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What Is the Difference Between Big History and World History?
World historians and Big Historians understand that there is great value in looking at the past on scales much larger
than those used by most historians. Larger scales allow you to see connections between things that might otherwise
seem disconnected, say the connections between the changing orbits of planet Earth and changing climates, or between
expanding trade networks and the spread of diseases. But to work on these large scales, you really need to exercise your
chronological imagination. This is particularly true if you do Big History because it works at scales much, much larger
than those of world history. And this can be challenging: How can you begin to get a feeling for the difference between 67
million years ago (when the dinosaurs were wiped out) and 100 years ago (when World War I began)? This very significant
difference in scales (Big History works at 13.8 billion years, world history normally works at a bit more than 10,000 years,
max) is one of the most important differences between world history and Big History. Big History also operates at very
different spatial scales; after all, it deals with a Universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies, rather than with the recent
history of a single planet.
There are other important differences between Big History and world history and they arise from differences in how we
define “history.” By “history,” most historians mean the history of human societies. This definition affects how we study
the past because, at least in the last few hundred years, humans have generated a lot of written documents, and most
historians think of those documents as the best source for studying human history. So, defining history as “human history”
shapes our understanding of evidence and research.
Big History uses the word “history” in a broader sense, to mean the past of everything, at all possible scales. It includes
not just human history but also the history of other living organisms (normally studied within biology), of the Earth and
Solar System (normally studied within geology and astronomy) and even the history of the Universe (cosmology). Clearly,
Big History cannot rely just on written documents, as writing itself began just a few thousand years ago and became
widespread just a century or two ago. So Big History uses whatever evidence is most appropriate for learning about
these different domains of knowledge. If you do Big History, you need to get used to many different types of evidence.
Astronomers study the light from distant galaxies; geologists study rocks; biologists and physical anthropologists study DNA.
You don’t need to become an expert in these forms of evidence, but you do need to get some feeling for how they work.
Doing Big History also means getting a sense of how scholars work in many different fields. It means finding language and
concepts—such as thresholds of complexity, or Goldilocks Conditions, or collective learning—that work well across many
disciplines. Using these transdisciplinary concepts, Big History strings together the stories about the past that have been
generated in many different disciplines, and it uses them to construct a larger history that treats human history as part of
a much larger story that unites all disciplines interested in the past. That is why it makes sense to see Big History as a sort
of modern origin story, one shared by educated people throughout the world and based on the best of modern scientific
scholarship.
Big History and world history are not mutually exclusive; they overlap in many interesting ways. But as you move between
world history and Big History it is important to be aware of these differences.
David Christian