The Distant Horizon

Twenty years ago, the distinguished economic historian David Landes wrote an article in The New Republic about what he called "Big History." It was a review of William McNeill's extraordinary The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000 and of my own more modest work The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. By the term "Big History," he did not have in mind such multivolume works as Arnold Toynbee's 12-volume A Study of History, or Samuel Morison's 15-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, or Joseph Needham's impossible to count how many volumes of Science and Civilisation in China. Nor did Landes mean to imply by the use of "big" that this mode of inquiry was superior to that of the history-from-below school that had emerged, spectacularly, in the 1960s. He had no quarrel with accounts of life in Provençal villages, of northern Italian millers, or of trade unionists in Lancashire. He was simply calling readers' attention to a different category or, if you like, a different level of historical writing.

What Landes had in mind were single-volume books whose authors took hold of a vast topic and then wrestled it to the ground, comprehended it, and explained it to readers -- in sum, gave it historical sense. This creative intellectual grappling with big themes described, of course, Landes' own pedagogic journey, a career in which the subjects attempted became bolder and grander: from Bankers and Pashas: International Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt to The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe From 1750 to the Present and The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor.

Landes' is a hard act to follow, and most of us historians have been happy to sail, at some distance, in his wake. Three recent books, however, have taken up the challenge of Big History: William Bernstein's A Splendid Exchange, Strobe Talbott's The Great Experiment, and Amy Chua's Day of Empire. All are significant contributions, and one, Chua's, has a chance of becoming a classic. They are ambitious, heavily supported by wide reading and many notes, and willing to take intellectual risks. None resembles anything like a history textbook, and all are better read -- better appreciated and better criticized -- by someone with a good background in world history. Still, that should not deter general readers interested in humankind's larger story. Indeed, such readers should be intrigued by these very different attempts to make sense of the broad sweep of history.

In an age of sound bites and the awful daily vision of human beings chattering into their cell phones as they hustle down the street, it is deeply satisfying that a small number of people still take the time to ponder and make connections between events over centuries. Landes was right: there will always be a place for books such as these, for they fulfill a basic human instinct to impose some order on the past.

RISE AND FALL

Bernstein's superb history of world trade concentrates heavily on the premodern (that is, pre-steam-engine) age. Bernstein published his impressive The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created just a few years ago, and this new study stands squarely on the shoulders of that work -- and then rises to new heights. A Splendid Exchange is a work of which Adam Smith and Max Weber would have approved. And it is all the more interesting because it is written by someone who is deeply knowledgeable about and active in the financial world yet finds the time to write graceful and insightful history with a delicate display of scholarship that conceals a vast erudition. What really marks Bernstein out is his talent in understanding, and then explaining, international commercial linkages.

A Splendid Exchange is a history of material goods that, in their relevant centuries, were deemed extremely desirable by societies that did not possess them -- tin, grain, iron, spices, textiles, steam engines, armaments, rubber, oil -- of the merchants and companies that moved those goods to market, and, by extension, of the financial networks that sustained these trades. This is not simply, however, a catalog of material culture; if it were, Bernstein's subtitle about shaping the world would make no sense. The real point, although perhaps Bernstein does not make it strongly enough, is the interaction of commerce and finance with politics and strategy. The cities of Antwerp and Amsterdam around 1600, for example, were not just places where the North Sea herring trade and the English wool trade met up, profitably, with the long-range banking techniques of Lombardy. They, and their environs, were also the locations for the largest shipbuilding industry in the world at that time; for a flourishing armaments trade; and for a lively pamphlet press that had taken advantage of the Gutenberg revolution to disseminate all manner of ideas about free thought, free religion (that is, Protestantism), and the freedom of international trade (as in the writings of the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius). These factors, along with the geography of the region, gave the Low Countries the ability reach out across the oceans and exert political and social power for centuries.