Inspired by xtisme’s current “History…what would you change and how?” thread, where people get to pick what they think are the most crucial specific historical events, I’d like to broaden the discussion to the issue of recent shifts in the historical “big picture”.
What large-scale historical theme(s) emerging over, say, the last twenty years do you think have had the most profound impact on how we view human history? I’ll get the ball rolling with a couple of suggestions:
1. A surprising amount of human history is the history of human environmental impact. From ancient to modern times, most of what we consider “historical” writing was political and/or military history: what happened to nations and societies was considered to depend, for the most part, on the marriages and wars of political leaders. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we started shifting our attention towards social and economic history: hey, turns out these nameless masses of commoners can also have a pretty significant effect on what happens. Even more recently, it has dawned on us, relatively suddenly, that the changes societies have made to their natural habitats have had a hell of an impact on their futures. “Environmental history” is new and big.
Agree? Disagree? Why?
2. Central Asia is way more important than we used to think. Traditional history was primarily focused on literate urban civilizations on the sea-washed fringes of the Eurasian continent. The plains and mountains in the middle were “flyover country”, largely uninteresting except for the Silk Road trade route across it, and the occasional eruption of nasty barbarians out of it. No longer. That “flyover country”, historians now think, has been a major agent in keeping the pot of history a-boiling on the whole continent for millennia.