From its genre-name, one may expect world history to be the ultimate expression or end-goal of historical studies. But in the mid-19th century, world history occupied only a marginal place in the overall historical discipline, and was usually the provenance of dabblers and not professional historians. The then-world history was a new field of inquiry that was poorly integrated with other fields. As a result, the study of world history entered a period of decline into popular literature, instead of rising to the dignity of a formal discipline. However, fortunes changed in the late 20th century. With the rise of the research standards, widespread education and globalization-consciousness, world history fully became a sub-discipline of history. This essay narrates the path of its evolution as a field of knowledge, from its original search for an ontological meaning of the world, to its current orientation of approaching the human past from an analytical perspective. The analysis of world history in this essay begins at its departure point with Leopold van Ranke (1795-1886), and ends with its consolidation as a core field of history at the contemporary time.
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