Comparing modern and historical varieties:

Over the past decade, it has been possible to discern the beginnings of a major shift in perspective in history scholarship and in the university history curriculum, beginning in the United States but now also starting to make itself felt in Europe. At the heart of this shift is an argument that history ought to be big: that is, it should be taught on a grand scale, from the beginnings of the universe to the present day (or, as Schulman (1999) aptly puts it, ‘from the Big Bang to the Big Mac’). David Christian, in a hugely influential paper which may mark the start of the big history movement, argues that ‘the discipline of history has failed to find an adequate balance between the opposing demands of detail and generality . . . we need large-scale maps if we are to see each part of our subject in its context’ (Christian 1991: 223–4). That is, just as world history has to be seen as a necessary framework for the investigation of small-scale, local events in spatial terms, so we need a long timescale in order to be able to see events and issues in their proper temporal perspective. Hence ‘the appropriate time scale for the study of history may be the whole of time’ (Christian 1991: 223).

The plea for big history flows in part from a disagreement over whether the central concern of history should be modernity, or humanity. Christian notes an increasing focus on modernity, which has made history essentially a study of how and why people became modern, and what modernity means. However, over a longer timescale (which will by its nature extend back well beyond humans per se, let alone modern ones), modernity is a matter of detail: not necessarily a focus in itself, but important in terms of its relevance to the broader questions. Here, the broader question would be, not why and how we became modern, but why and how we became human: and ‘[i]f history is to reestablish its centrality as a discussion about what it means to be human, it must renew the interest in the large scale’ (Christian 1991: 238).