Introduction to the English Edition

In his letter to the prospective contributors to the Cambridge Modern History, one of the greatest collaborative works of history published in the twentieth century, British historian Lord Acton triumphantly declared that “the long conspiracy against the knowledge of truth has been practically abandoned, and competing scholars all over the civilized world are taking advantage of the change.” Citing the principle of the Cambridge History, he reminded his contributors that “our Waterloo must be one that satisfies French and English, German, and Dutch alike; that nobody can tell, without examining the list of authors, where the Bishop of Oxford laid down the pen, and whether Fairbairn or Gasquet, Liebermann or Harrison took it up.”1 Such optimism about universal history was not uncommon then. After all, as Leopold von Ranke, another great nineteenth-century historian, famously put it, historians’ task regarding the past was simply to show “how it really was.” Under such a conception, historians’ own subjectivity rarely mattered. Today, such a confident claim to the universal truth about history is viewed by most historians with skepticism. Two trends have contributed to this. To begin with, the rise of Relativism in the latter half of the