I'm mean works that take a long view of human history, focusing on the factors influencing human actions across different times and places. In a sense, I'm looking for a well-articulated "theory of history," so to speak.
I'm open to writers from a variety of traditions and approaches, I just want to make sure that what I'm reading is deemed reliable by people who know more about history and historiography than I do.
edit: I mean to focus on human history, not natural history, as "big history" might imply. I don't need to start with the Big Bang, more like primitive societies beginning with anatomically modern human beings. But beyond that point in time, nature has obviously played a big role in history and should included in the discussion. My apologies for any confusion.
It sounds like what you're looking for may be found in the works of someone such as Fernand Braudel. Braudel was a leader of the French Annales School (school as in group of theories; not an actual place), and was known for his long view of history. The Annales School was hugely influential in the 1950s and 1960s, and became less popular with the advent of postmodernism and social history, but Braudel's work is definitely a start (and relatively readable) if you want to understand world systems theory.
Braudel (and the Annales writers) employ the concept of the longue durée, or long term, which prioritizes the history of long-term structural changes in structures (environmental, social, governmental) as a way to explain change, while attempting to avoid the history of specific events. As you can imagine, there are many, many opinions about the usefulness of this approach, but in the interests of not writing a novel, I'll simply mention that Braudel is still unavoidable even in an introduction to historiography. (Unless graduate education has just gone completely to hell since I was in school.)
Anyhow, Braudel's first work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, is still widely available and still widely read. In that book, Braudel first examines the long-term geographical/environmental history of the Mediterranean, then focuses on social change over a period of several centuries, then focuses finally on individual events which are firmly set in the context of the longue durée.
That's a very broad overview, but it's where I would start if I were you. Let me know if you have other questions!
From a Big History course syllabus I have access to, this is the required text for the class, and the following is a list of optional books for student essays:
Ball, Philip. Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. (Big Idea: Apparently complex social behaviors often emerge from mere particle-like interactions of individuals.)
Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. (Big Idea: Geographical differences can explain the long-term ascendance of some nations over others.)
Gould, Stephen Jay. Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. New York: Harmony Books, 1996. (Big Idea: The faith in increasing complexity and progress is mostly a statistical illusion or a human delusion.)
Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking, 2011. (Big Idea: Evolutionary psychology can explain the persistence of violence in human history—and its recent decline.)
Spier, Fred. Big History and the Future of Humanity. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. (Big Idea: There is a continuum of increasing complexity throughout cosmic, evolutionary, and human history, which can be understood in terms of the density of free energy flows.)
Waal, F. B. M. de. Our Inner Ape. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. (Big Idea: Our primate heritage enlightens our understanding of human relations, politics, conflict, and cooperation.)
Wilson, Edward O. The Social Conquest of Earth. New York: Liveright, 2012. (Big Idea: Culture has allowed humans to live and evolve—almost—like eusocial insects.)
Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf, 1998. (Big Idea: We can and should now unite all the major branches of knowledge and bridge the sciences and humanities.)
Wright, Robert. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Vintage Books, 2000. (Big Idea: The history of human society is the rise of non-zero-sum collaboration.)
I really enjoyed reading "Maps of Time: an Introduction to Big History" by David Christian for that kind of perspective. It does cover natural history as well, but I find the quantitative way that various measurements of human development are presented was very illuminating. If you love the big picture of history, give this a look.
A less academic read, but a fun book with lots of interesting links traced through history is James Burke's "Connections".
It's a rather fascinatingly constructed book as well, because everything in the book is cross-referenced. So you can read the book like a book - page 1, page 2, page 3, etc - or you can follow a single story thread as it jumps through time by following the links in the margins.
Obviously, i am not a historian, but I am an avid reader and an author, and this book scratches all three of my major itches: A fascination with history, the love of good writing, and the joy of a well-crafted story.
I found the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article concerning the philosophy of history to be very useful when researching historiographical trends; one section treats on the 'problem of scale', which seems to me to be relevant to your interests; it chronicles efforts to produce 'big' history publications without the projects turning into unwieldy messes, such as M. Livi-Bacci's 'A Concise History of World Population' (2007), but the rest of the article is great reading too, with an extensive bibliography for your further reading.
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