The Origins of the Modern World reflects recent trends in historiography, including increased interest among scholars in world history rather than history specializing in one nation or one region. World history is a more comprehensive approach that is especially important when discussing topics that affect various regions of the world, such as trade or colonialism. Also, world history is an important way of correcting how history in the English-speaking world has focused excessively on Western Europe and the US. Traditionally, when written histories did focus on regions like South Asia or West Africa, they tended to view non-Western peoples and states as passive, acted upon by the Western powers (especially in the age of colonialism) rather than acting in their own right. Another related trend in historiography over the last five decades has been an expansion of the concept of history beyond the political, the economic, the intellectual, and the military to other aspects of human experience across time, like social, cultural, gender, and environmental history. The view of history as more than just the story of various nation-states and wars lends itself to the development of world history as a popular approach.

Attitudes among both scholars and the general public have increasingly questioned the idea of Western exceptionalism, and this has become a bitter topic of political debate.