Drawing on Jerry Bentley's capacious framing of world history, Stolte and Schrikker have not only provided us with a view of how world history is “done” but catalogued a unique selection of voices behind different yet convergent historical approaches. World History—A Genealogy collects twenty-five interviews with well-known practitioners of world history from the pages of Itinerario between 1996 and 2016. The selection, each with different interlocutors, is thoughtfully curated, evident from the introduction's careful and studied critique of Leiden Center for the History of European Expansion and the Reactions’ institutional past, the attention to gendered realities of scholarly labour, and the enthusiasm for emerging areas of scholarship like the Pacific Ocean. By contextualizing academic networks that weave in and out of Leiden within pivotal historiographical debates, the introduction recalls the slow rearrangement of intellectual politics and methodological rubrics in world history since the 1970s.

The collection can be read in many ways depending on one's interests. One inclined towards scholarly biography, which is a common question across Itinerario interviews, might read the book for pathways of scholarship through Leiden that shaped world history elsewhere. Om Prakash's reflections to Jos Gommans, Carl Feddersen, and then editor Leonard Blusse in 1997 on being one of the first international scholars to work with VOC archives in the Netherlands are very illuminating. Prakash's interview brings out the challenges of reading Dutch archives for South Asian economic history and the later relevance of such work to debates on India's maritime and inland economies. His engagement with Michael Pearson's use of categories and reflections on his work on Bengal in relation to the South China Sea will interest students of emerging global South Asian histories. Pearson's interview to Ghulam Nadri references similar debates in connection to Mughal historiography and the development of Indian Ocean studies out of Australia that he helped shape. His lifelong physical and intellectual intimacy with maritime worlds and efforts to challenge the limits of Portuguese archives reveal what one might call the inner life of oceanic history. Indeed, both Prakash and Pearson also mention the critical influence of their partners on their scholarly biographies. Prakash's decision to teach not in the U.S. but Delhi and Pearson's attention to medicine in the Indian Ocean keep pace with how the editors alert us to gender in the life of historiography.

Those attentive to challenges of colonial histories inside academic life will find Allison Blakeley's interview to Suzanne de Graaf where he reflects on being racialised and misidentified as a Surinamean scholar while researching in the Netherlands in 1975 indicative of the limits of tolerance in a decolonising world. Blakeley's reflections on his work on racial imagery in Europe echo Ann Laura Stoler's experience in her 2016 interview to Amrit Dev and Sanne Ravensbergen. Citing Clifford Geertz's dismissive review for her tenure promotion and how her work on Dutch colonialism in South East Asia has not been reviewed in The Netherlands, Stoler suggests a more serious engagement with the politics of race and gender under empire in world history scholarship. The categorical utility of empire and its relationship to historians of colonialism appears most fruitfully in Frederick Cooper's interview to Iva Pesa and Alicia Schrikker where he notes the possible valences of empire beyond trading relationships. In bringing together scholars whose lives and scholarship bear a stronger imprint of Marxism and decolonization movements together with others who hew closely to what the editors call Leiden's liberal tradition, the volume serves as a window into the correspondence between politics and scholarship. Besides Cooper and Stoler, Natalie Zemon Davis’ account to Jessica Roitman and Karwan Fatah-Black of E.P. Thompson's engagement with her early work and her later interest in Suriname should inspire any student of microhistory in a global context. Alternatively, Brij Lal's interview, given to Doug Munro in 1995 while he was still on the Constitutional Review Commission of Fiji, elaborates upon what he calls critical attachment in historical practice. Those familiar with the intersections of his estimable scholarship with Fiji's post-colonial realities of racial politics, military coups, and constitutionalism will find his words poignant today. The contemporary rise in world history scholarship on the region validates Lal's career-long influence on Pacific Ocean history.

There remain errors to be corrected. The introduction (22-23) reproduces C.A. Bayly's long quote (193) about Annales historiography, Subaltern Studies, and the “brand-name” post-colonialism but incorrectly attributes it to the late Ashin Das Gupta whose interview contains no such opinion. Some descriptive terms in the introduction should also be reconsidered. For instance, the word “subalterns” to describe the scholars themselves who were associated with Subaltern Studies is misplaced just as the use of “frontiers” to characterize emerging interests in world history can sound imperial in tone. Also, the title of Bayly's interview and its listing on the contents page excludes the word “simply” from his actual quote, “I am not going to call myself simply a global historian” (93). Bayly insists that he has always been a historian of the local and the regional, arguments from which “can be employed simultaneously” with global history. The titles ought to reflect Bayly's subtle provocation to world historians about the importance of the local.

World history, Stolte and Schrikker remind us, is changing fast. Leiden is not an old boys’ club anymore, new analytical categories are emerging in the field, and digitisation of source material and online teaching flourishes apace. While David Armitage's interview to Jaap Jacobs and Martine van Ittersum reveals the opportunities and challenges coalescing around expanding digital methods in history, Robert Ross's confession to Alicia Schrikker and Jan Gewald that the landscape is still his favourite source should console the more adventurous among historians. Such diverse narratives make the collection hopeful, cautionary, inspiring, and humorous in equal measure.