Toward a History of Histories of Civilization

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay discusses efforts to write non-Eurocentric histories if civilization, beginning with H. G. Wells’s bestselling Outline of History, an early attempt to move beyond older European histories with their Western focus and ideas of linear progress over time. I then discuss several transitional works in the second half of the twentieth century, before turning to three contemporary works – one Japanese, one Chinese, and one American – that explicitly break with the older Eurocentric emphasis. With these examples in mind, we see the value of multiple histories of the multiple worlds of world civilization.