Editors’ Introduction
This concluding volume in The Oxford History of Historical Writing covers a very small period in comparison with some of its companions: barely two‐thirds of a century. As with the other volumes, the boundary dates are both fluid and imprecise: 1945 is a watershed date for the world in the sense that it marked the end of the Second World War and the division of Europe into a Western and an Eastern bloc. Elsewhere in the world, other dates are more meaningful: for China, 1949 is the critical year; and in much of Africa the decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s marked a significant rupture with past, colonial historiography. Unlike the earlier volumes, our period is also an unfinished one, for though some obvious sub‐periods are broken at points such as the early 1960s, the fall of European communism at the end of the 1980s, and the rapid rise of both globalization and radical Islam during the 1990s, it is difficult to predict, in early 2010 as this introduction is written, just where the story of post‐war historiography will end, or how. What ...