The Routledge Companion to Big History

Craig Benjamin is a Professor of History at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, USA, where he researches and teaches big history and ancient Eurasian history. Recent books include Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (co-authored with David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown, 2014); and Empires of Ancient Eurasia. The First Silk Roads Era 100 BCE – 250 CE (2018). Esther Quaedackers is a Lecturer in Big History at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where she has been developing, coordinating, and teaching big history courses for over a decade. She is the inventor of the ‘little big history’ approach, which is a research and teaching method in which small subjects are connected to aspects of big history in order to generate creative new ideas about how these subjects came to be the way they are. David Baker is Lecturer of Big History at Macquarie University, Australia, and is the first scholar worldwide to achieve a PhD in that field. He is co-designer of Big History School (three K–12 curricula), Big History: Connecting Knowledge on Coursera, and contributor to the Big History Project. He was scriptwriter for two seasons of Crash Course: Big History with over 12 million views on Youtube. He has produced numerous research articles, chapters, and edited volumes, including works in the Journal of World History and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Introductory chapters



Introduction to The Routledge Companion to Big History

Craig Benjamin, Esther Quaedackers and David Baker



1 What is big history?

David Christian

PART I



Big history and science



2 Big history and the study of time: the underlying



temporalities of big history

Barry Wood



3 Big history and astronomy – space is big: the Fermi



paradox: its relevance to big history and the human race

Jonathan Markley



4 Big history and macro-evolution: evolutionary principles



and mechanisms at biological and social phases of the



big history



Leonid E. Grinin, Andrey Korotayev and Alexander Markov

PART II



Big history, social science and the humanities



5 Big history and anthropology: our place in the



multiverse: anthropology, civilization and big history

Barry H. Rodrigue



6 Big history and archaeology: archaeology is big history

Brian Fagan



7 Big history and philosophy: philosophical foundations



of big history: why big history makes sense

Armando Menéndez Viso



8 Big history and political science: science, the deep past,



and the political

Lowell Gustafson



9 Big history and historiography: deep tides and swirling



foam: the influence of macro-historical trends on micro-historical



events

David Baker



10 Big history and critical theory: science, history and why



theory matters

David Blanks



11 Big history, morality and religion

Cynthia Stokes Brown

PART III



Little big histories



12 A case for little big histories

Esther Quaedackers



13 The little big history of the Nalón River, Asturias, Spain



Olga García-Moreno, Diego Álvarez-Laó, Miguel Arbizu,



Eduardo Dopico, Eva García-Vázquez, Joaquín García Sansegundo,



Montserrat Jiménez-Sánchez, Laura Miralles, Ícaro Obeso,



Ángel Rodríguez-Rey, Marco de la Rasilla Vives,



Luis Vicente Sánchez Fernández, Luis Rodríguez Terente,



Luigi Toffolatti and Pablo Turrero



14 Sketch of a little big history of Private E.E. Benjamin



and the Great War

Craig Benjamin

PART IV



Teaching big history



15 The Big History Project in Australia

Tracy Sullivan



16 Big history teaching in Korea

Seohyung Kim



17 Crossing thresholds: using big history to meet challenges



in teaching and learning in the United States

Robert B. Bain

PART V



Big history and the future



18 Big history and the future of technology

Leonid E. Grinin and Anton L. Grinin



19 Big history and the Singularity

Akop P. Nazaretyan



20 Underground metro systems: a durable geological proxy



of rapid urban population growth and energy consumption



during the Anthropocene

Mark Williams, Matt Edgeworth, Jan Zalasiewicz,



Colin N. Waters, Will Steffen, Alexander P. Wolfe,