Given the state of the art of scholarship dealing with the evolution of world history, this chapter provides a balanced perspective between elite and other interpretations of the global past. Christian universal histories were repeatedly written in a spirit that sought to divide divine truth from heretical viewpoints. Starting from the late fifteenth century, the European conquests began having massive impacts on entire world regions, particularly the Americas and the coastal regions of Sub-Saharan Africa. The growing knowledge about different world regions fed into the epistemological crises of European historiography. During the early modern period, many societies experienced their own "culture wars" or "history wars", for example between religious and proto-secular narratives. The Eurocentric orientation of historiographical cultures in general and world history in particular continued during much of the twentieth century. Despite its limited impacts, university-based historical scholarship has a strong influence on general education systems as well as, to a certain extent, on the media.

The publication of the bull Regnans in excelsis in 1570 had many unexpected side effects, one of which was to inaugurate a native school or habit of scholarship. Scholars work was part of the Erasmian concept of bonae litterae, as much devoted to the spread of learning by translation, from Greek to Latin or Latin to the vernacular, such as grammars and manuals. One-and-a-half centuries later, one of the first English scholars Bishop White Kennett, observed that the reason that most of the old Historians were first printed beyond the seas was cheaper methods and quicker sale that made the Editors to gain abroad what they must have lost at home. Archbishop Parker's belief in the importance of Anglo-Saxon studies stretched from collecting the manuscripts that he left to Cambridge and Corpus Christi College to an informed interest in their printing with specially cut types. The last work of seventeenth-century British scholarship was the first of the new century.