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Art in Theory: The West in the World is an independent, free‐standing book. It can be read, studied and taught from in its own right. But it also forms a complement to the three existing volumes of the Art in Theory project. In chronological order, these books are: Art in Theory 1648–1815, Art in Theory 1815–1900 and Art in Theory 1900–2000. Published between 1992 and 2003 under the editorship of Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger, these anthologies presented an archaeology of the changing ideas that had contributed to the making of European – and subsequently ‘Western’ – art from the consolidation of the Academic system in the mid‐seventeenth century, through the Modernist period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to the then‐current ‘Postmodernism’ at the turn of the millennium.

That extended period obviously encompassed many changes, some evolutionary, some revolutionary, in the sense of what art was and might be. Nonetheless, the focus through all three volumes remained consistent. In terms of Art in Theory’s final tally of three‐and‐a‐half thousand pages and almost nine hundred texts, ‘Art’ was European, was coterminous with the ‘Western canon’. For all its internal density, Art in Theory had little in the way of an outside. It was, in effect, as if the West was the world. In this, the Art in Theory series was a creature of its time. But that time is now gone.

Several years after the assumed ‘completion’ of Art in Theory, Paul Wood had embarked on the project of writing a theoretically informed account of the relations between ‘Western’ art and the arts of the rest of the world over the extended modern period from the Renaissance to Globalization. In light of this, Harrison and Wood began to plan a fourth volume of Art in Theory to complement the existing Western‐oriented volumes with a documentary anthology of those wider relations extending over the same approximate period. Harrison died in the early stages of drafting the anthology. Thereafter, Wood initially worked to complete his book Western Art and the Wider World, published in 2013, and the long‐planned documentary anthology was eventually brought to completion in its present form by Wood and Leon Wainwright in 2019.

The globalization of art is now established fact. There are, to be sure, various qualifications that can, and need, to be entered into that statement. Traditional centres, pre‐eminently New York, remain powerful. Canonical Western institutions such as the Guggenheim and the Louvre have implanted themselves worldwide, from the Middle East to China. But nonetheless, the balance of forces has changed, both conceptually and practically. Previously, in terms of an anthology of changing ideas about art, concepts such as ‘the primitive’ and ‘Primitivism’ – to take a contentious example – were conventionally regarded as essentially internal to the development of the Western avant‐garde and were organized around predominantly technical and formal properties of objects. Now no contemporary treatment of the relationship between European and African art could employ the concept of ‘the primitive’ as anything other than symptomatic of wider relationships of power. How those relationships are construed is, of course, the nub of the matter; they can be seen as primarily inscribed by class or gender or race, by colonialism or capitalism, by empire or ethnicity, or by conceptions of identity that run across all of them, framing them or being framed by them according to who you are, what you believe and where you stand, morally and politically. But cumulatively such matters are inescapable for any project aspiring to anthologize changing ideas of art on a global scale.