David Christian

World history in context

World history can provide a context for regional and national histories, but what is the context for world history itself? If world history is about the history of human beings, asking this question means asking about the place of human beings within modern knowledge. While most traditional cosmologies put humans at the center of the picture, the temporal and spatial scales of modern science are so vast that humans can seem to vanish entirely. Yet if we order the contents of our universe by complexity rather than by size or longevity, things look different. This paper explores arguments suggesting that human societies and their evolution may be among the most complex objects available for scientific study. Such conclusions hint at the significance of world history beyond the history profession and also suggest the extraordinary difficulty of the challenges world historians face.

Bread and salt : a social and economic history of food and drink in Russia

Introduction Part I. The early diet: 1. Farming and gathering: grain and game 2. Salt: a major extractive industry 3. Drink: ale and alchemy Part II. State appetite, peasant diet: 4. Controls and code: the seventeenth century 5. Steppes and counter-measures: the eighteenth century 6. Tea and temperance Part III. Rural diets on the eve of change: 7. The established pattern 8. Tavern and treasury 9. Good time and bad Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization

Significance Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? To address these long-standing questions, we constructed a database of historical and archaeological information from 30 regions around the world over the last 10,000 years. Our analyses revealed that characteristics, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems, show strong evolutionary relationships with each other and that complexity of a society across different world regions can be meaningfully measured using a single principal component of variation. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history. Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured, and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? These are long-standing questions that have proven difficult to answer. To test between competing hypotheses, we constructed a massive repository of historical and archaeological information known as “Seshat: Global History Databank.” We systematically coded data on 414 societies from 30 regions around the world spanning the last 10,000 years. We were able to capture information on 51 variables reflecting nine characteristics of human societies, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems. Our analyses revealed that these different characteristics show strong relationships with each other and that a single principal component captures around three-quarters of the observed variation. Furthermore, we found that different characteristics of social complexity are highly predictable across different world regions. These results suggest that key aspects of social organization are functionally related and do indeed coevolve in predictable ways. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history.

“Complexity, Energy and Information in Big History and Human History”

Christian provides a ‘big history’ narrative, placing human history within the context of the larger histories of the biosphere and the universe. He integrates scholarship from history, physics, geology, biology, and other relevant disciplines. He shapes his narrative around three key ideas: (1) increasing complexity, (2) flows of energy and (3) increases in information and human understanding, particularly through ‘collective learning’, which have enabled complexity to increase. Within his 14-billion-year storyline, the agricultural and industrial revolutions mark central, far-reaching epochal advances in the progressive move toward today’s increasingly complex world. Understanding the large trajectories of human history will be essential, as we try to make sure that these huge flows of energy do not transform the biosphere and ruin the lives of future generations.

Crafting a New Narrative to Support Sustainability

In 1968—during the first manned voyage to orbit the moon—Astronaut William Anders took the famous photograph known as Earthrise, which graphically depicts Earth as a small oasis in a dark, cold, hostile space. Environmentalists used Earthrise to spread their message of the need to care for our fragile planet, and it played a pivotal role in catalyzing the great environmental campaign successes of the 1970s in the United States, such as Earth Day, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.1

Reply to Tosh et al.: Quantitative analyses of cultural evolution require engagement with historical and archaeological research

We thank Tosh et al. (1) for their interest in our research (2) but note that their analyses do not undermine the main findings of our article. Their suggestion that polity population divided by polity area should be one of the social complexity dimensions raises a number of issues. What does this ratio mean at large spatial scales, where populations are concentrated in large urban centers and much of the territory is not heavily populated? How are societies distributed across this variable and why? For example, a small-scale “simple” society could have a very high population density if it has access to a rich resource base. Tosh et al. (1) do not provide sufficient information or context to meaningfully … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: t.currie{at}exeter.ac.uk. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Big History Meets Minimal English

“Big History” refers to the teaching of human history at very large scales, including evolutionary history and cosmology. If Minimal English attempts to find a common language for humanity, Big History attempts to find a common historical story, a modern origin story shared by all humans. To what extent, then, can a modern science-based origin story be expressed in Minimal English? In dialogue with Wierzbicka’s Chap. 8, this chapter asks what aspects of a modern origin story will prove most challenging to the Minimal English project.

Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia (review)

the limitations that the editor placed on the contributors, the quality of individual essays in this collection is generally good. They represent a careful analysis of interstate politics in a particular place and at a given moment. However, one wonders why some essays were even included and then placed in an impossible editorial frame. Why Russia? Why China? Kagan is a classical scholar, and therefore most of her examples of power politics come from ancient Greece and Rome. It seems to me that Russia and China were included to give the book a more world-historical focus. If this was the case, then the editor has failed. This is not world history but more of what I would call a Grand Tour kind of history, a bit of classical antiquity and then back to dear old Anglo-American Blighty. However, this was not what we were promised in the beginning of the book. In the beginning, Kagan stated that her methodology was inductive: the historical examples first, historical pattern later. She would take a look at imperial moments in history, analyze them in terms of power politics and interstate relations, and, if possible, find the pattern that could explain the current American imperial moment. What we ended up reading is exactly the opposite. Kagan took the current imperial moment and then went back in history to find similar ones. Several times in the book the editor underlined that she put together this book for current policy makers so that they can learn from history. I believe they would be ill served by reading this rather distorted and essentially capricious vision of the past. I found in it serious methodological flaws. Most importantly, the book does not deliver on what it promised to its readers at the outset: a thorough transhistorical analysis of power politics and interstate relations based on a representative sample of carefully selected imperial moments. It is really a comparison between classical and Anglo-American imperial moments. Therefore, in spite of the editor’s ambitions, it cannot be a world history of imperialism. alexander mirkovic Arkansas Tech University

'Pots are not people' : recent books on the archaeology and history of central Eurasia

This essay reviews three recent works on the history of the Eurasian steppes.1 They all touch in different ways on the fundamental challenge of how one can discern cultures and ethnicities from the archaeological record. In particular, they touch on the related problems of the origins of pastoral nomadism (and specifically of horse riding in the Inner Asian steppe) and of the Indo-European languages. David Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel and Language, tackles these two themes directly. It offers a superb, highly readable, and up-to-date survey of what archaeology and historical linguistics can tell us about the history of the Central Eurasian steppes. Anthony has been a participant in these debates for some time and, though he is fair to alternative positions, he also ends up re-asserting his own conviction that: a) the Indo-European languages originated in the region north of the Black Sea in the fourth millennium BCE; and: b) the early spread of Indo-European languages was closely linked to the spread of pastoral nomadism. Christopher Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road takes a strong and clear position on both issues in

Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation.

List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements Part 1: Vodka & Russian Society: Introduction: Vodka & Russian Society Vodka before the Nineteenth century Part 2: Drinking Vodka: Vodkas and pseudo-vodkas in the 19th century tavern Drinking Vodka - Russias drinking cultures Part 3: Making money from Vodka: Selling Vodka (A) Taverns and tavernkeepers Selling Vodka: (B) Tax farming Selling Vodka: (C) The tax farmers Taxing Vodka - the governments share Making Vodka - The nobilitys share Part 4: Vodka and emancipation Upper class protest - press attacks on the tax farm Working class protest - boycotting Vodka Working class protest - smashing taverns Killing the hundred-headed hydra - the abolition of tax farming Appendices Glossary: measures and conversions Bibliography Index