Big history

1 Big historiography

Braudel’s Longue Durée approach was the big-name long-history approach. Stresses the importance of the longue durée—slow-moving structures (e.g., geography, social hierarchies) that persist and shape history beneath the surface of events. He distinguishes between short-term events (événements), medium-term cycles (conjunctures), and the deep time of structures.

I’m a quantitative chap, so I’m more interested in the later, more methematically-inflected schools of big history such as cliodynamics and environmental history and their ilk. A famous exemplar of of this approach (and I think the coiner of the term cliodynamics) is Peter Turchin. Vaclav Smil and Ian Morris also seem to be in there.

Early Thinkers:

• Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee were among the first to propose that civilizations follow cyclical patterns of growth and decline. Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918) argued that cultures are like organisms with life cycles, while Toynbee’s A Study of History (1934–1961) traced the genesis, growth, crises, and disintegration of 21 civilizations.
• Fernand Braudel, a leading member of the Annales School, introduced the concept of the longue durée, prioritizing long-term social, economic, and geographic structures over events and cycles.

So far, doesn’t seem very quantitative? Contemporary stuff is way more data-driven

• Peter Turchin developed cliodynamics, applying mathematical models and statistical analysis to historical data to uncover patterns of social stability and crisis.
• Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), argued that geography, available plants and animals, and disease environments shaped the unequal development of societies.
• Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) proposed that societies collapse when the marginal returns on investments in complexity fall below sustainable levels.
• Stanley Salthe approached macrohistory through thermodynamics, viewing societies as energy-transformation systems subject to entropy and energy flow principles.
• Leonid Grinin and Andrey Korotayev have modeled social and technological evolution, integrating world-systems theory, future studies, and mathematical macrodynamics.
• François Hartog introduced “regimes of historicity,” examining how societies structure their understanding of past, present, and future.
• Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie emphasized microhistory, climate, and environmental factors in shaping social trajectories, pioneering anthropometric and environmental history.
• David Christian coined the term Big History, teaching history from the Big Bang to the present with a multidisciplinary lense.
• Ian Morris

2 Energetics and thermodynamics

Smil (2019), Muthukrishna (2023), Salthe (2005); Morris (2015); Tainter et al. (2003).

3 With reference to singularity

See intelligence in deep history for a discussion of the singularity and its implications for big history.

4 Incoming

• A global analysis of matches and mismatches between human genetic and linguistic histories—PNAS

• Peter Turchin’s theories of civilizational cycles

• SESHAT:

  The Seshat Global History Databank brings together the most current and comprehensive body of knowledge about human history in one place. Our unique Databank systematically collects what is currently known about the social and political organization of human societies and how civilizations have evolved over time.

  Main website: seshatdatabank.info

• The rate of return on everything

  The new database covers total returns for all important assets classes—equity, housing, bonds, and bills—across 16 advanced economies from 1870 to 2015.

  Jordà-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory Database

• History’s Masters The Effect of European Monarchs on State Performance

  We create a novel reign-level data set for European monarchs, covering all major European states between the 10th and 18th centuries. We first document a strong positive relationship between rulers’ cognitive ability and state performance. To address endogeneity issues, we exploit the facts that (i) rulers were appointed according to hereditary succession, independent of their ability, and (ii) the widespread inbreeding among the ruling dynasties of Europe led over centuries to quasirandom variation in ruler ability. We code the degree of blood relationship between the parents of rulers, which also reflects “hidden” layers of inbreeding from previous generations. The coefficient of inbreeding is a strong predictor of ruler ability, and the corresponding instrumental variable results imply that ruler ability had a sizeable effect on the performance of states and their borders. This supports the view that “leaders made history,” shaping the European map until its consolidation into nation states. We also show that rulers mattered only where their power was largely unconstrained. In reigns where parliaments checked the power of monarchs, ruler ability no longer affected their state’s performance.

  Inbreeding as an instrumental variable for ruler ability. Supports the idea that a competent (and benevolent?) dictator is effective.

  Extracting the equivalent effectiveness measure of a parliament would be interesting. Where does a competent institution sit on the monarch competence scale?

5 References