How size matters: the question of scale in history

Abstract

In the last few years, the AHR has published six “Conversations,” each on a subject of interest to a wide range of historians: “On Transnational History” (2006), “Religious Identities and Violence” (2007), “Environmental Historians and Environmental Crisis” (2008), “Historians and the Study of Material Culture” (2009), “Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information” (2011), and “The Historical Study of Emotions” (2012). For each the process has been the same: the Editor convenes a group of scholars with an interest in the topic who, via e-mail over the course of several months, conduct a conversation, which is then lightly edited and footnoted, finally appearing in the December issue. The goal has been to provide readers with a wide-ranging consideration of a topic at a high level of expertise, in which the participants are recruited across several fields and periods. It is the sort of publishing project that this journal is uniquely positioned to undertake. This year's topic is “How Size Matters: The Question of Scale in History.” Many working historians—perhaps more those of past generations than today—might regard this question as irrelevant if not downright strange. Most traditional history, after all, is spatially defined by categories such as the nation-state, or chronologically constrained by the temporal boundaries of an event or era, or otherwise contextualized in terms of time and space by implicit “givens.” At least since the rise of the Annales school of history in the 1970s, however, these assumed categories have been challenged by such concepts as the Braudelian “world” and the longue durée, and subsequently by the vogue of “microhistory.” In more recent years there has been the rise of global or world history, as well as, even more recently, “deep” history, which challenges historians to think not only in years or centuries but across the vast spaces of evolutionary and even planetary time. The conversation that follows touches on all of these topics. Joining the Editor here are Sebouh David Aslanian, a scholar of early modern Armenian and world history at UCLA; Joyce E. Chaplin, a historian of the environment and of science from Harvard University; Kristin Mann, an African historian at Emory University; and Ann McGrath, a scholar of colonialism and Indigenous history at the Australian National University. In addition, all of these scholars have an active interest in global and world history, which largely provided the theme of the conversation.