The recent revival of world history as a subject of scholarly debate and teaching has not solved the intellectual problems that defeated the discipline of world history earlier in this century. Constructing a history of the contemporary world, with its twin poles of deepening integration and proliferating difference, requires a new conceptual foundation, one that escapes both the Eurocentric focus on the rise and decline of the West and the grand parallel narratives of comparative civilizations. This essay offers a case for reconstituting world history on a new basis. The history of our actually existing world finds its origins in the mid-19th-century crisis of autonomous civilizations and traces the emerging dynamics of integration and difference that have made the world of the late 20th-century neither the fulfillment of some world-historic promise nor the culmination of western development, but the beginnings of an entirely new and truly global history
