Hello!

I think there are a few points in your post to unpack; first I’ll touch on why the genre of “big history” can be tricky just for what it IS: an incredibly zoomed out, and therefore necessarily much less detailed, form of history.

Whenever we discuss ANYTHING, be it the weather, a pattern on fabric, a basketball game, etc., the more detail we provide the more precise we can be. If in conversation I say “it rained all day,” that might seem an innocuous statement that on the surface seems “true” to describe the gloomy wet day yesterday. However, what if what really happened yesterday was that it was overcast with no rain until 8:46am, at which point it started to rain until 2:14pm, at which point there was a brief hailstorm until 2:47pm, followed by more rain, until another brief period of sleet as the temperature dropped at 9:28, and then no rain until after midnight? My characterization of it raining all day was “fine” for certain purposes, but it obviously wasn’t true in the sense that it obscured a lot of what actually happened yesterday. If someone who firmly believed the statement “it rained all day yesterday” then tried to apply that statement then attempted to tie it to a larger question— “why does it rain all day in THIS country but not in THAT country?”— then you’re basing your question on a false proposition that logically means your conclusion cannot be true.

To get back to history: big history out of necessity forces the historian (or journalist, or some other professional) to make “it rained all day yesterday” statements about massive swaths of time, groups of people, cultures, belief systems, or virtually any other subject one might touch upon. To truly perform big history, one has to go big: in doing this, it’s not like there is nothing lost. I’d argue that what’s almost always lost is the truth. Now I’m the case of the weather or the details of a basketball game the truth might not be very problematic. But when we’re talking about history, which deals with humanity, with people, with concepts and ideas that absolutely inform on a daily basis how we think about and take action on the world around us, this is HUGELY important.

I’ll touch on a few examples of what I’m referring to here. First to dispense with it quickly: the less detail about a historical event, the less I know and the more incorrect it is, as seen by our rain example. If the French Revolution is one line in a book as a 'joining of forces between the peasantry and the Estates General to overthrow the monarch' (and this is exactly the case in Cynthia Stokes Brown’s appropriately titled Big History) then all we know about the French Revolution is a singular statement that isn’t true really on even a basic level. So by including this “fact” we’ve now given the reader entirely false information about a major historical event.

Another common issue with big history (once again done out of necessity) is of “generalized grouping of ‘nations’ or ‘cultures.’” Italy is a great example. The actual country of Italy is quite modern: while as a conceptualization the idea of “Italy” as a region of peoples with similar languages has been around for much longer, the actual idea of a unified country called Italy didn’t gain traction until the 19th century, and wasn’t officially a nation until the “kingdom” of Italy late in the century, and wouldn’t have its modern form until the 20th.

Another example in my realm are the “French”: it’s virtually impossible to actually speak of “the French” in the ancien regime. On the eve of the French Revolution, there were regions in the hinterlands where “French” subjects spoke no French, had entirely different taxes, judicial courts, obligations to the king, and a host of other cultural differences that, for example, made them far more kin to their closest neighbors in the “German” principalities or Basque countries, than their fellow citizens in Paris. In both of these cases, the distinction is important for us to know when we’re thinking about history. If I’m speaking of why things were a certain way in “Italy” compared to “China” in the 13th century, I’m taking two concepts that did not exist (especially as we, the average reader, thinks about them) and then applying broad statements that, at best, apply to a fraction of the territory and have a million and one “exceptions to the rule,” and then using the broad statement AS a rule to base a thesis—a hypothesis about the world—off of.

Which of course leads into arguably the biggest problem with big history: asking questions, and then using false propositions to answer those questions. In your question, you stress that what draws you to big history is how interesting the questions are. I’d push back there a bit. A question being an interesting one (or a "legitimate" one in your phrasing) doesn’t mean it is a question that has to have an answer. And yet, when the question is interesting enough, there are plenty of authors who will MAKE it have an answer no matter what they have to do to get there. Why? Well, it sells! There is a reason Homo Sapiens was in every airport I went to for years after it’s release: people what to read the “truth” about a sweeping tale that neatly fits all of human history within its very glossy covers (seriously what’s that book made of? It feels nice, I’ll give them that). We love patterns and we love a good, provocative story; big histories usually give us both.

But at what cost? I’d argue the outcome is more damaging that we might think. It’s tempting to say “yeah I know not to take everything I read in Guns, Germs, and Steel literally, but it’s an interesting story regardless and I want to hear Diamonds answer to the question of why ‘Europeans came to rule’ the Americas.” There are plenty of other posts that go into detail on what’s faulty about Diamond’s premises, but if I read Diamond and come away with the conception of a helpless indigenous population wiped out by factors beyond their control, I now have a pretty powerful paradigm for how to view the world in my head that is NOT meaningless.

Look at some of the answers by /u/crrpit and /u/commiespaceinvader and /u/scaredymuse, among others, I found for How well received is Big History in historical circles?