ABSTRACT
Historians are cautious about generalization. They frequently prefer to tell stories that hint at wider patterns, rather than laying these patterns out explicitly at risk of oversimplification. They also tend to be very place-specific, and get nervous about statements that cover too much geographical ground. World historians, while not necessarily quite so cautious as the rest of the breed, are understandably edgy about discussions that pay too much attention to the West, since one of their purposes is to rebalance historical understanding so that the West does not seem to be running the past. A major reason world historians were prone to attack what used to be called “the modernization model” was that it gave pride of place to the West and assumed (in its simplest versions) that the rest of the world would follow Western patterns or that otherwise there was something deficient that had to be explained.
