The impact of the West on the rest of the world is a recognized central theme of world history over the past two centuries. At present, when many historians are trying to avoid the ethnocentricity of their predecessors, that fact alone raises problems of interpretation. In the past, historians often concentrated on the history of their own society. Their central question was: How did we come to be as we are? The broader question of how the world around us came to be as it is pushed into the background. The more fundamental question of how human societies change through time was hardly approached.

Today, many historians in Western societies try not to overemphasize the activities of their own ancestors, but they are confronted by the fact that Western societies actually did play a central role in world history during recent centuries. The problem of European dominance is bound up with several interlocked problems in the interpretation of global history. One problem arises from the effort to identify an appropriate central narrative to follow the main line of human development on a global scale. Historians of the United States are used to tracing an account back from the present to the colonial period, and beyond that to Europe. Historians of Europe have arranged their narrative in the sequence of ancient to medieval to modern – and perhaps to postmodern.