Ebook: The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Volume 4: 1800–1945

The Oxford History of Historical Writing is a five-volume, multi-authored scholarly survey of the history of historical writing across the globe. It is a chronological history of humanity’s attempts to conserve, recover, and narrate its past with considerable attention paid to different global traditions and their points of comparison with Western historiography. Each volume covers a particular period, with care taken to avoid unduly privileging Western notions of periodization, and the volumes cover progressively shorter chronological spans, reflecting both the greater geographical range of later volumes and the steep increase in historical activity around the world since the nineteenth century. The Oxford History of Historical Writing is the first collective scholarly survey of the history of historical writing to cover the globe across such a substantial breadth of time.

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Volume 4 of The Oxford History of Historical Writing offers essays by leading scholars on the writing of history globally from 1800 to 1945. Divided into four parts, it first covers the rise, consolidation, and crisis of European historical thought, and the professionalization and institutionalization of history. The chapters in Part Two analyze how historical scholarship connected to various European national traditions. Part Three considers the historical writing of Europe's 'Offspring': the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Brazil, and Spanish South America. The concluding part is devoted to histories of non-European cultural traditions: China, Japan, India, South East Asia, Turkey, the Arab world, and Sub-Saharan Africa. This is the fourth of five volumes in a series that explores representations of the past from the beginning of writing to the present day, and from all over the world. This volume aims at once to provide an authoritative survey of the field, and especially to provoke cross-cultural comparisons.