"This is the first text on historiography to adopt a comparative, global perspective on the topic, looking not just at developments in the West but at the other great historiographical traditions in Asia and the Middle East, and at more localised historiographical developments elsewhere in the non-Western world, from Latin America to Sub-Saharan Africa.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century it examines the various kinds of historical thinking and writing which pre-dated western influence, the impact of western ideas of history as these began to be exported through trade and empire, and the rise of professional and 'scientific' history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The authors argue that what happened here was not a simple process of assimilation, but of adaptation into long standing intellectual and cultural traditions, often in the service of specific ideological concerns, for instance that of nationalism.

Finally the book turns to the twin challenges to the western historical paradigms of 'objectivity' and 'progress' mounted by postmodernism and post-colonialism, critically examining the extent to which these might undermine the commitment of the historian to an honest and truthful representation of the past."--Jacket.