I cannot possibly thank all the people who have helped me with this book by educating me, reading draft manuscripts, pointing me to important books and important authors, commenting on my lectures, and giving lectures that I have listened to. We humans swim in a sea of ideas, and a book like this is built by grabbing ideas as they float past, linking them to other ideas, bending them, perhaps warping them, perhaps finding new connections. I can trace some ideas to particular individuals and even particular conversations, but many got lodged in my brain and fermented, sometimes over several years, before turning up in another part of my brain in new forms and without labels to remind me of their sources. So I do not know whom to thank for many of the ideas in this book. All I can do is offer a general thank-you to my numerous colleagues and friends and to the rich process of collective learning that has stocked my mind with countless ideas from today’s marvelous and prolific world. Big history is a collective project, an emergent property of synergies among many, many minds.
Some people I can thank directly. A small group of like-minded scholars have gathered around the idea of big history and its analogues and worked to advance education and research in big history. They include pioneers such as the astrophysicist Eric Chaisson, the sociologist Johan Goudsblom, and all those who helped form and nurture the International Big History Association (listed in alphabetical order): Walter Alvarez, Mojgan Behmand (and her many colleagues at Dominican University), Craig and Pamela Benjamin, Cynthia Brown, Leonid Grinin, Lowell Gustafson, Andrey Korotayev, Lucy Laffitte, Jonathan Markley, John Mears (who began teaching big history at the same time as me), Alessandro Montanari, Esther Quaedackers, Barry Rodrigue, Fred Spier, Joe Voros, Sun Yue, and many others who have helped build the big history story. I worked particularly closely with Craig Benjamin and Cynthia Brown on the first college textbook in big history in a remarkably friendly and fruitful collaboration. Sadly, my friendship with Cynthia ended with her death on October 15, 2017; one of the pioneers of big history, she will be missed by everyone in the field. Many world historians have supported the idea of big history over the years, beginning with Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Bob Bain, Terry Burke, Ross Dunn, Pat Manning, Merry Wiesner-Hanks, and others. Two great world historians lent their immense prestige to the new field: William H. McNeill, who saw big history as the logical next phase beyond world history, and Jerry Bentley, who first invited me to publish on the relationship between big history and world history. The Teaching Company invited me to give a lecture series on big history, and Bill Gates, who listened to those lectures, gave a tremendous boost to the field by supporting the creation of a free online syllabus in big history for high schools and inviting me to give a TED Talk on big history in 2011. His support resulted in the Big History Project, very ably managed first by Michael Dix and colleagues from Intentional Futures and now by a team headed by Andy Cook and Bob Regan. Co-creators of the Big History Project include the hundreds of teachers and schools and students who have taken the courageous gamble of teaching and learning this ambitious new approach to the past. The World Economic Forum allowed me to speak about big history as a global project, and at the annual meetings in Davos, I have had the privilege of being introduced by two Nobel Prize winners: former vice president of the United States Al Gore and Australian astrophysicist Brian Schmidt. I also had the privilege of visiting Lake Mungo and meeting Mary Pappin, a Mutthi Mutthi elder whose family played a crucial role in the return to their homelands of the remains of Mungo Lady and Mungo Man.
I have spent most of my career at Macquarie University in Sydney, and Macquarie has supported the idea of big history since I first began teaching it, with colleagues from across the university, in 1989. My particular thanks to Bruce Dowton and his colleagues for supporting big history and the creation of the Macquarie University Big History Institute, very ably led by Andrew McKenna, Tracy Sullivan, and David Baker (who is, as far as I know, the first scholar to earn a PhD in big history). Over the years, my colleagues in the Modern History Department have given immense support to this new way of thinking about history, and many have taught big history alongside me. My thanks to all of them, and particularly to Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Peter Edwell, and Shawn Ross. My thanks also to my many students in big history, who kept me on the straight and narrow by always bringing me back to the simplest and deepest of questions. I spent a very enjoyable eight years at San Diego State University, whose historians provided both support and smart insights into how this new approach to history might play out in the diverse academic communities of the United States and whose graduate students proved to be remarkably disciplined and skilled tutors in big history.
Many experts in different fields have offered new insights or course corrections; they include Lawrence Krauss, Charles Lineweaver, Stuart Kauffman, Ann McGrath, Iain McCalman, Will Steffen, Jan Zalasiewicz, and many, many more. I have received immense support and rich feedback from my editors at Little, Brown, and at Penguin: Tracy Behar, Charlie Conrad, and Laura Stickney. I thank Tracy Roe for her scrupulous and eagle-eyed copyediting. And I owe a huge debt of gratitude to John Brockman, who supported the idea of this book from the moment I first suggested it.
Several friends have kindly looked at and commented on drafts of this manuscript. They include Craig Benjamin, Cynthia Brown, Nick Doumanis, Connie Elwood, Lucy Laffitte, Ann McGrath, Bob Regan, Tracy Sullivan, and Ian Wilkinson.
For my family, big history has become something of a cottage industry. Chardi, Emily, and Joshua have all looked at drafts of this manuscript, and their comments and ideas over the years have often sent me in new directions. To Chardi, I owe the deep insight that big history is really a modern origin story. To them and my wider family (including my mother, who was my first teacher), I owe the deep gratitude of someone whose life has been blessed by the kindness and love of those closest to him. I dedicate this book to my family, to my grandchildren, Daniel Richard and Evie Rose Molly, and to all students everywhere as they embark on the momentous challenge of building a better world.