Big History: Between Nothing and Everything by David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, Craig Benjamin (review)

The emerging field of teaching and research usually called “Big History” involves efforts by scholars from many countries around the world representing a wide range of disciplines to forge an integrated explanation of key developments that have shaped the entire 13.8 billion years stretching from the origins of the universe as we can know it to the emergence of our species in recent geological eras. A natural extension of the concerns driving world historians, this field has made great strides forward in the last twenty years. It has already demonstrated tremendous analytical power while still in the early stages of constructing a framework within which its potential might be more fully realized. Three pioneers of Big History who have contributed from the outset to this demanding endeavor have now provided colleagues seeking a comprehensive understanding of the entire knowable past with a valuable tool not only to educate undergraduates, but also to help interested scholars work through their difficult conceptual challenges.

Although it may come as a surprise that the latest contribution of David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin to the field of Big History has taken the form of a textbook, several factors explain the apparent paradox. What Christian, Brown, and Benjamin have accomplished will undoubtedly prove vital to advanced research as well as to teaching possibilities because they have managed to present an impressively current information base, and because as textbook writers, they were compelled to be crystal clear about the essential nature of Big History, how it might be constructively investigated, and why it can be worthwhile to pursue. In so doing, they have either drawn upon existing concepts and interpretations or introduced novel ideas that will surely prove indispensable to academics in all of the disciplines relevant to Big History, including many of the natural sciences.

The key concepts that the authors have used to shape the framework for their science-grounded treatment of the whole of time will already be familiar to world historians. They include such recurring phenomena as goldilocks conditions (wherein circumstances have become optimal to create certain decisive evolutionary outcomes), emergent properties (the new self-organizing attributes of existing systems), collective learning (the distinctive human capacity to share, preserve, and thereby accumulate valuable information), power (the capacity within human societies of individuals or groups to control other individuals or groups in addition to important material resources), convergent evolution (the emergence of particular biological attributes in different line-ages as well as the roughly simultaneous appearance of parallel developments in human communities facing comparable challenges in widely separated places), exchange networks (webs of human interaction that accelerate cultural change), and world zones (unconnected geographical areas that exhibited their own enduring patterns of existence from the beginning of the Holocene to around 1500 c.e.).

Perhaps the most indispensable of the concepts utilized by the authors for the shaping of Big History, however, relates to their understanding of complexity (the structures of entities exhibiting multiple parts, some with novel characteristics, that can be sustained only by continuous energy flows) and thresholds of increasing complexity (the relatively abrupt emergence of major breakthroughs or notably critical transitions that augment the potential for variety in the unfolding of the cosmos). Since big historians all take for granted the interconnectedness of everything they encounter in their investigations, they tend to combine numerous evolutionary processes in an over-arching set of patterns that define the details of their grand narratives. Thresholds of increasing complexity punctuate those narratives, and most practitioners of Big History would probably agree that Christian, Brown, and Benjamin have properly identified as most worthy of their concern the eight thresholds, ranging from the origins of the universe to the rapidly changing life ways of human beings in recent centuries.

One of the positive and easily overlooked attributes of this textbook is its comparative brevity. At just over three hundred pages, it will be...