The idea of world history was born of the European mind at a time when Europe itself was spreading its power to the four quarters of the globe. We, who are so used to it, forget how novel this idea was and how late in its appearance. The voyages of the fifteenth century, and the continued explorations and settlements that followed, opened the whole world to European civilization. Hitherto history had been local or tribal, limited to particular peoples or empires. By the eighteenth century the age of the enlightenment could envision all humanity as the subject of one history and the whole earth as the theater of a single drama.
It was only natural then that Europe, at this moment of expansive power and in the self-assurance of its mission, should create the idea of universal history after its own image and see itself as the center of the historical process, natural too that it should read the meaning of this history in the terms on which it prided its own civilization.
William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in Technological Civilization (Anchor Books, 1979), p. 196.
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