Sublime

Today, we are nostalgists as much as we are futurists. The new technology enables the simultaneous experience and enactment of events from a multiplicity of positions. Far from signalling its demise, these emergent networks facilitate the democratisation of history, illuminating the forking paths along which its grand narratives may navigate the he

as knowledge became the most important economic resource, the profitability of war declined and wars became increasingly restricted to those parts of the world – such as the Middle East and Central Africa – where the economies are still old-fashioned material-based economies.

the new millennium it became apparent to anyone with eyes to

most ‘big histories’ place such a strong focus on technology. Dividing up the human past according to the primary material from which tools and weapons were made (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age) or else describing it as a series of revolutionary breakthroughs (Agricultural Revolution, Urban Revolution, Industrial Revolution), they then assume that

The nostalgics are beginning to find an identity and empathy with the progressives.

We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy. After communism in eastern Europe

Especially important here are long-term shifts in societies – what Fernand Braudel described as the ‘longue durée’ – counterposing these to a short-term focus upon events. Braudel talks of ‘history whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man [sic] in relationship to his environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constan

Toynbee expounds the principle that times of trouble or rapid change produce militarism, and it is militarism that produces empire and expansion.