If you find this interesting, or just generally want a remarkable overview of human history, I highly recommend the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared diamond. It won a Pulitzer prize in its day, and really is a terrific book. Little dated, having been written in the late '90s, but the vast majority of it is still up to date and very interesting. The author does repeat a few fad claims from the '90s that have been debunked (such as the QWERTY keyboard being intentionally slow), but nothing really substantial.
A friendly note to anyone going into it with no other info: Guns, Germs, and Steel reached the status of having its own wikipedia entry [0] and is very widely known, with enough controversy to fuel endless debates on historical subreddits. Enjoy your read and be prepared when you'll want to share your thoughts.
Even as a lay reader (though I have read many other books and The Great Courses on similar material) there were several things I picked up on that are not scholarly at all. The most visible of which is the weird obsession the author has with repeatedly making sure that the reader knows that Europeans are not smarter than anybody else (though explicitly are less smart than Polynesians, an ironic contradiction to the author's own contention just a couple sentences prior that there are no intelligent differences among humans) and that any consideration whatsoever that different societies might have been different and made different choices with different outcomes, is utterly racist and unacceptable. It definitely struck me as very anti-science.
But taken as a whole I enjoyed much about the book's approach and there are plenty of great things in there. And I would say about any book, definitely don't take anything as gospel. Always, always, read the criticisms and other discussions before just accepting things as "correct" simply because they were printed in a book.
Though a fun thought experiment, this book isn't up to date with modern knowledge and isn't taken seriously by archaeologists. It also doesn't hold much water when the theories proposed are empirically tested. Grand narratives are legacy science.
You were on the mark until the last sentence. Grand narratives are an indispensable part of science. When we discover the right narrative (evolution, the big bang, etc) it helps to frame all of our subsequent thinking. His arguments are bad, but their attachment to a grand narrative are irrelevant to their being bad.
Grand narratives are different from epistemes. Grand narratives have assumed notions of absolute truth because of the power dynamic implied in those notions. See that second link. It's what postmodernism is all about. The tl;dr is epistemes = what knowledge is at a given time & grand narratives = who gets funded.
Jared Diamond tried to reclaim environmental determinism from its unsavoury origins, but he didn't realise that you couldn't repair something when the foundations were rotten.
Earth Transformed by Frankopan is a nice recent addition to the genre of big history. I found it incredibly well sourced, and devoid of grand theoretical claims. It also doesn't suffer of Western centrism, the author goes to great lengths to show global developments and how big environmental changes impacted different regions and cultures in different ways. Just facts and very balanced analysis, and it is a huge book. It has 200 pages just of notes, that you download separately because the tome was already nearly 1000 pages long.
You should also read the criticisms of that book, of which there are many. It's a good read, but much of it is speculation backed up by unprovable theories and the occasional factual error.
Yes please, I would love to read the criticisms of the book. Do you have any specific recommendations? Another commenter mentioned the Wikipedia page, which I am looking at now.
I definitely have criticisms of my own, such as the author being obsessed with telling the reader directly that Europeans aren't smarter (in fact he makes clear multiple times that Polynesians are genetically smarter than Europeans), and with him calling everyone and everything racist if they even consider the possibility that differences between groups of humans could have had anything to do with how their histories turned out, even directly calling any of those theories "racist." He also freely mixes his own opinion with facts, although he did usually make an attempt to include some of the counter-arguments, though they smelled a bit like strawmen.
But overall the book's attempt at comprehensive, engaging overview and the focus around what seems like such a simple question ("Yali's question"), and a lot of mostly accurate stuff, made for an enjoyable read and one I would recommend.
"Sapiens" by Yuval Harari is really remarkable overview of human history and is much more recently written. I read it twice already and enjoyed it a lot both times.
The book is internally inconsistent, with the author cherry-picking "facts" to support his own prejudices. In some cases the same data is used for mutually exclusive conclusions in different chapters. Basically, he making up conclusions and then throwing any shit against the wall in the hope it sticks, with no regard for what he's already said in the same book.
It's pseudo-science, designed to let complacent readers validate their prejudices, and pat themselves on the back.
I have never understood this particular criticism of the work. It is, if anything, an extremely strident argument against prejudice. The entire point is that differences in current day development are not due to innate deficiencies in the people but rather at least in part due to historical quirks of geography and ecology and therefore current development level says very close to nothing about the intrinsic potential or capabilities of anyone from any region of the world.
Yes. GG&S might be wrong, but the claim that it's explicitly racist has always seemed to me to be an astonishingly tendentious misreading.
It turns out that there are lots of readers out there who wilfully confuse "is" for "ought". Even when an author goes out of their way to emphasise that they are only describing their view of reality, not in any way assigning virtue to it.
Most of the GGS-hatred I've seen has come from people who hate that Diamond rejects racial differences or innate differences in will and spirit ("civilization", "culture" etc.) as an explanation.
Then there's some very few left-wing critics who hate it for basically the same reason, but with opposite sign, since it implicitly also rejects that western civilization or the white race is uniquely evil.
Then there's some grumbling from academics who hate a popularizer for all the reasons you'd expect.
I remember reading this as a boy and thinking what the fuck this dude is way too obsessed with these Polynesians. Something about geographical determinism really draws in the creeps.
