World history in some sense of the term has been prominent for a very long time. Herodotus, Sima Qian, and Juvaini all looked beyond their own societies (classical Greece, Han-dynasty China, and Mongol-dominated Persia, respectively) and took the larger world into account. During the Enlightenment, Voltaire undertook his famous cross-cultural history of customs, while the Göttingen historians Johann Cristoph Gatterer and August Ludwig Schlözer worked to establish an analytical “universal history.” Global conflicts of the twentieth century prompted reflections on world history from a remarkably diverse group of thinkers (most of them not professional historians), including H. G. Wells, Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, and Jawaharlal Nehru, among others