The Evolution of World History After 1945: From Cold War Narratives to Global Scholarship

The conclusion of the Second World War fundamentally altered the international landscape, rendering older historiographical traditions inadequate for a new generation of professional historians. In the immediate post-war decades, world history remained a marginal concern within mainstream academia, overshadowed by more pressing intellectual responses to the new global order. Decisive advances beyond the frameworks of Arnold J. Toynbee or his contemporaries were rare. The Allied victory initially reinforced neo-Hegelian narratives that positioned the North Atlantic West as the triumphant endpoint of historical progress. Conversely, the Soviet Union's rise and the Chinese Communist Revolution supported a rival, teleological narrative centered on inevitable socialist development.

These competing Cold War ideologies directly shaped world historical writing. The ten-volume Soviet Vsemirnaia Istoriia (World History), edited by Evgenii M. Zhukov, was structured by a rigid dogma of historical stages culminating in communism, with the nation-state as its basic unit. While allowing some complexity in analyzing societal formations, it fundamentally categorized nations by their "maturity" within this predetermined path. In a mirror image, American modernization theory of the early 1960s presented a story of the "rise of the West," with the United States as the perfected model of liberal democracy and capitalism.

It was within this context that William H. McNeill produced his seminal work, The Rise of the West (1963), which dominated Anglophone world history for decades. McNeill’s monumental achievement was twofold. First, he grounded his synthesis firmly in the most advanced regional research available, moving away from speculative meta-history. Second, he masterfully balanced innumerable temporal and spatial patterns, demonstrating that world history could be written with scholarly rigor, free from mysticism or triviality. Although sharing a moderate Occident-centrism of its era, McNeill’s work effectively downsized world history from prophecy to a viable research program.

Simultaneously, other scholars began to challenge triumphalist Western narratives. The English historian Geoffrey Barraclough offered a pioneering interpretation of the twentieth century and questioned the continued validity of writing history solely as the story of "major" civilizations. This skepticism was later echoed in works like anthropologist Eric R. Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982). Despite McNeill's prominence, world history writing was not confined to the West. In newly decolonized nations, historians were primarily focused on constructing national pasts, though global hierarchies and colonial dehistoricization were constant underlying concerns.

Internationally, collaborative projects attempted new syntheses. UNESCO’s History of Mankind series, while uneven and still Eurocentric in its early volumes, featured an innovative twentieth-century volume that deliberately marginalized conventional political history. In France, a strong tradition of civilizational history continued, but the pioneering Annales School showed little initial interest in transcending European boundaries. The great exception was Fernand Braudel, whose trilogy Civilization and Capitalism (1979) presented a coherent, theoretically stringent global history of the early modern period. His work profoundly influenced world-systems theory and stands as a masterful Francophone counterpart to McNeill’s.

Between 1945 and the 1980s, world history continued to exhibit distinct national characteristics. German scholarship often emphasized a philosophical "historical anthropology" exploring universal human themes, while British scholars like Barraclough pushed to integrate burgeoning research on the "Third World." Crucially, this period saw the dramatic expansion of specialized fields like African and Southeast Asian history, often fueled by American area studies programs. The launch of monumental series like The Cambridge History of Africa provided the essential empirical foundation for a more pluralistic global history.

Barraclough wisely cautioned against illusions of omniscience, noting that the view from the Thames Valley would never match that from the Tarim Basin. He advocated for rigorous comparative history in the Weberian tradition as a practical antidote to centrist approaches. This comparative mode flourished in American social science through the work of historical sociologists like Barrington Moore and Theda Skocpol. By the 1990s, as sociology retreated from grand historical comparison, a space opened for a new global history to emerge, setting the stage for the field's contemporary boom. Thus, the post-war period was one of fragmented development, laying the essential research groundwork and slowly dismantling Eurocentric paradigms, which enabled the transformative rise of global history in subsequent decades.