As part of an MA course work program, I am sure that I am not the only one feeling the crunch. It is coming to that point in my program where I am expected to produce my little chunk of research; taking all of those lessons I have learned in the past several years and transforming it into a piece of writing that reflects both my interests and my capacity as an academic.
I have, however, hit several road blocks along the way. For the most part, this has been because those lessons which have informed both my interests and my academic capacity Keep Coming! When producing a work that is so representative of myself, that I have an extremely personal connection with, I have been feeling a lot of pressure to get it right. I have learned much this year and am now trying to come to terms with how to incorporate it into my research.
As such, I thought it might be useful to post my working project to date. I do this in the hope that I will receive feedback and suggestions that will aid me in shaping the trajectory of the project henceforth. Mostly, I am concerned with my analysis of the modern period. I have several ideas for improvement already, but a bit of direction is always helpful. Also, to those of you whom haven't yet been introduced to 'Big History', this essay may serve as a brief (but imperfect as mentioned) introduction to the subject. Either way, here it is...
Framing: The Methods of the 'Big Historian' David Christian, in his book Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, writes a history of everything. Christian’s entry point, the central image through which he frames his argument, is that of a nearly infinite web. Stretching back to the big bang and contemplating distant futures, Christian links all events of known history (and beyond) through a single grand narrative. His is a necessary history. Modern technologies and population density have greatly expanded the confines of the individual’s known world. Is Christian’s ‘big history’ unique in its ability to explain ‘everything’? Herodotus was able to write, in The Histories, an account of everything within the confines of his world by profiling influential people. Ibn Khaldun also gave an account of his known world, but by analyzing political, economic, and cultural systems. These must also be considered histories of ‘everything’. As the limits of a historian’s known world have expanded, they have required increasingly abstract methods of framing. While Herodotus may have been able to organize much of the information of his world in the history of a single individual, the sheer scope of today’s world requires the world historian to step back, using a more theoretical entry point.
Before it is possible to examine where ‘big history’s’ grand narrative framing method sits in relation to those methods of previous histories, there are other questions that must be answered. For the purposes of this paper, it is first necessary to define precisely what is meant by ‘known world’. Also, what is it exactly to ‘frame’ an argument? Only after operationally defining these working terms is it possible to situate the methods of ‘big history’ amongst those of past histories.
The term ‘world’ is relational. Certainly it is not an inclusive term. One could study a religious world, a political world, a global world, a world of technology, etc. It is a flexible term and, to be a useful unit of analysis, some parameters must be set. For the purpose of this paper, it may be more accurate to say ‘known world’. Background radiation from the big bang was definitely present during Herodotus’s time.1 It was not until much later though, that technology has granted the ability to perceive it. In practical terms, the big bang played a major role in all of history. However, because previous historians were not aware of it, it could not tangibly be a part of their world. The opposite is also true: there may have been, for example, a megafaunal creature of which we have no oral, written or archeological records. Our inability to perceive its existence, despite it having once been a part of our globe, excludes it from our ‘known world’.
A world then, should be seen as the whole of all known information. This means technology plays a major role in defining known worlds. Population growth and density must also be considered. A larger and denser population not only provides more information to be considered in one’s world, it also enables a heightened ability for that world to learn collectively. Christian links these factors (population growth, technology and innovation) in processes he refers to as Malthusian cycles. 2 While there are other sources that contribute to the expansion of worlds (indeed, many discoveries may occur purely by chance), these factors will allow for a study of the significant trends involving ‘world’ expansion and historical framing methods.
Oswald Spengler, in the introduction to his book The Decline of the West, describes the discipline of history:
Nature is the shape in which the man of higher cultures synthesizes and interprets the immediate impressions of his senses. History is that from which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality.3
For Spengler, history is the attempt to coherently organize everything we know. To do so, however, implies the use of some structure or set of constraints capable of organizing ‘everything’. These are the framing structures. Any individual holds the ability to sense and perceive their environment. Framing then, is a common linking structure: a central idea through which individual sensory experiences may be interpreted. One could have the sensory experience of an earthquake, for example, but it is only through some abstract idea such as plate tectonics, God, or another figure, image, or idea capable of explaining your sensations of an earthquake, that one is capable of contextualizing their experience.
The ability to frame is not necessarily linked to written language. (Indeed it is most likely an element of both human and non-human life.) Certainly, non-literate populations are capable of contextualizing individual experiences into long and rich oral narratives. Alessandro Portelli, in his book The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, highlights the complexities of oral histories4 This ability to frame despite the presence of written language suggests that framing methods were a significant aspect of what is traditionally referred to as ‘pre-history’ (that is, the time before written record).
While framing methods outside written language is an interesting, and important topic, the goal of this paper is to contextualize the methods of ‘big history’ amongst those of other written histories: specifically those which attempt or claim to explain ‘everything’. While this assessment of written histories cannot be exhaustive, it is an attempt to place ‘big history’ amongst the larger trends of world histories. However, arguing that trends exist between framing methods, or that ‘big history’ is somehow related to other histories is, in itself, an argument based on contingencies. This paper requires framing structures just as does any argument. The progression of framing methods in world history is being examined, and ‘big history’ is the most recent, and effective, approach available.
It may seem as though any analysis of written framing methods must begin with the first written arguments. ‘Big history’ though, is part of a specific tradition. While the epic of Gilgamesh and the works of Homer may lend great insight into the societies in which they were produced, they were not world histories. Rather, they were mythical anecdotes, offering moral lessons more than attempting to accurately understand ‘everything’.
The first history that attempted such a task was Herodotus’s The Histories in the fifth century BCE. Any account of world history’s written framing methods must, then, begin with Herodotus. Christian would argue that Herodotus lived in a unique period of human history. “[W]orld populations”, Christian asserts, “grew exceptionally fast between 1000 and 1 BCE”.5 He attributes this population growth to an increasing ability of individuals to live in increasingly large societies. This speaks to the developing abilities of both individuals as well as the states they now found themselves a part of. “Political systems were getting better at judging the appropriate levels of tribute-exaction, and people (and their immune systems) were getting better at coping with infectious diseases”.6 This process, he argues, allowed for a level of political and social organization not seen since ancient Mesopotamia. Certainly, it was the first time that large, structured civilizations emerged after the development of complex writing systems. This suggests a possible link between the degree to which people were becoming increasingly connected through political systems and population density, and the efforts of individuals (such as Herodotus) to contextualize their personal experiences through historical narratives.
How did Herodotus manage to organize the increased information that came with connected living? Instead of examining the tribute-exacting structures or strengthened immune systems that Christian argues developed during this period and allowed for complex state formation, Herodotus conceives of his world only by collecting the unique experiences of important individuals.
Croesus was a Lydian by birth, son of Alyatts, and sovereign of the nations on this side the river Halys. This river flowing from the south between the Syrians and Paphlagoians, empties itself northward into the Euxine Sea. This Croesus was the first of the barbarians whom we know of that subjected some of the Greeks to the payment of tribute, and formed alliances with others.7
From such examples it is clear that, by engaging these important individuals, Herodotus was able to construct a narrative capable of organizing all the information (be it the geography of rivers, tribute exaction, political alliances, etc…) he saw as part of his ‘world’. The second book of Herodotus’ The Histories, “Euterpe”, devotes a large section to comparing which civilization is “the most ancient of mankind”. Even this section, though, is framed through an individual:
The Egyptians, before the reign of Psammitichus, considered themselves to be the most ancient of mankind. But after Psammitichus, having come to the throne, endeavored to ascertain who were the most ancient, from that time they consider Phrygians to have been before them, and themselves before all others.8
Using Psammitichus as an entry point, Herodotus goes on to perform a comparative study of cultures, geography and technological achievements. While Herodotus recorded history, these important individuals were the people to whom he attributed the making of history. Through them, he was able to give an account of his world.
The histories produced by Ssu-ma Chi’en and Plutarch come just at the end of the population boom described previously by Christian. They appear in distinct cultures separated by a century and a vast amount of territory. Despite this apparent separation, there are distinct similarities in the way they framed their known worlds. Plutarch, of the Roman Empire, and Ssu-ma Chi’en, of the Han dynasty, belonged to (apart from the Achaemenid Empire of Iran) two of the largest political systems on the globe to that point.9 Both Plutarch and Ssu-ma Chi’en employ a method similar to Herodotus in contextualizing their respective societies. Their biographical histories are those most commonly associated with a ‘Great Men’ method of framing. While the number of others included in their collection is, however, significantly limited, the power of these individuals is greater. By chronicling the lives of extremely powerful individuals (General Li Kuang for Ssu-ma Chi’en10, for example; Marc Antony for Plutarch), these historians attempt to appeal to a higher authority. In this way, it is not the man Marc Antony that is being studied, but the idea of a single man who controls the entire world. Philip Stadter’s Plutarch and the Historical Tradition suggests that Plutarch embellished both Antony’s power over his empire and his obsessive relationship with Cleopatra. This allowed him to explain the stability of the empire: the waning of Rome was because Antony ignored politics for his mistress.11 Because these powerful individuals held influence over vast territories and numerous cultures, they served as accessible entry points for discussing information from those territories and peoples. They are the agents of their histories.
This speaks to the social and political developments of the centuries between Herodotus, and Ssu-ma Chi’en and Plutarch. While Herodotus was part of an expansive political system, it lacked the ability for strong central government. The political systems of Ssu-ma Chi’en and Plutarch, while still not living in the kind of centralized government found in modern states, witnessed a rise in central authority. “Most [states] ruled through chains of intermediaries, with little knowledge of or interest in the lives of the majority of those they ruled. Yet undoubtedly states slowly got better at what they did, and managed their power with great skill and efficiency…”.12 While Plutarch and Ssu-ma Chi’en still relied on individuals to frame their histories, the use of fewer, more powerful individuals, must be seen as an abstraction. The idea of their political power served as an entry point capable of linking vast territories and peoples.
By the fourteenth century, framing through individuals had become a less viable method of framing. This is shown in the writings of Ibn Khaldun. Khaldun takes a novel approach in presenting history: an approach that he defines explicitly for his readers in the introductory section of his work:
From the various possibilities, I chose a remarkable and original method. In the work, I commented on civilization, on urbanization, and on the essential characteristics of human social organization, in a way that explains to the reader how and why things are as they are, and shows him how the men who constituted a dynasty first came upon the historical scene. As a result, he will wash his hands of any blind trust in tradition. He will become aware of the conditions of periods and races that were before his time and that will be after it.13
Essentially, Khaldun is engaging with the structures of civilizations themselves. He is critical of the approach of his contemporaries, blaming them for relying too much on the methods of older historians. “They [his contemporaries] disregarded the changes in conditions and in the customs of nations and races that the passing of time had brought about”. Even in Khaldun’s age, using entry points of individuals had become too specific a framing method. As he points out, continual growth of information can quickly lead to oversimplification: “Other historians, then, came with too brief a presentation (of history). They went to the extreme of being satisfied with the names of kings, without any genealogical or historical information, and with only a numerical indication of the length of reigns”.14 Just as Plutarch and Ssu-ma Chi’en had, by writing history through political figures, abstracted their entry points in order to cope with increasing amounts of information, Khaldun, by writing history through civilization and race, had again relied on abstraction. Royal authority and government were still agents in his history, but so were other elements that contribute to civilizations.15 The use of an abstract idea of civilizations as his entry point allowed Khaldun to organize his known world with much greater efficiency.
Why though was it necessary, in Khaldun’s period specifically, to reevaluate historical framing methods? Once again, the period in which Khaldun was writing as one of tangible expansion. “In the fifteenth century, after the long slump associated with the Black Death, populations rose again throughout Afro-Eurasia. Once again, population growth stimulated commerce and urbanization”.16 This process would have greatly influenced Khaldun. He spent his early life between Granada and Tunis, but later would come to spend much time in Cairo. The boundaries of the Islamic empire had been broadened, making long distance travel plausible.17 The geographic area to which Khaldun felt connected (and therefore felt the need to explain) had greatly increased the amount of information he needed to synthesize.
Khaldun’s known world had expanded so much that he required an entry point that was even less specific than those of previous historians. Not only was he immediately a part of a political empire that exceeded in size those of previous historians, but the written records left by those historians forced Khaldun to include earlier empires in his known world. He therefore sought not only an understanding of his life in relation to his immediate society, but also in relation to the whole of known history before him.
Spengler developed Khaldun’s method of examining cyclical history through state structures. He outlines, in the introduction to The Decline of the West, that it is the responsibility of the historian to create a near mathematical method, capable of “following objective connexions of cause and effect”.18 Applying this mechanical philosophy to his cyclical theory of states, Spengler saw potential for historians to not only examine the past, but also to contemplate, and even predict, the future. To accomplish this, Spengler redefined the units of analysis used by the historian, devoting entire chapters of his work to “Music and Plastic”, “Philosophy of Politics”, and “The Form-World of Economic Life”. These were the essential components of civilizations: the structures that were capable of explaining all of history.
There was something besides cultural, political, and economic systems, though, that Spengler attributed to the making of history.
That there is, besides a necessity of cause and effect - which I may call the logic of space - another necessity, an organic necessity in life, that of Destiny - the logic of time - is a fact of the deepest inward certainty, a fact which suffuses the whole of mythological religions and artistic thought and constitutes the essence and kernel of all history…19
Spengler compels us to consider an alternative method of framing: one that, through religion, also allows for a study of history that “covers the whole world”. The only difference between this method and the one he applies, Spengler suggests, “…is only in the eyes by which and through which this world is realized”. By this, Spengler alludes to framing methods. He is suggesting that both political/economic systems and religion, given their expanse, have the capability of framing the history of the ‘whole world’.
Toynbee, like Spengler, acknowledged two competing agents of history. He critically analyzed history through both state structure and religion. In so doing, he combined Spenger’s logics of ‘space’ and ‘time’. Christian would argue that religions are like political or economic systems in their ability to expand.
Though associated in practice with particular dynasties or empires, they [universal religions] proclaimed universal truths and worshiped all-powerful gods. It is no accident that universal religions appeared when both empires and exchange networks reached to the edge of the known universe, controlling populations with diverse belief systems and lifeways.20
Universal religions, like powerful individuals such as Psammitichus, Marc Antony, and General Li Kuang, served as linking structures capable of explaining the growing territories and peoples under their control. As a framing structure, universal religions proved as malleable as political systems. As the historian’s world expanded, religion could be studied in increasingly abstract terms, eventually including multiple religions and culminating (as is seen in the work of Toynbee) in a theoretical discussion of the nature of religion. While religion may be used as a method of framing, it has been, just as other methods, subject to abstraction given an increase in the information that must be framed.
This identification of specific structures within a civilization (a further abstraction in methodology) is again linked to practical expansions of the known world in which Spengler and Toynbee lived. Christian refers to the past 200 years of human history as taking place after the ‘Modern Revolution’.
Those regions that found themselves at the hub of the new global network of exchanges were the first to experience the high rates of innovation and the extraordinary energy flows characteristic of modernity. By the late nineteenth century, their industrial lead gave them a decisive economic, political, and military advantage, which enabled them to put their stamp on the nature and form of modernity throughout the world. 21
The industrial and scientific revolutions had laid the necessary framework that would allow political, economic, religious, and cultural networks to expand in a way not seen since the agricultural revolution. By the 20th century, drastic shifts were beginning to occur:
Not until the twentieth century did the full significance of the Modern Revolution begin to reveal itself. Change accelerated so rapidly, and the ramifications of change were so universal, that this period marks an utterly new stage in human history and in the history of human relations with other species and with the earth. Indeed, it may be no exaggeration to say that the twentieth century marks a decisive moment in the history of the entire biosphere.22
Christian identifies this period as occurring during a wave of innovation. New technologies (such as the combustion engine) and the incorporation of oil as a major energy supply, made possible an economic and political expansion that dominated the globe. The increasing interdependence of the world’s states was made evident through the World Wars. These events served as a very easily recognized connection of peoples from around the globe. Once again, the historians pushing the boundaries of world history were part of a world that dwarfed those of past historians both in geographic scope and complexity.23
There is another wave of innovation, Christian argues, that succeeded that of Toynbee and Spengler’s lifetimes. “This wave is still in motion…”, he argues, “… early in the twenty-first century. Its dominant technologies are electronic and genetic, while its most striking early effect has been to draw all parts of the world more tightly together than ever before”. He continues, “Global flows of information and wealth have become so rapid, and have such little respect for traditional boundaries, that they have blurred the borders between states as well as between enterprises”.24 It is the lack of respect for ‘traditional boundaries’ that makes this innovative wave significant for historical framing methods. The boundaries of civilizations were being traversed so readily that, suddenly, framing through structures of civilizations was no longer an effective method of organizing worldly information. International corporations, rather than states, were now the most influential societal structures. Given the change in commodities (from material goods to information), as well as the decreasing significance of state structures, it was becoming increasing evident that top-down methods of conceptualizing history were becoming less and less viable.
As one might by now expect, historians emerged in the midst of this period of expansion offering a method of conceptualizing history that attempted to eliminate the problematic issues posed by ‘traditional boundaries’. They offered interpretations of history that were no longer organized through elite structures of states or civilizations. As Manning describes in his book Navigating World History, “The scope of these analyses was less than planetary, but their contribution was to identify patterns of interaction more complex than the diffusion of influence from the powerful to the weak”.25 William McNeil in particular wrote history with this reevaluation of traditional boundaries in mind. In attempting to write a more effective history, McNeil, like historians before him, again relied on abstraction. His is the first history using an abstract web as its entry point. He describes, in his book Human Web: A Birds Eye View of World History, what he means by the word ‘web’:
A web, as we see it is a set of connections that link people to one another. These connections may take many forms: chance encounters, kinship, friendship, common worship, rivalry, enmity, economic exchange, ecological exchange, political cooperation, even military competition. In all such relationships, people communicate information and use that information to guide their future behavior. They also communicate, or transfer, useful technologies, goods, crops, ideas, and much else. Furthermore, they inadvertently exchange diseases and weeds, items they cannot use but which affect their lives (and deaths) nonetheless. The exchange and spread of such information, items and inconveniences, and human responses to them, is what shapes history.26
This view of history posits all people as dots on map. It is the interaction between these dots that makes history. Contrary to previous methods, which identified political, economic, religious, and cultural systems as moving history forward, McNeil’s web allots agency directly to people (all people, not only the elite or powerful).
Christian has developed McNeil’s web design of history. The exact point of development, the abstraction in framing that Christian has contributed, is in sheer scope. Through an interdisciplinary approach to history, Christian has questioned the boundaries of even McNeil’s method of framing.
To understand your own country, you must travel beyond its borders once in your life. You will not understand everything you see; but you may begin to see your own country in a new light. The same is true of history. To understand what is distinctive about human history, we must have some idea of how a biologist or a geologist might approach the subject.27
This interdisciplinary approach has allowed Christian to examine history in a unique way. He has created a history that places humans within a larger narrative. While the entry point is still an abstract web, it is no longer a ‘human’ web. Rather, Christian posits every bit of information as an independent node on the web. In doing so, he assigns agency not only to all humans, but to all plants, animals, planets, quarks, and ideas. All of these nodes interact, some through humans and some not. It is his hope that by understanding phenomena that go beyond human history, the historian might better be able to understand where ‘our type of animal’ sits in the broader spectrums of time and space.
Once again, it is the expansion of the knowable world between the periods of McNeil and Christian that demanded re-conceptualization. The last paragraph of the introduction to Christian’s Maps of Time provides an account of how we might think about the relationship between one’s immediate world and the way we are able to understand it.
In their day, all creation myths offered workable maps of reality, and that is why they were believed. They made sense of what people know. They contained much good, empirical knowledge; and their large structures helped people place themselves within a wider reality. But each map had to build on the knowledge and fulfill the needs of a particular society. And that is why they don’t necessarily count as “true” outside their home environments. It must start with modern knowledge and modern questions, because it is designed for people who live in the modern world. We need to try to understand our universe even if we can be certain that our attempts can never fully succeed. So, the strongest claim we can make about the truth of a modern creation myth is that it offers a unified account of origins from the perspective of the early twenty-first century.28
Christian’s view of framing methods hardly heralds his own method as revolutionary. Rather, it posits Maps of Time as the same as all previous histories in that it offers a ‘workable’ way of making ‘sense of what people know’. Christian has not reached the apex of historical thought: he has not delivered the textbook with which all future generations will come to comprehend the living existence of the world in relation to their own lives. In the future, as in the past, people will be faced with a drastically different reality that we currently face. They will inevitably apply methods of conceptualizing that reality that suit their needs. Until this point, as the realities (worlds) have expanded, historians have relied on increasingly abstract methods of understanding. One can only assume that, should our knowledge continue to grow, pushing the boundaries of our world to contain even more information, this trend of abstraction will continue.
What is the significance of this abstraction in historical framing methods? It may be possible to address this issue by situating ‘big history’ amongst other current histories. In doing so, it is necessary to make the distinction between types of histories generally. Those previously mentioned have been explicit attempts at explaining everything within the limits of their authors known worlds. They serve the purpose of contextualizing the author within a broader reality. This isn’t the case for all histories. While all histories serve some purpose, they may be linked more to political, economic, or social motivations than to efforts at contextualization. Some of these histories stand in staunch opposition to the methods of big history, and while they must be interpreted critically, their opposition cannot be overlooked.
The grand narrative method of ‘big history’ has not been without opposition. The shift from histories employing top-down framing methods to those emphasizing web design carries significant implications. As nodes on Christian’s web, all information has agency. If the historian is willing to recognize this omnipresent agency, and wishes to make any kind of legitimate claim, they must assume to know something about everything. Is this possible? This is the question posed by the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group (founded in the early 1980’s: the same period that world histories were gaining popularity) and marks one of the fundamental challenges to any history claiming to be inclusive. As described by John Beverley in his article, “Writing in Reverse: The Subaltern and the Limits of Academic Knowledge,” the process of accurately representing the views of a subaltern group is impossible. In any attempt to portray the outlook of a person or persons which are in some way subordinate, there is the inevitable application of resources, be it means of portrayal, acquired knowledge, or so forth, which that subaltern does not have access to. Therefore, in attempting to create a reproduction of that subaltern perspective, the representation is being made from a standpoint that is conforming to the oppresive system that has been the cause of their social position.29 Beverley’s argument is meant to apply to subordinate human populations. However, the argument can be generalized. Never having experienced life as a tree, for example, we cannot understand the tree as an agent. This view goes beyond the Subaltern Studies Group. Haines Brown, in an article titled “The Reconstruction of Objectivity”, argues, “Since the Second World War (although it has deeper roots), there has been an assault on the ideal of objectivity that we might very loosely call postmodern deconstructionism”.30 Brown goes on to identify several issues that make any form of objectivity impossible.
Subaltern Studies is obviously not an attempt at universal understanding. Rather, it seems to be the opposite. Argued to its fullest, it would assert that being ourselves, we are limited to knowing only ourselves. This is an extreme view. Later in the same essay, Brown counters,
In any case, it does not seem the nature of things is “essential” to them, but is the effect of a constrained causal relation with the broader world. What is internal to it is only certain dispositions associated with its empirical structure. It may seem that we have wandered away from the issue of objectivity, but that is not the case. If objectivity depends on universality, truthful knowledge of a system that necessarily includes its relation to the broader world seems to open the way for us to acquire objective knowledge of it.31
By creating a framing method that is non-hierarchical, ‘big’ historians have distributed value evenly throughout time and space. By not emphasizing the role of humans (much less the ruling elite or elite structures) ‘big’ history has provided all elements of our known world with a voice. This voice ensures that, because everyone and everything is capable of telling its own history, some level of objectivity (a universal subjectivity) is possible.
This is not to say that the postmodernist critique is without value. If nothing else, it has alerted historians to issues of subjectivity and forced the discipline to re-examine its methodology. Christopher Lloyd, in his article “The Methodologies of Social History: A Critical Survey and Defense of Structuralism”, outlines the relationship between the growth of macro-histories and the developing research methods of social history in the past two decades. The adoption of a scientific mentality in historical studies has allowed historians to engage with their subjects in an equitable exchange.32 One of the responsibilities of Subaltern Studies, as argued by Beverley, was the need to build, “…relationships of solidarity between ourselves and the people and social practices we posit as our objects of study”.33 By integrating alternative research methods that are capable, through an interdisciplinary approach, of equitably engaging its ‘objects of study’, ‘big history’ has embraced the concerns of the subaltern historian. By abstracting the entry point into its narrative, ‘big history’ has created a research process that has allowed for more objectivity than any history that came before it.
Since Herodotus’ time, the known world has been significantly expanded. To account for this increase in information, historians have used increasingly abstract methods of organization. Once, rulers and the political, economic, religious, and cultural systems they represented could be used as entry points into understanding the world. These were the makers of history. Now, ‘big history’ argues that history is made all around us by everyone and everything. Agency is universal. We are able to understand it because we have eliminated the traditional boundaries of historical thought. Ultimately though, we have only eliminated those traditional boundaries out of necessity. Historical thought is a product of its own time and place. Dynamic shifts brought about by population density, technology, and innovation have demanded equally dynamic shifts in the way historians have conceptualized themselves in relation to their world.
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