Our Place in the Universe: An Introduction to Big History ed. by Barry Rodrigue, Leonid Grinin, and Andrey Korotayev (review)

As recently as five years ago it would have been necessary to begin a review of a book on big history with a definition. Most historians had never heard of it. That has changed. With the publication of major new works by David Christian, Fred Spier, Cynthia Brown, and Craig Benjamin, the formation of the International Big History Association, the inclusion of big history panels at the American Historical Association and World History Association annual meetings, the launching of the Big History Project supported by the Gates Foundation, coverage in the New York Times, the Times of London, and elsewhere, and the introduction of courses in universities and high schools across the country, big history has come into its own. But we must still begin with a definition of sorts, because while big history has emerged as a field in its own right, there is disagreement, especially among self-avowed big historians, as to what should be included and what left out.

In its simplest terms, big history is an interdisciplinary approach to the past that combines the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. It seeks to understand the cosmos, earth, life, and humanity using the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods. But how tightly is this interdisciplinarity to be understood? Must we really think of history as a science? Can human history really be reduced to a unified theory based upon the second law of thermodynamics, that is, on physics? Or is there still room for the humanities, for interpretation? Is it in fact a new discipline in its own right? Or is it a branch of world history?

Our Place in the Universe: An Introduction to Big History is the first in a three-volume series published by Primus Books, a new academic division of the venerable textbook publishing house Ratna Sagar. The appearance of this series, entitled From Big Bang to Galactic Civilizations: A Big History Anthology, celebrates a more international outlook for Primus, and indeed a more international outlook for big history itself. With more than one hundred contributors from thirty disciplines and twenty countries, this body of work comes down on the side of diversity and inclusion, veering away from a narrow insistence on a specific scientific approach and toward a broader worldview that sees big history as a collective human experience that has emerged over the past fifty years as part of a global intellectual conjuncture. It is not so much “interdisciplinary” as it is “transdisciplinary,” which is to say that it is more than the sum of its parts. This version of big history evokes the ethos of cooperation and environmentalism and embraces an optimistic world-view that looks to the future and infuses the past with meaning in a way that a narrowly construed scientific approach is incapable of doing.

There are some bumps and some rough edges—which is okay if you can accept the notion that big history is still history and are willing to embrace the humanities part of that, and if by scholarly methods you mean all scholarly methods, including psychology and philosophy, and even a little art and poetry (to appear in later volumes). For the editors and, clearly, for many other big historians as well, a little ambiguity in one’s theory of everything is tolerable and probably to be expected in such an all-encompassing intellectual venture.

Our Place in the Universe covers four broad themes. “Big History as a History of the Universe” serves as an overview. Opening with a prestige piece by neurologist and astronaut Roberta Bandar, who participated in a space shuttle Discovery mission in 1992, it includes much deeper enquiries by astrophysicists, geologists, and, yes, even a historian (David Christian on time and history), which serve as an overall introduction to the field. My favorite was by George Ellis, a cosmologist from the University...