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What Is Big History? What is Big History? David Christian Distinguished Professor and Director of the Big History Institute Macquarie University As they err who study the maps of that includes the pasts studied by biologists, regions before they have learned paleontologists, geologists and cosmologists. By accurately the relation of the whole linking different perspectives and scales, and universe and the separate parts of it to many different scholarly disciplines, all of which each other and to the whole, so they are try to understand the deep roots of today’s world, not less mistaken who think they can big history can transform our understanding of understand particular histories before “history.” they have judged the order and sequence of universal history and of all times, set However, to fully capture the richness and range of forth as it were in a table.1 teaching, we will eventually need the perspectives Big history represents an attempt at what E.O. ofthis big vibrant historians new trainedfield of research,in many other scholarship disciplines. and Wilson has called “consilience,” a return to the I hope this essay may encourage such scholars to offer their distinctive perspectives on big history. of the fragmented visions that dominate modern educationgoal of a unified and scholarship. understanding2 Though of reality, it may in seemplace The evolution of historical scholarship in the new, the goal of consilience is very old. And twentieth century even in its modern forms, big history has been around for at least a quarter of a century. So the Historians will recognize that my title comes Journal of Big from a classic essay on history, studied by most History provides the ideal opportunity for a stock Anglophone history graduates. It was written take.publication of the first issue of the 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 It sees big history as the modern form of an Macauley Trevelyan, a historian who, unlike Carr, ancientThis article project. is a personal I am a historian account by of training,the field. so saw history as a literary discipline, and quite my account focuses on the relationship of big distinct from the sciences. As a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, Carr took seriously the perspective of a historian trained in the English- Marxist insistence that history should be regarded speakinghistory to world, the discipline and it focuses of history. on big It reflectshistory’s the relationship to Anglophone historical scholarship. own thinking about history as I, too, entered the But not just to Anglophone historical scholarship, as a branch of science, and that idea influenced my because the debates I discuss had their the early 1970s. counterparts and echoes in many other traditions field of Russian history as a graduate student in of historical scholarship. Nor do I focus just on In “What is History?” Carr tracks the evolution of historical scholarship as it is normally understood the history discipline in England in the early 20th within the academy, because big history sees century. At one level, his story is of a sustained human history as part of a much larger past 1 Jean Bodin, 16th century, cited from Craig Benjamin “Beginningstrend awayand Endings,” from the in confident Marnie Hughes-Warrington, realism, positivism ed., Palgrave Advances in World Histories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 95. 2 E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (London: Abacus, 1998). Journal of Big History Volume 1 Number 1 2018 Spring http://dx.doi.org/10.22339/jbh.v1i1.2241 What is Big History? and even universalism of many nineteenth each offering its own pin-hole view of the world. century historical thinkers, towards increasing Specialization proved a powerful research fragmentation and skepticism. He begins by strategy, but it was achieved by severing ancient scholarship from the 1890s, as Acton presided increasingly isolated from each other. The idea of citing Lord Acton’s confidentCambridge vision of historicalModern alinks single among world fields of knowledge, of knowledge, whether leaving united them by History. Acton saw the Cambridge Modern religious cosmologies, such as that of Christianity, Historyover the as first “a uniqueedition opportunity of the of recording, … the fullness of the knowledge which the behind Alexander von Humboldt’s attempt to nineteenth century is about to bequeath….” He or by scientific scholarship—the vision thatKosmos lay added: “Ultimate history we cannot have in this was abandoned.5 In humanities disciplines such as generation [but] … all information is now within history,write a scientificwhich lacked universal the sort history of unifying in his paradigm— reach, and every problem has become capable of ideas characteristic of the natural sciences in solution.”3 the era of Darwin, of Maxwell and of Einstein, positivist, and optimistic, and it assumes that history is part Acton’s of the view larger of history project is of confident, increasing epistemological realism.6 human knowledge in general. His vision of history specialization also undermined Acton’s confident is also broad. He assumed that historians should Carr captures some of these changes by citing aim at some kind of “universal history,” though he the introduction to the second edition of the seems to have understood that phrase to mean, Cambridge Modern History, written by George not an early form of big history, but something Clark in 1957, more than half a century after closer to modern “world history” or “global Acton’s hopes for an “ultimate history,” Clark which is distinct from the combined history of all writes:Acton’s confident pronouncements. After citing countries.”history.” Acton4 defined universal history as “that Historians of a later generation do not In the early twentieth century, English look forward to any such prospect. They historical scholarship underwent a profound expect their work to be superseded again transformation, and when Carr wrote, the and again. …The exploration seems to discipline was more fractured and less sure of be endless, and some impatient scholars itself. These shifts were part of a sea-change take refuge in skepticism, or at least that affected most scholarly disciplines, from in the doctrine that, since all historical the humanities to the natural sciences, as judgements involve persons and points specialization and professionalization broke of view, one is as good as another and scholarship into ever-smaller compartments, there is no ‘objective’ historical truth.7 3 E. H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 7. 1st published in 1961, based on the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures, delivered in 1961 in Cambridge. 4 Carr, What is History? 150. 5 On Humboldt as a big historian before his time, see Fred Spier, Big History and the Future of Humanity, 2nd ed. (Malden, Mass.: Wiley Blackwell, 2015, 18-21, and Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, (London: John Murray, 2015). 6 in 1962, just a year after Carr’s book: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of TheChicago distinction Press, 1970).between paradigm and pre-paradigm disciplines was introduced by a book whose first edition appeared 7 Carr, What is History? 7-8. Journal of Big History Page 5 David Christian Carr’s own position falls between the robust epistemology in disciplines such as history, widenedThe loss ofthe confidence gulf between in a therealist “two or cultures” naturalist of relativism of Clark. He explores brilliantly the the sciences and humanities that so worried C.P. complexscientific dialectic realism ofbetween Acton and history the hesitantas truth and Snow in a famous lecture delivered in 1959.8 history as stories we tell about the past. He takes The gulf was particularly wide in the English- truth and science seriously, because he believes speaking world, because English, unlike most that history, like science, and like truth in general, has a purpose: it can empower us. It empowers “science,” to the natural sciences. In English, the us by improving our understanding of the present, veryother idea scholarly of “historical languages, science” confined began the to word, seem and it does that by mapping the present on to the absurd. By Carr’s time, historical scholarship past: “The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the nature of historical scholarship, and in the realist past, but to master and understand it as the key epistemologyhad lost confidence that still both underpinned in the “scientific” research in to the understanding of the present.”10 It followed the natural sciences. that the maps of the past created by historians had to be good maps. Like good science, they Skepticism and intellectual fragmentation sapped had to give us a better grip on the real world. So Carr, like Marx, was a philosophical realist undermined the ancient hope that history could and saw no fundamental chasm between the empowerconfidence us in by the helping value ofus historical better understand research, and humanities and the natural sciences. “Scientists, the present. As historians became increasingly social scientists, and historians are all engaged in isolated from other disciplines and even from each different branches of the same study: the study of other, they were left with increasingly fragmented man and his environment,
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