Big history and historiography: deep tides and swirling foam: the influence of macro-historical trends on micro-historical events

Big history holds the potential to revolutionise how every historian thinks about micro-historical events and to reawaken one of the oldest debates on the relevance of meta-theory in historical scholarship, a debate which has long sat dormant, stagnant, and unresolved. Big history is well known for exploring broad trends that stretch across 13.8 billion years, rising complexity and collective learning being foremost amongst them. But those same broad trends trickle into every famine, every beheading, every palace coup, and every civil war in the past 5,000 years of conventional history. To revive Braudel’s metaphor, those events are surface disturbances, swirling foam atop the deep tides of big history.