Macrohistory

Last updated

Macrohistory seeks out large, long-term trends in world history in search of ultimate patterns by a comparison of proximate details. [1] It favors a comparative or world-historical perspective to determine the roots of changes as well as the developmental paths of society or a historical process. [1]

Contents

A macrohistorical study might examine Japanese feudalism and European feudalism to decide whether feudal structures are an inevitable outcome because of certain conditions. Macrohistorical studies often "assume that macro-historical processes repeat themselves in explainable and understandable ways." [2] The approach can identify stages in the development of humanity as a whole such as the large-scale direction towards greater rationality, greater liberty or the development of productive forces and communist society, among others. [3]

Description

Macrohistory is distinguished from microhistory, which involves the rigorous and in-depth study of a single event in history. [4] However, these two can be combined such as the case of studying the larger trends of post-slavery societies, which include the examination of individual cases and smaller groups. [5] Macrohistory is also distinguished from metahistory with the way the latter recognizes historical works as "a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse." [6] According to Garry Trompf, macrohistory encompasses but is not limited by metahistory by taking in broad prospectus of change, including those that are imaginal or speculative. [7]

Macrohistory has four "idea frames" – that past events can show: 1) we are progressing; 2) affairs have worsened; 3) everything is repetitive; and, 4) nothing can be understood without an eschaton (end time) or apocatastasis (restoration of all things, or reconstitution). [8]

Examples

Examples of macrohistorical analysis include Oswald Spengler's assertion that the lifespan of civilizations is limited and ultimately they decay. [3] There is also Arnold J. Toynbee's historical synthesis in explaining the rise and fall of civilizations, which also included those by other historians (e.g. William H. McNeill's The Rise of the West ) inspired by his works. [9] The Battle of Ain Jalut and the early Mongol conquests are considered by many historians to be of great macrohistorical importance. [10] The former marked the high water point of Mongol conquests, and the first time they had ever been decisively defeated.[ citation needed ] The early conquests, on the other hand, were pursued for the purpose of long-distance trade but disrupted trade networks until the emergence of the so-called Pax Mongolica when trade relations in Eurasia stabilized. [10]

Reception

According to economists Robert Solow, [11] Brian Snowdon, [12] Jason Collins, [13] and to an article in the "Break Through & Mind Changing Idea" section of Wired (Japan), [14] [15] Oded Galor's unified growth theory is a macro-historical analysis that has significantly contributed to the understanding of process of development over the entire course of human history and the role of deep-rooted factors in the transition from stagnation to growth and in the emergence of the vast inequality across the globe. [16] Wired (Japan) has described Galor's theory as a global theory comparable to Newton's "law of gravitation", Darwin's "evolution theory" or Einstein's "general relativity". [14]

Macrohistorical publications

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feudalism</span> Legal and military structure in medieval Europe

Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of legal, economic, military, cultural, and political customs that flourished in medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Macroeconomics</span> Study of an economy as a whole

Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes regional, national, and global economies. Macroeconomists study topics such as output/GDP and national income, unemployment, price indices and inflation, consumption, saving, investment, energy, international trade, and international finance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oswald Spengler</span> German polymath (1880–1936)

Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German polymath, whose areas of interest included history, philosophy, mathematics, science, and art, as well as their relation to his organic theory of history. He is best known for his two-volume work The Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1922, covering human history. Spengler's model of history postulates that human cultures and civilizations are akin to biological entities, each with a limited, predictable, and deterministic lifespan.

World history or global history as a field of historical study examines history from a global perspective. It emerged centuries ago; leading practitioners have included Voltaire (1694–1778), Hegel (1770–1831), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), and Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975). The field became much more active in the late 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Economic history</span>

Economic history is the study of history using methodological tools from economics or with a special attention to economic phenomena. Research is conducted using a combination of historical methods, statistical methods and the application of economic theory to historical situations and institutions. The field can encompass a wide variety of topics, including equality, finance, technology, labour, and business. It emphasizes historicizing the economy itself, analyzing it as a dynamic entity and attempting to provide insights into the way it is structured and conceived.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Economic growth</span> Measure of increase in market value of goods

Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of increase in the real and nominal gross domestic product (GDP).

Evolutionary economics is a school of economic thought that is inspired by evolutionary biology. Although not defined by a strict set of principles and uniting various approaches, it treats economic development as a process rather than an equilibrium and emphasizes change, innovation, complex interdependencies, self-evolving systems, and limited rationality as the drivers of economic evolution. The support for the evolutionary approach to economics in recent decades seems to have initially emerged as a criticism of the mainstream neoclassical economics, but by the beginning of the 21st century it had become part of the economic mainstream itself.

Philosophy of history is the philosophical study of history and its discipline. The term was coined by the French philosopher Voltaire.

<i>The Decline of the West</i> Book by Oswald Spengler

The Decline of the West is a two-volume work by Oswald Spengler. The first volume, subtitled Form and Actuality, was published in the summer of 1918. The second volume, subtitled Perspectives of World History, was published in 1922. The definitive edition of both volumes was published in 1923.

The idea of convergence in economics is the hypothesis that poorer economies' per capita incomes will tend to grow at faster rates than richer economies. In the Solow-Swan growth model, economic growth is driven by the accumulation of physical capital until this optimum level of capital per worker, which is the "steady state" is reached, where output, consumption and capital are constant. The model predicts more rapid growth when the level of physical capital per capita is low, something often referred to as “catch up” growth. As a result, all economies should eventually converge in terms of per capita income. Developing countries have the potential to grow at a faster rate than developed countries because diminishing returns are not as strong as in capital-rich countries. Furthermore, poorer countries can replicate the production methods, technologies, and institutions of developed countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Malthusianism</span> Idea about population growth and food supply

Malthusianism is the theory that population growth is potentially exponential, according to the Malthusian growth model, while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population decline. This event, called a Malthusian catastrophe occurs when population growth outpaces agricultural production, causing famine or war, resulting in poverty and depopulation. Such a catastrophe inevitably has the effect of forcing the population to "correct" back to a lower, more easily sustainable level. Malthusianism has been linked to a variety of political and social movements, but almost always refers to advocates of population control.

The overlapping generations (OLG) model is one of the dominating frameworks of analysis in the study of macroeconomic dynamics and economic growth. In contrast to the Ramsey–Cass–Koopmans neoclassical growth model in which individuals are infinitely-lived, in the OLG model individuals live a finite length of time, long enough to overlap with at least one period of another agent's life.

<i>The Rise of the West</i> 1963 book by William H. McNeill

The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community is a book by University of Chicago historian William H. McNeill, first published in 1963 and enlarged with a retrospective preface in 1991. It explores world history in terms of the effect different old world civilizations had on one another, and especially the deep influence of Western civilization on the rest of the world in the past 500 years. He argues that societal contact with foreign civilizations is the primary force in driving historical change. In 1964 it won the National Book Award in History and Biography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social cycle theory</span> Type of social theories

Social cycle theories are among the earliest social theories in sociology. Unlike the theory of social evolutionism, which views the evolution of society and human history as progressing in some new, unique direction(s), sociological cycle theory argues that events and stages of society and history generally repeat themselves in cycles. Such a theory does not necessarily imply that there cannot be any social progress. In the early theory of Sima Qian and the more recent theories of long-term ("secular") political-demographic cycles as well as in the Varnic theory of P.R. Sarkar, an explicit accounting is made of social progress.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William H. McNeill</span> Canadian historian and writer (1917–2016)

William Hardy McNeill was an American historian and author, noted for his argument that contact and exchange among civilizations is what drives human history forward, first postulated in The Rise of the West (1963). He was the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1987.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oded Galor</span> Israeli-American economist (born 1953)

Oded Galor is an Israeli-American economist who is currently Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University. He is the founder of unified growth theory.

Robert Paul Brenner is an American economic historian. He is a professor emeritus of history and director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA, editor of the socialist journal Against the Current, and editorial committee member of New Left Review. His research interests are early modern European history, economic, social and religious history, agrarian history, social theory/Marxism, and Tudor–Stuart England.

Unified growth theory was developed in light of the alleged failure of endogenous growth theory to capture key empirical regularities in the growth processes and their contribution to the momentous rise in inequality across nations in the past two centuries.

Demographic economics or population economics is the application of economic analysis to demography, the study of human populations, including size, growth, density, distribution, and vital statistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of macroeconomic thought</span>

Macroeconomic theory has its origins in the study of business cycles and monetary theory. In general, early theorists believed monetary factors could not affect real factors such as real output. John Maynard Keynes attacked some of these "classical" theories and produced a general theory that described the whole economy in terms of aggregates rather than individual, microeconomic parts. Attempting to explain unemployment and recessions, he noticed the tendency for people and businesses to hoard cash and avoid investment during a recession. He argued that this invalidated the assumptions of classical economists who thought that markets always clear, leaving no surplus of goods and no willing labor left idle.

References

  1. 1 2 Li, Huaiyin (2019). The Making of the Modern Chinese State: 1600–1950. Oxon: Routledge. ISBN   9781138362444.
  2. ↑ Matthew C. Wells, Ph.D., Parallelism: A Handbook of Social Analysis . Archived August 24, 2011.
  3. 1 2 Morris, Irwin; Oppenheimer, Joe; Soltan, Karol (2004). Politics from Anarchy to Democracy: Rational Choice in Political Science. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. p. 224. ISBN   0804745838.
  4. ↑ Graham, Shawn; Milligan, Ian; Weingart, Scott (2015). Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope. London: Imperial College Press. p. 2. ISBN   9781783266081.
  5. ↑ Araujo, Ana Lucia (2017). Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 7. ISBN   9781350010598.
  6. ↑ Heilmann, MarkAnn; Llewellyn, Mark (2007). Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing . New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp.  2. ISBN   9781349281855.
  7. ↑ Milani, Milad (2014). Sufism in the Secret History of Persia. Oxon: Routledge. p. 8. ISBN   9781844656776.
  8. ↑ Handbook of the Theosophical Current. Leiden: BRILL. 2013. p. 375. ISBN   9789004235960.
  9. ↑ Yerxa, Donald A. (2009). Recent Themes in World History and the History of the West: Historians in Conversation. University of South Carolina Press. p. 3. ISBN   978-1-57003-831-0.
  10. 1 2 Etkin, Nina Lilian (2009). Foods of Association: Biocultural Perspectives on Foods and Beverages that Mediate Sociability. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. p. 53. ISBN   978-0-8165-2777-9.
  11. ↑ Solow, Robert (May 2011). Endorsements. Princeton University Press. ISBN   9780691130026.
  12. ↑ Snowdon, Brian (June 2008). "Towards a Unified Theory of Economic Growth. Oded Galor on the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern economic growth. An interview with introduction by Brian Snowdon". World Economics. 2 (9). CiteSeerX   10.1.1.724.3924 .
  13. ↑ Collins, Jason (2013). "Galor's Unified Growth Theory". Jason Collins Blog.
  14. 1 2 Ishikawa, Yoshiko (2018). "The root of economic disparity is attributed to East Africa ten thousands of years ago: Professor Oded Galor's 'Unified Growth Theory'". Wired. Vol. 31.
  15. ↑ "English Translation of Yoshiko Ishikawa, 'The root of economic disparity is attributed to East Africa ten thousands of years ago: Professor Oded Galor's Unified Growth Theory'". 2018.
  16. ↑ Galor, Oded (2011). Unified Growth Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN   9781400838868.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.