Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson, “Natural Experiments of History”
I remember telling my wife, the mathematician, that historians typically work on one time and place their entire careers. If you begin, say, as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (as I did), you are likely to end as a historian of Russia in the 1600s (I didn’t, but that’s another story). “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said. “Don’t historians get bored with their little time and place?” “Yes,” I replied. “Don’t they exhaust the topic and begin to work in circles?” “Yes, quite often” I replied. “Don’t they want to compare what they’ve learned about time/place X with time/place Y in order to better understand both X and Y?” “Probably,” I replied. “Then why,” she asked, “do historians continue to work the way they do?” It’s a good question, and one that deserves to be answered. On the one hand, ‘more and more about less and less’ has certainly enabled us–that is, the historical profession–to uncover a lot of the past that might have been forgotten. But, on the other hand, we’ve gone so far ‘inside baseball’ that we can’t and don’t talk to one another, let alone talk to colleagues in other disciplines or the public at large. There are exceptions, but they only improve the rule.
In their very readable new book Natural Experiments of History (Harvard, 2010), Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson point out that this way of going about history is a lost opportunity. If historians would pull up for a moment and look around, they would discover a world of “natural experiments” that could both shed light on their particular time/place and speak to larger patterns in world history. More specifically, “natural experiments”–what historians usually call the “comparative method”–would permit them to speak about the general causes of the specific events they study. To my mind, that is a laudable goal and one that we should pursue. Knowledge, as we know, is difference. If all you know is Russia in the 1600s, then you won’t really know Russia in the 1600s. We should do what we tell our undergraduates to do: compare and contrast.
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As a regular listener to this show and also a mathematician (albeit a failed one), I’d like to add that the vast majority of mathematicians don’t do research outside the square millimetre of their expertise during most, if not all, of their of their professional career. In fact, one of the reasons I left maths was that while I was working on my Ph.D. — on, say, the mathematical equivalent of Russia in the summer of 1627 — there were large areas of maths that I knew next to nothing about and that didn’t feel right. I have no doubts the same is true for historians though and we could all do with broadening our horizon, ideally to far beyond the limits of our profession. Your podcasts definitely contribute to that. Keep up the good work!
[...] just listened to an excellent podcast featuring Jared Diamond and his latest publication Natural Experiments of History. Diamond is the [...]
I just listened to this podcast (sorry Marshall, I’m a bit behind!), and I have to admit I found the whole thing rather frustrating and depressing. This guy (Diamond) hasn’t a clue about what historians actually do. Throughout the interview a rather strange caricature was presented of the historical profession. It’s seems that we’re all deranged obsessive compulsives consumed with meaningless minutia . It seems out work is only marginally more relevant than the guys who memorize train schedules. This comes as a bit of a surprise, since most of the historians I know are quite erudite, sophisticated in their use of theory and have nothing against comparative methodology. The question is not whether historian use comparison, but rather how. Historian generally look outside their areas of specialty to shed light on things that actually happened–ideas that spread from one region to another, processes of change stretching across national and temporal boundaries. What we don’t do is is juxtapose completely unrelated cases to tease out some kind of Newtonian law of human development valid in all times and places. Nor do we seek out reductionist “explanations” based on a single set of variables, or project the causal power of individual factors hundreds of years forward in history. Frankly I was struck by the crudeness and naivite of Diamond’s methodology. Was Napoleon bad or good? What kind of a question is that? So we’re not supposed to study the American Civil War unless we’ve also looked at the English, French, Russian, Congolese, Chinese and who knows what other equivalent. And what comes out of this? Civil Wars are bad? People can be very mean to one another? People fight when they can’t settle their differences peacefully? Here’s a Newtonian law for you: “The breadth of one’s comparisons is commensurate with the banality of one’s generalizations.” You heard it here first!