After history became a field of professional scholarship in the nineteenth century, however, historians largely turned away from large-scale approaches to the past in favor of studies focusing on individual societies, especially national communities in Europe. The explanation for this narrowing of historians' focus lies in the political and social environment of nineteenth-century Europe. Like sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science, history emerged as a professional field of study in a Europe that had embarked on processes of dynamic state-building, rapid industrialization, and global imperialism. This political and social context profoundly influenced the development of history and the social sciences. Under the spell of the powerful national states that were taking shape around them, European scholars focused their attention on national communities, which they took as natural units of historical and social analysis. In light of industrialization and imperialism, they construed Europe as the site of genuine historical development, as opposed to other regions that they considered stagnant and unchanging, and they based their models of social change and historical development exclusively on European experience.