BIG AND LITTLE HISTORIES This book introduces students to ethics in historiography through an exploration of how historians in different times and places have explained how historyought to be written and how those views relate to different understandings of ethics. No two histories are the same. The book argues that this is a good thing because the differences between histories are largely a matter of ethics. Looking to histories made across the world and from ancient times until today, readers are introduced to a wide variety of approaches to the ethics of history, including well-known ethical approaches, such as the virtue ethics of universal historians, and utilitarian approaches to collective biography writing while also discovering new and emerg- ing ideas in the ethics of history. Through these approaches, readers are encouraged to challenge their ideas about whether humans are separate from other living and non- living things and whether machines and animals can write histories. The book looks to the fundamental questions posed about the nature of history making by Indigenous history makers and asks whether the ethics at play in the global vari- ety of histories might be better appreciated in professional codes of conduct and approaches to research ethics management. Opening up the topic of ethics to show how historians might have viewed ethics differently in the past, the book requires no background in ethics or history theory and is open to all of those with an interest in how we think about good histories. Marnie Hughes- Warrington is Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Enterprise at the University of South Australia and Visitor at the School of History, Australian National University, Australia. She is the author of several historiography texts, including Fifty Key Thinkers on History (three editions), History Goes to the Movies (2007) and History as Wonder (2018). Anne Martin is Director of the Tjabal Indigenous Higher Education Centre at the Australian National University, Australia. She is an Aboriginal rights activist and educator who is dedicated to changing the future for our next generation of leaders. What does it mean to do history “ethically”? Marnie Hughes-Warrington’s book examines this question from a variety of different vantage points, ingeniously linking the continued effort of approaching our pasts morally to the scale and scope by which we comprehend and represent those pasts. Whether it be from the perspective of microhistory, Big history, and everything in between, Hughes-Warrington deploys an assortment of examples from antiquity to 9/11. She thereby raises important issues that have bearing not only on how we engage ethically and empathetically with the world as it was but also with the world as it is and may yet become. Daniel Woolf, Queen’s University, Canada In eminently readable prose, Marnie Hughes-Warrington and Anne Martin take us on a magisterial tour of how narrating the past sheds light on the choices that face us in the present. There's no cookie-cutter way to write the past. Every single choice entails the denial of others. Yet together, the kaleidoscopic range of historical writing offers a vital guide to the never-ending work of leading the good life. Big and Little Histories is an indispensable guide in this process. Sam Wineburg, Stanford University, USA This is an astonishingly agile and stimulating book. It scales heights and depths and zooms in and out, scoping histories from the micro level of minutes to the macro of millennia, as it explores the proposition that Aristotle’s modelling of ethics as practical, inexact and plural can help us think productively about histories as much as ethics and about the interactions between them. The book is a history and an exposition of a range of ethical theories - addressing virtue, utilitarian, deontological, cosmopolitan ethics, infinite, entanglement ethics and much more. Equally, it is an exploration of varieties of historiography, including microhistory, children’s histories, global histories, collective biographies, and indigenous histories. It is also a sustained reflection on the ethical implications of the form of history telling - exploring circular narrative structures, first and second-personal histories, universal philosophical histories, reflexive histories and much else besides. It does all this with admirable clarity and lightness of touch. The book communicates an infectious curiosity about the rich complexities of human and animal pasts - ranging over slice histories of moments, didactic thumb bibles, Big Histories of 13.8 billion years, snowball hurling, oxygen holocausts, and swarm histories written by algorithms. Its chapters enact their arguments, scale-shifting themselves and anchoring insights in particular moments and in grand narrative arcs. It is both highly readable and cries out to be read and re-read. It will be enjoyed with great profit by students of history and students of philosophy and is an argument by example for closer dialogue between the two. Arthur Chapman, Associate Professor in History Education, UCL Institute of Education, UK Big and Little Histories is stimulating reading that imaginatively integrates the theories and problems of ethics with the histories of different sizes and shapes across the globe. This is an important book, because it not only argues that ethics is foundational for the writing of history, but also explains how ethics as individual responsibility is relevant and present in this practice. Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, University of Oulu, Finland BIG AND LITTLE HISTORIES Sizing Up Ethics in Historiography Marnie Hughes-­Warrington, with Anne Martin First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Marnie Hughes- Warrington, with Anne Martin The right of Marnie Hughes- Warrington, with Anne Martin to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis. com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978- 0- 367- 02354- 6 (hbk) ISBN: 978- 0- 367- 02355- 3 (pbk) ISBN: 978- 0- 429- 39999- 2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429399992 Typeset in Bembo by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive) For Bruce and Ari, loved across all scales CONTENTS Acknowledgements ix Advisory for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers xi 1 Good histories 1 2 Universal histories and virtue ethics 11 3 Collective biographies and utilitarian ethics 29 4 Philosophical world histories and deontological ethics 47 5 Little world histories and sentiment ethics 65 6 Global histories and cosmopolitan ethics 85 7 Microhistories and social contract ethics 102 8 Slice histories and infinite ethics 118 9 Big histories and information ethics 136 10 Non- human histories and entanglement ethics 154 viii Contents 11 Indigenous histories and place ethics with Anne Martin 174 12 One angel? Scaling the ethics of history 184 Bibliography 188 Index 205 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS From Marnie Hughes- Warrington: You can walk past a door multiple times and not notice it. When you do see it, you wonder where it will lead you. I want to thank everyone who encouraged me to ask why no two histories are the same size and to seek the answer by knocking on doors around the world. Those doors were generously opened by many scholars, and I am profoundly grateful for their intellectual hospitality. Frank Bongiorno played a key role in encouraging me to step from wonder to eth- ics in historiography. His support and conviviality, along with that of Chris Wallace, Ann McGrath and other colleagues in the Australian National University School of History, continue to inspire. Peter Harrison, Charlotte Rose- Millar, Ethan Kleinberg, Mark Donnelly, Jouni- Matti Kuukkanen, Arthur Chapman, Anna Clark, Tamson Pietsch, Kristyn Harman, Paul Kiem and colleagues generously hosted seminars and discussions on the ideas in this book—some when my ideas were very nascent—at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland, Wesleyan College, St Mary’s University Twickenham, the Centre for Philosophical Studies at Oulu University, University College London, the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney, the University of Tasmania and the History Teacher’s Association of New South Wales. I am also grateful for those who read and commented on sections of the book, including Tyson Retz at Stavanger University, Norway. Merry Wiesner- Hanks and David Christian were thought-provoking interlocutors at the World History Association Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2019. The 2019 humani- ties forum at Rhodes House in Oxford provided a great opportunity to test some of the questions in the conclusion. I am also grateful to the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, at which the proposal for this book took shape,