The decline of a tradition: The changing fate of Sale’s Universal History and the transformation of modern European historiography

Abstract

Since the Age of Discovery, large amounts of knowledge regarding foreign lands spread to Europe, and the tradition of writing world history based on the Bible came under attack. How to organize knowledge of foreign lands into a world history became a question of keen interest to historians in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. In this context, encyclopedic world history writing became an important trend. The multi-author, multi-volume Universal History published in eighteenth-century Britain was an example of this trend. The books were wildly popular for a time, with intellectual circles fighting to read them. They also won the praise of many notable members of society. A century later, however, the same set of books came under scholarly criticism, eventually becoming marginalized in the historiographical literature. The fall of Universal History was not an isolated case, but rather a reflection of modern history’s professionalization, changing academic trends, and a shift in historical consciousness. That is, there was a break between the past and the present, and thus history changed from the magistra vitae one could draw lessons from into an object of research.