World history holds an awkward place within the historical discipline. It is evoked most frequently in America as the framework for a survey course for undergraduates, where it is often seen as a sort of fast-food solution, a means for honoring diversity by introducing the existence of other societies and of a very long past to students without the preparation or patience for a more nutritious diet. Yet world history has also always been associated with profound and fundamental questions. Once called philosophy of history and enjoying ancient ties to religion, world history tended in academic study to flatten into generalizations about wealth and power—usually involving the path to them and their use in different eras—accompanied by some analysis of the pattern of their rise and fall. Today’s expanding interest in world history, however, reflects something more than its convenience for classrooms committed to diversity or the appeal of pondering eternal questions. It rests in part on an impressive body of recent scholarship building on but recasting an enormous literature on empires, global power, and economic development.1 Largely by happenstance, the works considered here underrepresent