World history is an important branch of history, which systematically discusses and expounds the process of human history from primitive, isolated and scattered people to the closely related whole world. The main task of the world history discipline is to comprehensively investigate the history of various regions, countries and nations from the perspective of the whole world, and use the achievements of cultural anthropology, archaeology and other related disciplines to study and clarify the evolution of human history and reveal the laws and trends of evolution.

In China, since the early 1950s, mainly due to the division of history, people used to compare the history of China with the history of the world, and almost regarded the history of the world as a synonym for foreign history. In fact, world history is by no means an extraterritorial history that excludes China's history. The history of China, like the history of all other countries, is an integral part of the whole process of human history developing into world history.

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So far, there is no complete agreement on the stages of world history. As early as the Renaissance, there was a saying in the west that history was divided into "ancient", "medieval" and "modern". This division based on European history has been used by western historians for a long time. Many historians add "contemporary" or "modern" after the three periods, thus forming the four-stage method.

Marxist historiography also adopts the four-stage staging method, which is based on the theory of historical materialism on the development of social and economic forms, and is essentially different from those historians who take the rise and fall of politics or other "major events" as the staging standard. Marxist historians generally regard "ancient" as the stage of primitive society and slave society, "medieval" as the stage of feudal society, "modern" as the stage of capitalist society, and "modern" refers to the new period from the October socialist revolution in Russia.

Some scholars believe that the word "Middle Ages" is only applicable to the history of Western Europe and has no universal significance in the history of the world, so the word "Middle Ages" is used to indicate the stage between "ancient" and "modern". This staging method is completely feasible in theory. However, the development of human history is unbalanced. All parts of the world enter a certain socio-economic form sooner or later, and the time they experience in a certain socio-economic form is also long and short. Especially since the history entered the civilized period, we rarely see the socio-economic form that absolutely belongs to this stage or that stage, and rarely see the transition from the low-level socio-economic form to the high-level socio-economic form with absolutely neat and single development. Therefore, there are still differences on the division of world history.