The rise of the West to a position of dominance is one of the most important developments in world history in recent centuries. Many have dealt with it in some central framework, whether that of European history alone, that of economic history, or that of a world system. Everyone writing about the world beyond Europe has had to take the rise of the West into account, consciously or unconsciously.

For the world outside the West, the central fact in this period is the challenge of the West and the responses to it, and many historians have dealt with this subject in different ways. These essays represent a particular approach, with an emphasis on the non-Western responses seen through case studies of particular problems, rather than through broad themes and overall generalizations. The choice of cases may appear idiosyncratic, but it was not random. They were chosen in an effort to look at a wide variety of responses within a brief scope. The sharp shift in subject matter from a discussion of administrative decisions and their outcomes in Southeast Asia to the affairs of Maya peasants in Yucatan was intentional. Both views represent only a part of the whole reality, but together they represent part of the variety of what actually took place. The essays seek to incorporate the perspective of world history, not by telling all the important things that happened anywhere – a clear impossibility – but by telling about a selection of different things that happened in different places within the framework of different human societies.