Scales

David Christian

pp. 64-89

in: Marnie Hughes-Warrington (ed), Palgrave advances in world histories, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Abstract

The issue of scale is extremely important in historical teaching and research, yet historians have not given it the consideration it deserves.² The issue has certainly not been discussed as much as other familiar topics such as the problem of "objectivity" or "how historians use sources' or whether or not historians can and should make moral judgements.³ Yet no historian interested in world history can ignore the problem of scale, because world history requires us to think about the past on scales that challenge some basic conventions of modern historical scholarship.