Historiography

Over the past quarter century, the study of historiography has been globalized and expanded well beyond older accounts that focused principally on European-based traditions of historical writing. Often simply considered as the analysis of writings about particular problems or events and taken as an add-on or adjunct to “real” history, it has become a serious historical subfield in its own right—in a sense, the discipline’s theoretical and historical meta-field. As a result, there are now several recent textbooks, encyclopedias, monographs, and book series available to students, professional historians, and others interested in the subject. Yet some of the most incisive and thought-provoking historiographical studies of the past four decades have appeared not in book form but in a range of academic journals from around the world—not all of which are always readily accessible outside major research libraries. Q. Edward Wang has used his extensive experience of teaching, critically thinking about, and prolifically writing on historiography to select some of the best historiographical scholarship to be produced since the 1980s for reprinting. They appear here with the added benefit of Prof. Wang’s substantive introductions to each of four chronologically-arranged volumes that cover writings on subjects ranging from antiquity to the present, and with an ambitiously global geographic range. With this handsome set, Bloomsbury continues to establish itself as a major publisher of scholarship focusing on the history, nature, and changing social role of human study of the past. * Daniel Woolf, Professor of History, Queens University, Canada *