How dependent is history upon the viewpoints of its researchers/writers, or perhaps more to point, how influenced are historians and others by the cultural factors in which they live?
By which I mean, how much difference is there between how various nations/cultures present history? In an increasingly globalized world, can there ever be a history that encompasses the world rather than the background of its writers? Is it a case of cultural hegemony that shapes history, presumably from an Euro-centric, Anglo-centric, and/or American centric narrative? Do other countries accept the English language narrative of history or do they prefer their own? If the latter, does it matter to have a fragmented and probably oftentimes contradictory history? Does the academic study of history reinforce the dominant cultural ideals of the ruling power?
It's a lot of questions, but the common theme I'm trying to get at here is, how is it decided whose narrative becomes the accepted history? Not simply varying from nations, but from class, from race, and many other variables. I realize that it may be in many cases the answer is "Whatever we can find, since there's so little."
Is it possible to establish a "true" history, or is it only possible have a culturally based history that will be competing with many other histories?
This may be a good time for me to awkwardly describe Leopold von Ranke's theories, which I'm not really that familiar with -- so hopefully someone can correct me if I go astray. Ranke was confident that competent historians who engaged all the relevant sources empirically could produce an objective, reliable history. The role of the historian was to stand back as an omniscient narrator whose voice would essentially be absent and whose personal position (race, class, nation, and so on) would be irrelevant.
In many ways, the Rankean philosophy of history remains powerful today -- particularly within popular understandings of history -- although obviously historians have engaged with a whole series of modern and postmodern claims on narrative, ways of knowing, and positionality since Ranke's time. But the notion that historians are collectively engaged in producing a single consensus history that can stand for all time really doesn't capture the work that most historians actually do. Maybe the people that are most closely engaged in producing sweeping national or global histories that everyone (theoretically) agrees with are textbook authors or museum curators -- and even so I imagine they'd describe their roles in different terms.
Professional historians do produce big, global histories with sweeping narratives and do actively attempt to work beyond national borders and across cultures. I myself work very hard to produce historical work that can be responsive and useful to the non-Western communities with which I work, and always try to think through ways in which my position and the sources I rely on may be leading me to frame stories in biased or skewed ways. I write about empire, and I'm constantly bombarded with claims that originated as subtle justifications of colonial rule, so it's important to me not to inadvertently reinforce those claims. I also don't imagine that my work will supplant indigenous histories. My work is intended to be complementary to those histories, and to serve a different function.
Central to all of this, I think, is the need to recognize that who we are impacts the way that we research and the way that we write. That doesn't mean that only Japanese historians are able to write about Japan, or even that a Chinese or a Korean historian would necessarily produce scholarship that was substantially different from what this hypothetical Japanese scholar produced. It just means that historians need to ask themselves questions. Am I valorizing these American missionaries because they remind me of myself? Am I interested in this topic because it's important, relevant, and useful, or because by some quirk of my own personality or experience I happen to find it entertaining? If the latter, is that problematic, am I safe to press ahead, or should I tweak my research questions?
I don't mean to be too relativistic here -- because historians work with sources, we can't go too far in the direction of Derrida. Or at least I don't think we can. There may not be many historians walking around trumpeting their work as the one true history for all people now and forever, but we still imagine that our work is the best and most reliable output of which we are capable at the time of production. This feels like a bit of a ramble, but I hope it helps.
While you wait for answers dealing with the historiography of an increasingly globalized world, you might be interested in what some historians have had to say about the theory of history and truth in previous threads:
Let's have a go at this.
So, let's abandon for a moment the idea of "neutrally." There be dragons.