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World history has recently been brought into French historiographical debates. Is it a new American fashion or even a new tool of American or neoliberal hegemony? This paper explains why it is in fact a typical product of a multicultural, globalizing, Cold War and post-Cold War America. However, there are other national traditions of world history, and world history research works like an interconnected transnational archipelago. Although it is a promising field, it has many weaknesses, and while most world historians are aware of these weaknesses, they fear a nationalist backlash as world history might become a mere cultural varnish for globalized elites or a conflict zone for nationalists who want access to the grand universal narrative of the history of the world.