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Book Review
| Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. By DAVID CHRISTIAN. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 588 pp. $34.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
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By any standards, this is a most impressive work, bold in conception and ably executed, with a combination of judicious comments, thoughtful insights, clear prose, and stellar range. Christian takes his history on all and every timescale as he sets out "to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth" (p. 2). This involves ranging from the origins of the universe and closing with the future. Furthermore, this is not simply a matter of narrative, as Christian aims to analyze and explain process along the way. To produce such a dynamic account, he faces the particular challenge that, whatever their particular expertise, much of the book will be terra incognita to its readers. This leads him to have to offer clear explanations, and he succeeds in doing so, as when he compares much evolutionary change to "the shuffling of a vast deck of cards" (p. 149). |
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Given his scale, it is not surprising that Christian searches for trends. For example, he argues that although the history of the era of agrarian civilizations was characterized by innovations of many kinds, generally of an incremental, not revolutionary, type, nowhere was innovation sufficient to keep up with the pace of population growth. Nevertheless, the growing diversity is seen as a major cause of collective learning, "for it increased the ecological, technological, and organizational possibilities available to different communities, as well as the potential synergies of combining these technologies in new ways" (p. 284). |
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