Axel Schneider was born in Germany. Educated at Erlangen University, National Taiwan Cheng-chi University, and Bochum University he has taught at the Universities of Heidelberg (Germany), Leiden (The Netherlands), National Taiwan Cheng-chi University, and Beijing University. In 2009 he was appointed Professor of Modern China Studies at Göttingen University, where is currently also serving as Director of the Göttingen Centre for Modern East Asian Studies. Editor of the Leiden Series in Comparative Historiography, he has published widely in German, English, and Chinese on modern Chinese historical writing.Daniel Woolf was born in England and grew up in Canada. Educated at Queen's University and Oxford, he has taught at several Canadian Universities including Dalhousie, McMaster, and the University of Alberta. In 2009 he was appointed Professor of History at Queen's University in Kingston, where he is currently also serving as Principal and Vice-Chancellor. General Editor of The Oxford History of Historical Writing, he is also the author or editor of several previous books and many articles and book chapters. He previously also edited the two volume Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing (1998).

`unrolls the great map of mankind, displaying the historical consciousness of the human race in all its varieties.'Jonathan Clark, Times Literary Supplement

• Editors' Introduction ; 1. History and Theory ; 2. History and Memory ; 3. Censorship and History since 1945 ; 4. Postcolonial Criticism and History: Subaltern Studies ; 5. World History ; 6. Global Economic History: A Survey ; 7. Women's and Gender History ; 8. The Historiography of Environmental History ; 9. The Historiography of Science and Technology ; 10. History and Social Science in the West ; 11. From the Search for Normality to the Search for Normality: German Historical Writing ; 12. Historical Writing in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary ; 13. French Historical Writing ; 14. British Historical Writing ; 15. Scandinavian Historical Writing ; 16. Italian Historical Writing ; 17. Historical Writing in the Balkans ; 18. Athens and Apocalypse: Writing History in Soviet Russia ; 19. African Historical Writing ; 20. Argentine Historical Writing in an Era of Political Instability ; 21. Brazilian Historical Writing ; 22. Mexican Historical Writing ; 23. American Historical Writing ; 24. Arab Historical Writing ; 25. Indian Historical Writing since 1947 ; 26. Thai Historical Writing ; 27. Vietnamese Historical Writing ; 28. Indonesian Historical Writing since Independence ; 29. Settler Histories and Indigenous Pasts: New Zealand and Australia ; 30. Chinese Historical Writing since 1949 ; 31. Japanese Historical Writing ; 32. Historians and Historical Writing in Korea ; Epilogue: On the Current and Future State of Historical Writing