ABSTRACT
We are beginning our discussion of the history of modern historiography on a comparative global scale in the eighteenth century for two main reasons: First, as we already mentioned in the Introduction, this was the eve of the period when Western historiography exerted an important influence on the historical cultures of the rest of the world. Second, the eighteenth century was marked by fundamental changes in historical perspective, primarily but not exclusively in the West. It is then that a modern outlook, as we have described it in the Introduction, emerged that dominated the ways of thinking about history throughout the nineteenth and well into the second half of the twentieth centuries.
