A reservation that is perhaps more serious has to do with the lenses through which world historians view the larger world. Leaving aside Eurocentric, orientalist, racist, and other varieties of aggressively ethnocentric perspectives, which inevitably taint representations of other peoples and societies, the problem remains that even the most cosmopolitan approach comes from some perspective that complicates efforts to understand other peoples, societies, and cultural traditions. Indeed, some argue that professional historical scholarship is itself a Eurocentric project that takes the modern European national state both as a historical norm and as its principal subject, even when it deals with the world beyond Europe. Granting that absolute analytical purity is a noble dream akin to perfect objectivity, a self-reflective awareness that questions regimes of intellectual and cultural domination might nevertheless support improved practical understandings of the world and the cross-cultural interactions that have shaped it throughout human history.