Little, Middle, and Big Histories
Scaling Historical Consciousness
What makes big history big is not the object of knowledge, but the form of the exposition of the object of knowledge. It is easy to conflate the largeness of the object of knowledge with the largeness of the mode of exposition when we are engaged in an exposition of the universe entire. Most expositions of big history, even little big histories, start with the big bang, almost as a kind of pro forma nod to the conventions of the discipline. We find this, for example, in Craig Benjamin’s “Sketch of a little big history of Private E.E. Benjamin and the Great War” (The Routledge Companion to Big History, pp. 320–336). To situate the life of an individual in his cosmological context means introducing the cosmos first, since the cosmos precedes the individual, and the cosmos also outlasts the individual, so the eschatology that is the mirror image of the earliest origins will also be cosmic in scale.
Big history simpliciter begins and ends with the universe that encompasses us all. Perhaps when our cosmology reaches that degree of development at which we understand our big bang to be our local big bang, and one among many (as our galaxy is part of the local cluster, one among many such clusters), then we will begin and end with something that encompasses the universe. Until such time, we “limit” ourselves to the universe we can observe, and which we can therefore know after a fashion. But big history also homes in on emergent complexity, so amidst the vastness of the universe, we seek out the complexity in the cosmic story, and that leads us back to our world and ourselves, which is the most complex milieu we have encountered to date.
Objects and persons in our world made the theme of little big histories are nested within big history proper, beginning and ending with the same cosmological context, however diminutive the object of exposition. Esther Quaedackers uses a brick as the object of an exemplary little big history in “A case for little big histories” (Op. cit., pp. 279–299), smaller and arguably less complex than the individual employed by Benjamin, but still, as we find, filled with interest and possibilities, implying in turn that any of the familiar objects of life might be similarly thematized as objects of little big histories.
Between big history and little big histories we can posit an historical parameter space of meso-history as another possibility, i.e., a history of the middling sort that falls between the full exposition of big history and a little big history that focuses on some appropriately small object of knowledge. The objects of knowledge for meso-history are almost as familiar as familiar objects treated in little big histories. Indeed, traditional history has been constituted by meso-histories. The histories of states and civilizations, of religions and of wars, of cities and languages, are all meso-histories; Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, despite its scope and reach, is a meso-history that we could not reasonably call either a big history properly speaking or a little big history. Some meso-histories tend toward the large and could be effortlessly extended to be big histories; others tend toward the small, and could be reduced to little big histories. In spite of these tendencies, there remains a meso-scale that can receive a big history exposition on its own merits.
The assimilation of traditional history into the context of big history could take the form of identifying traditional histories as meso-histories that fit within the overall framework of big history, taking their place within the larger whole, no less than little big histories. No effort of historical research need be in vain; no scholar need view their years of painstaking work as superseded; nothing is lost even as we take the biggest of big pictures as the basis for history. I mention this as it has been a concern. When David Christian presented a talk at the IBHA conference in 2014, “Big History: A Personal Journey,” he related the story of another historian, Sheila Fitzpatrick, who said to him, “I’m intrigued by big history but I’m worried that it threatens to devalue the work of my entire career as a historian of the Soviet Union!” Christian himself described his “microscopic” graduate work studying a failed Russian reform of 1801–1803, implying that big history was in part a reaction against intense specialization. All of this can be folded into the framework of big history.
And with big history as the framework for meso-histories and little big histories, we can imagine a future big history taking place on several levels, each integrated above and below, in which we can, at any time or at any place, zoom in to some diminutive object and render its little big history, or zoom out to some cosmic scale and render this story. Perhaps we choose to begin, as we began with traditional histories, with some local tradition with which all are familiar, or some equally familiar national history. None of this is antagonistic to big history if big history integrates all objects of knowledge across scales of space and time.
It would be a matter of convention and convenience to decompose big history into the little, the middle, and the large; we could just as well identify four or five or more divisions of size within big history, or even a continuous gradation of degrees of the “size” a history in question, defining a hierarchy along two scales of size in time and size in space. These could then be the x and y axes of a graph, on which we could map every historical effort, seeing the scale of each in relation to the scale of all other histories. And, still, big history remains the coordinating function among these differing scales and methods.
This is an expanded text of my Frontiers column from the IBHA newsletter EMERGENCE for Winter 2024 is now available:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OSBDnd8eKIycHoHBBg6k2rrZ7cedVMr7/view
