Although unquestionably problematic, world history is also a necessary project. Over the course of a few decades, global historical analysis has demolished assumptions that history is a property attaching exclusively to national states or other ostensibly coherent individual societies. While recognizing that cultural distinctiveness, exclusive identities, local knowledge, and the experiences of individual societies are perfectly valid interests, it has gone beyond these traditional concerns of professional historical scholarship and brought large-scale processes into clear historical focus. In doing so, it has demonstrated that various transregional, continental, hemispheric, oceanic, and global frameworks make appropriate contexts, alongside national states and individual societies, for the analysis of many historical processes. Furthermore, global historical analysis has offered opportunities to move beyond Eurocentrism and other ethnocentric approaches to the past by understanding the experiences of all the world's peoples in larger historical context, rather than viewing some of them as totally exceptional, incomparable, and unrelated to the experiences of others. Thus, recent scholarship in world history has not only contributed to the understanding of the world as a whole, but also has constructed contexts for the better understanding of individual regions and their relationships with the larger whole.