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Nature and the Pitfalls of Big History
Back to the Garden: Nature and the Mediterranean World from Prehistory to the Present, by James H. S. McGregor, Yale University Press.
AMONG THE BOOKS I inherited from my father there is a complete edition of Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization, then in its sixteenth printing. Volume 1 was Our Oriental Heritage, where, after considerable musing about the nature of civilization, Durant started his history in the Paleolithic. He just kept going. (Ariel became co-editor with volume 7.) The Story of Civilization was big history in every way: it had the sweep of millennia, global coverage, eleven large volumes, and repeated printings. Until today, I had not looked at it in years; I buried the maroonish volumes in a remote bookcase behind a door. I was slightly embarrassed to display them; the prose, as I recalled (rightly), reeked of hubris and antique presumption. But big history is back, and now it is academics as well as popular writers who are doing it. It was a book by an English professor-James H. S. McGregors Back to the Garden: Nature and the Mediterranean World from Prehistory to the Present-that caused me to excavate Durant. Back to the Garden is relatively restrained in space and, at least compared to the Durants' history, constrained in tone, but it is expansive in time. It is big history.
The current vogue of big history-inspired in part by big data -is a back-to-the-future moment. Digital innovation has produced big data by allowing us to access reams of statistics, search libraries of digitized books, and make spatial and temporal connections on a vast scale. Big data is new, but big history is not. It was not yet called big history in the early twentieth century, but the Durants were hardly alone in writing it. Will Durant was a contemporary of H. G. Wells, whose Outline of History was only slightly less ambitious-it began with the Neolithic-and Wells's literary skill has allowed it to wear better than the Durants' work. Virgil M. Hillyer's A Childs History of the World is of the same era. It was decades old when I read it-as a child-and it apparently still survives among the homeschooled.
McGregor, however, is...