The Routledge Companion to Big History

Craig Benjamin, Esther Quaedackers, David Baker, Craig Benjamin, Esther Quaedackers, David Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000228021
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Routledge Companion to Big History guides readers though the variety of themes and concepts that structure contemporary scholarship in the field of big history.

The volume is divided into five parts, each representing current and evolving areas of interest to the community, including big history's relationship to science, social science, the humanities, and the future, as well as teaching big history and 'little big histories'. Considering an ever-expanding range of theoretical, pedagogical and research topics, the book addresses such questions as what is the relationship between big history and scientific research, how are big historians working with philosophers and religious thinkers to help construct 'meaning', how are leading theoreticians making sense of big history and its relationship to other creation narratives and paradigms, what is 'little big history', and how does big history impact on thinking about the future? The book highlights the place of big history in historiographical traditions and the ways in which it can be used in education and public discourse across disciplines and at all levels.

A timely collection with contributions from leading proponents in the field, it is the ideal guide for those wanting to engage with the theories and concepts behind big history.

1
WHAT IS BIG HISTORY?¹

David Christian

Big history is based on a very ancient idea, which sixteenth century French historian Jean Bodin captured nicely: “As they err who study the maps of regions before they have learned accurately the relation of the whole universe and the separate parts of it to each other and to the whole, so they are not less mistaken who think they can understand particular histories before they have judged the order and sequence of universal history and of all times, set forth as it were in a table.”² Big history represents an attempt at what E.O. Wilson has called “consilience,” a return to the goal of a unified understanding of reality, in place of the fragmented visions that dominate modern education and scholarship.³ Though it may seem new, the goal of consilience is very old. And even in its modern forms, big history has been around for at least a quarter of a century. So the publication of the first issue of the Journal of Big History provides the ideal opportunity for a stock take.

This article is a personal account of the field. It sees big history as the modern form of an ancient project. I am a historian by training, so my account focuses on the relationship of big history to the discipline of history. It reflects the perspective of a historian trained in the English-speaking world, and it focuses on big history’s relationship to Anglophone historical scholarship. But not just to Anglophone historical scholarship, because the debates I discuss had their counterparts and echoes in many other traditions of historical scholarship. Nor do I focus just on historical scholarship as it is normally understood within the academy, because big history sees human history as part of a much larger past that includes the pasts studied by biologists, paleontologists, geologists, and cosmologists. By linking different perspectives and scales, and many different scholarly disciplines, all of which try to understand the deep roots of today’s world, big history can transform our understanding of “history.”

However, to fully capture the richness and range of this vibrant new field of research, scholarship, and teaching, we will eventually need the perspectives of big historians trained in many other disciplines. I hope this essay may encourage such scholars to offer their distinctive perspectives on big history.

The evolution of historical scholarship in the twentieth century

Historians will recognize that my title comes from a classic essay on history, studied by most Anglophone history graduates. It was written in 1961 by E.H. Carr, an English historian of the Soviet Union. Carr’s book began as a lecture series given at Cambridge in 1961 in honor of George Macauley Trevelyan, a historian who, unlike Carr, saw history as a literary discipline, and quite distinct from the sciences. As a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, Carr took seriously the Marxist insistence that history should be regarded as a branch of science, and that idea influenced my own thinking about history as I, too, entered the field of Russian history as a graduate student in the early 1970s.

In “What is History?” Carr tracks the evolution of the history discipline in England in the early twentieth century. At one level, his story is of a sustained trend away from the confident realism, positivism, and even universalism of many nineteenth century historical thinkers, towards increasing fragmentation and skepticism. He begins by citing Lord Acton’s confident vision of historical scholarship from the 1890s, as Acton presided over the first edition of the Cambridge Modern History. Acton saw the Cambridge Modern History as “a unique opportunity of recording, … the fullness of the knowledge which the nineteenth century is about to bequeath….” He added: “Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation [but] … all information is now within reach, and every problem has become capable of solution.”⁴ Acton’s view of history is confident, positivist, and optimistic, and it assumes that history is part of the larger project of increasing human knowledge in general. His vision of history is also broad. He assumed that historians should aim at some kind of “universal history,” though he seems to have understood that phrase to mean, not an early form of big history, but something closer to modern “world history” or “global history.” Acton defined universal history as “that which is distinct from the combined history of all countries.”⁵

In the early twentieth century, English historical scholarship underwent a profound transformation, and when Carr wrote, the discipline was more fractured and less sure of itself. These shifts were part of a sea-change that affected most scholarly disciplines, from the humanities to the natural sciences, as specialization and professionalization broke scholarship into ever-smaller compartments, each offering its own pin-hole view of the world. Specialization proved a powerful research strategy, but it was achieved by severing ancient links among fields of knowledge, leaving them increasingly isolated from each other. The idea of a single world of knowledge, whether united by religious cosmologies, such as that of Christianity, or by scientific scholarship—the vision that lay behind Alexander von Humboldt’s attempt to write a scientific universal history in his Kosmos—was abandoned.⁶ In humanities disciplines such as history, which lacked the sort of unifying paradigm ideas characteristic of the natural sciences in the era of Darwin, of Maxwell and of Einstein, specialization also undermined Acton’s confident epistemological realism.⁷

Carr captures some of these changes by citing the introduction to the second edition of the Cambridge Modern History, written by George Clark in 1957, more than half a century after Acton’s confident pronouncements. After citing Acton’s hopes for an “ultimate history,” Clark writes:

Historians of a later generation do not look forward to any such prospect. They expect their work to be superseded again and again. …The exploration seems to be endless, and some impatient scholars take refuge in skepticism, or at least in the doctrine that, since all historical judgements involve persons and points of view, one is as good as another and there is no ‘objective’ historical truth.⁸

The loss of confidence in a realist or naturalist epistemology in disciplines, such as history, widened the gulf between the “two cultures” of the sciences and humanities that so worried C.P. Snow in a famous lecture delivered in 1959.⁹ The gulf was particularly wide in the English-speaking world, because English, unlike most other scholarly languages, confined the word, “science,” to the natural sciences. In English, the very idea of “historical science” began to seem absurd. By Carr’s time, historical scholarship had lost confidence both in the “scientific” nature of historical scholarship, and in the realist epistemology that still underpinned research in the natural sciences.

Skepticism and intellectual fragmentation sapped confidence in the value of historical research, and undermined the ancient hope that history could empower us by helping us better understand the present. As historians became increasingly isolated from other disciplines and even from each other, they were left with increasingly fragmented visions of the past, and of the nature and goals of history. This growing sense of fragmentation was the scholarly counterpart of what Durkheim called anomie, the loss of a sense of coherence and meaning, an idea that Carr himself glosses in a footnote as “the condition of the individual isolated from … society.”¹⁰ Scholarly anomie arose from the growing isolation of scholars both from each other and from a unified world of knowledge. The one force that partially mitigated the growing sense of scholarly isolation was nationalism. Though tribal by their very nature, national histories, which had flourished since the nineteenth century, provided some sense of cohesion for historians working within national historiographical traditions.

Carr’s own position falls between the robust scientific realism of Acton and the hesitant relativism of Clark. He explores brilliantly the complex dialectic between history as truth and history as stories we tell about the past. He takes truth and science seriously, because he believes that history, like science, and like truth in general, has a purpose: it can empower us. It empowers us by improving our understanding of the present, and it does that by mapping the present on to the past: “The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.”¹¹ It followed that the maps of the past created by historians had to be good maps. Like good science, they had to give us a better grip on the real world. So Carr, like Marx, was a philosophical realist and saw no fundamental chasm between the humanities and the natural sciences.

Scientists, social scientists, and historians are all engaged in different branches of the same study: the study of man and his environment, of the effects of man on his environment and of his environment on man. The object of the study is the same: to increase man’s understanding of, and mastery over, his environment.¹²

On the other hand, Carr understood more clearly than Acton that the past is not simply waiting to be discovered, “like fish on a fishmonger’s slab.”¹³ History consists of stories about the past constructed by historians, and how we construct those stories changes as our world and our purposes change. We need empirical rigor to get at the truth about the past, but when telling stories about the past we will need the skills of storytellers, including what Carr calls “imaginative understanding,” the ability to understand and empathize with those who lived in the past.¹⁴ In this, Carr was influenced by one of the great English philosophers of history, R.G. Collingwood, though he warned that Collingwood’s emphasis on the empathetic role of the historian, if taken too far, could lead to extreme skepticism.¹⁵

Particularly, influential on Carr’s thinking was Marx’s dialectical balance between science and activism. Marx insisted that there is an objective past. But making something of that past is a creative task, and how we approach it depends on who we are and the particular present in which we write and study. This is the dialectic that Marx described in a famous passage from the “18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.”

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.¹⁶

Historians, too, “make their own history,” but they do so “under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.” What they make of the past depends on the time and place in which they write. But the stories they construct about the past may, in their turn, influence the pasts studied by future historians. As an activist, Marx understood well that how we describe the past matters, because our accounts may shape the future. Indeed, he hoped that his own account of the evolution of capitalism would have a profound impact on the future, as indeed, it did.

Like Marx, then, Carr understood the complex and delicate balance between history as truth and history as story. History is, Carr wrote, in a passage familiar to many a graduate student in history: “a continuous process of interaction between the historian and [the] facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.”¹⁷ Like memory, history does not recall the past; it re-creates it.

But what past? Carr was even more committed than Acton to broadening the scope ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introductory chapters
• 1 What is big history?
• PART I Big history and science
• PART II Big history, social science and the humanities
• PART III Little big histories
• PART IV Teaching big history
• PART V Big history and the future
• Index