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central concern of historians is what the
appropriate time-scale of history ought to be. David Armitage indicates that
most historians find themselves working in an interval between five and fifty
years. This was not always the case. Prior to the professionalization of the
history field in the late nineteenth century, historians freely cast a long net
in time to capture the so-called “grand historical narrative,” seeking out
broad patterns of history in centuries or even millennia. As professional
history became both more specialized and widespread, shrinking periodization became
micro-history and case studies until the grand narratives of history—human or
otherwise—were relegated to cosmology and anthropology. Armitage argues for a
return to the longer view of history: the Longue
Durée, or "long term."
In “The Return of the Longue Durée: An Anglo-American
Perspective (2015),” Armitage explores why the Longue Durée initially retreated in the historical professional, its
current revival, and the questions about how the Longue Durée informs the questions historians ask. The Longue Durée, he argues, “allows [historians] to step outside the confines
of national history to ask about the rise of long-term complexes, over many
decades, centuries, or even millennia; only by scaling our inquiries over [such] duration can we explain and understand the genesis of contemporary global
discontents.” The problem is that historical work has become too dependently
tied to “events.” Unlike economists, historians must “untether” themselves from
such limitations. Worse still, the professionalization and specialization of
history has led to the diminished capacity of historians to have an audience
with policy makers as their “grand narrative” ancestors had. The inquiries of
micro-history are undoubtedly rich and complex, but without a larger context
such questions became “irrelevant” to non-experts. Armitage calls for the
return of the Longue Durée to act as
an inspiration for historians “to return history to its mission as a social
science.”
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| The Observable Universe (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2MASS_LSS_chart-NEW_Nasa.jpg) |
David Christian, in “The Return of
Universal History (2010)” evokes a similar sentiment when he calls for a return
to “universal history,” defined “as the attempt to understand the past at all
possible scales, up to those of cosmology, and to do so in ways that do justice
both to the contingency and specificity of the past and also to the large
patterns that help make sense of the details.” He writes that in the nineteenth
century, “[historians] lowered their sights, insisting that factual rigor must
precede high theory.” The grand narratives of historical scholarship were thus
marginalized and the contraction of scope was further encouraged by the
development of the nation-state and nationalism, which offered “the discipline
of history an artificial sense of wholeness.” The project of uncovering the
overlooked, repressed and the many “others” of history is made possible,
Christian argues, because of the data now available to draw upon. Lastly, he
sees the expansion of universal history as a way to encourage collaboration
between historians and scientists, collaborations which have been sorely
lacking due to specialization and departmental professionalization. He sees
universal history, in its “whole” sense as occupying three interrelated
patters: 1) the increasing control of “biosphere” resources by humanity, 2) the
slow but accelerating increase in the human population, and 3) after initial
massive global migrations, the eventual settling of humans into dense
communities. Much like the early universe, early human history started off
rather simply and has since been increasingly complex, just as the patterns of
stars and galaxies from the early matter of the universe. But humans are unlike
every other species on earth for the simple reason that they do not solely
adapt over generations, but within
generations. It is this “[continuous] adaptation [that] provides the species as
a whole with more resources than are needed simply to maintain a demographic
steady state.”
Universal history for Christian also
has a pedagogical component. He argues that it will impact education in three
ways: 1) it will help students grasp the underlying unity of modern knowledge,
2) it should help people to better understand the complex relationship between
humanity and the biosphere, and 3) when understood in the scope of universal
history, the underlying unity of humanity as a whole can be understood. For
both the professional historian and the consumer of history, the return of
universal history, he argues, “is the possibility that it may provide the
framework within which we can create histories that can generate a sense of
human solidarity or global citizenship as powerfully as the great national histories
once created multiple national solidarities.”
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| From the Big Bang to Humanity From: https://www.commonsense.org/education/website/big-history-project |
David Christian, in his 1991 paper,
“The Case of “Big History,” argued for pursuing the scholarly inquiries of
history to its absolute capacity. Moving past the Longue Durée and universal history, the logical ending point is “big
history,” which is “the whole of time.” Historians, he argues, have “failed to
find an adequate balance between the opposing demands of detail and
generality.” This tension yields histories rich in detail but fragmented and
parochial. Nothing short of an anthropological understanding of the human
species is required to achieve a full understanding of “modern” humanity. “Big
history” is just such an endeavor; the exploration of time-scales even up to
and including the scale of the universe itself. The objection to such a pursuit,
he notes, is that the scale of such time makes details irrelevant, to which
Christian replies that the very notion of what comprises a “detail” is
relative. “As one shifts from the smaller to larger scales,” he argues, “the
loss of detail is, in any case, balanced by the fact that larger objects come
into view, objects so large that they cannot be seen whole from close up.”
Furthermore, “big history” by asking such far-ranging questions about the
experience not just of humanity but all of existence, may actually even speak
to the future, a taboo that Christian
sees as limiting historical scholarship. The pursuit of “big history” is
nothing short of reconciling the relationships between humanity and the
biosphere and determining whether the historical evidence implies an option
toward equilibrium or the succumbing to the forces of entropy.
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