ABSTRACT
A new situation which makes the need for universal history by which we mean a history that looks beyond Europe and the west to humanity in all lands and agesa matter of immediate practical urgency. In returning to world-history today we are returning to an older tradition which reaches back beyond the nineteenth century to the origins of modern critical historical study and which held its own until the close of the eighteenth century. For the men of the Enlightenment the idea of world-history was particularly congenial. The first great historical achievement of the eighteenth century was to bring the extra-European world into the field of enquiry and thus to make universal history possible. The writing of universal history made demands on human knowledge greater than the human intellect could ever hope to encompass; the field it covered was so immense that inevitably the knowledge which any single individual could bring to bear was too limited to carry the burden.
