Smail’s ultimate point is that the shifts in historiography had not yet
run their course—thus his comment that “the crisis is very much with us.”
Nationalist historiography was only a partial solution, in itself not
commensurate with the “great changes” in the world that included the breaking down of particularisms, the “increasingly firm establishment of a
single world culture, or civilization, within which there is a single universal
physical science (already virtually achieved), a single universal history and so
forth.” Nationalist historiography, like its binary opposite colonial
historiography, was for Smail a “closed system” that inevitably would become
irrelevant as a single universal history was developed.