This was inspired by comments Dan Carlin has made (not sure how you all will feel about that...) about how modern history is much more concerned with narrow issues of constructing and interpreting relatively minor pieces of history than on broad analysis or interpretation.
Though I am a complete outsider, this does gel with my other limited experiences of reading this subreddit, listening to lectures, reading the occasional book, etc. History used to be considered a part of the humanities like philosophy (my major) and literature, but now it seems to be viewed as a social science. I think Dan Carlin made a similar point himself.
It strikes me, though, that while it is intrinsically interesting to find out what happened in the past, there could be a lot of interesting interpretation and analysis of history that leans more towards the humanistic side of things and eschews the micro for the macro. I don't just want to know why events unfolded how they did but theories about what it means. I don't expect a grand theory to rule them all to emerge from this, that doesn't really seem to happen in the humanities, but it would be interesting and useful to see those discussions and perspectives.
So, am I missing something? Does this already happen? If so, do modern historians generally like it or dislike it?
If it isn't happening, should it? Should historians do it or somebody else?
The micro at the expense of macro is a relatively old critique of the historical profession and one that ignores much of the realities that facing contemporary scholars in academia.
For one thing, there are relatively few dissertation topics that can hold such an attempt to engage in such a massive macro-level analysis. The goal of a dissertation is to uncover new research or a new theoretical paradigm and "smaller" topics make this process more manageable. Unless one is able to self-fund, there are few PhD students who can invest the time in (and less PhD committees with the patience for) a Fernand Braudel-level scale of analysis. The typical path (and I'm painting with a very broad brush here) for an American academic historian is the first book to be an enlarged dissertation on a highly specialized topic, and the second or third to be more broadly based, often because they have the time and experience to write on a wider topic.
Another basic problem with this critique over the Balkanization, and it is a common one, is that it underestimates the impact that specialized studies can have upon understanding the past. For example, one of the classic microhistories is Carlo Ginzberg's The Cheese and the Worms about an Inquisition trial of a sixteenth century Italian miller named Menocchio. On the surface, Menocchio is an nonentity in global history; a minor idiosyncratic miller in a relatively insignificant Italian village. But the preserved records of his trial reveals that Menocchio had a number of heterodox opinions that expressed a weltanschauung that's quite at odds with what one would expect from Counter-Reformation Italy. Focusing only upon grand narratives and big ideas fosters a tendency to reduce figures like Menocchio into background characters. Other specialized studies also have greater sway than their narrow topics would suggest. Stephen Kotkin's first book, Magnetic Mountain, a study of the creation of a Soviet city in the 1930s, introduced the concept "speaking Bolshevik" into the lexicon of Soviet studies. The assumption that the Carlin critique makes is that academics are researching subjects like Bulgarian transsexual dwarf nuns which should only appeal to other academics, when in reality even narrow subjects produces work of great value in other areas.
Ultimately, part of the subtext behind this critique is not "historians are creating too narrow histories" but rather "historians are not writing the type of histories I want them to." Often historians are engaging with big ideas, but in different way than the layman expects.