Credit for placing large-scale processes on the agenda of professional historians is due principally to Marshall G. S. Hodgson, L. S. Stavrianos, William H. McNeill, and Philip D. Curtin. Hodgson sharply criticized the kind of Eurocentric scholarship that measured the world's societies against the standard of European experience, and he called for comparative, transregional, hemispheric, and global approaches to the past.4 Stavrianos tirelessly promoted the teaching of world history and insisted on the need to analyze the human past from a global point of view.5 McNeill recognized that individual societies are not the only sites of historical development, that historical processes take place between and among societies as well as within individual societies, and he developed this insight into a dynamic vision of the global past. By analyzing encounters, interactions, and exchanges between peoples of different societies, he sought to understand some of the most powerful processes of world history. He articulated his vision of the past most fully in his book The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, which emphasized diffusions of ideas and technological skills as driving forces of world history.6 Curtin preferred not to write about the world as a whole, but he developed an influential method of illuminating crucial global themes through comparative case studies. He also pioneered graduate education and supervised scores of students who helped establish comparative world history as a distinctive approach to the global past.7