes. It is to ask how “we” (meaning the historian and his presumed readers) came to be as we are. This frankly ethnocentric approach is much criticized today, although it is extremely common and is pedagogically useful so long as it is not the only view of the past presented to students. Another principle of selection that claims to be world history tells about the rise of “great civilizations.”