According to statista, Eurasia had a strong or overwhelming majority of world population even as far back as 10,000 BCE. If we just assumed that certain aspects of dominance follow “winner-take-all” dynamics, such as the spread of a trade language or currency, and that every population had chance of victory in winner-take-all dynamics proportional to its size, then Eurasia was the probable conqueror for this reason alone.
Europe had 1/5th of Asia’s population by 1500, and Europe + the Americas had about 1/4th of Asia’s population by the 1800s, so it is more surprising to me that Europe was the victor rather than some part of Asia. But maybe it shouldn’t be more surprising than getting heads 2-3 times in a row when flipping a coin.
I find myself more intrigued to learn more about the messy and nuanced historical details than to get an answer to the titlular question. Here’s an analogy to explain why. Let’s say that I flipped a coin, and it landed on heads. We could spend an hour or two doing some quick calculations and estimates of approximately where I flipped the coin from, how hard, the material properties of the surface it landed on, and so on, and come up with some stories that “explain why the coin landed on heads.” But I would be very unlikely to feel confident that whatever story we could tell would truly explain why this coin flip resulted in it landing on heads. Instead, I would feel that we’ve started to make a tiny bit of headway on understanding the physical causes of coin-flipping dynamics in general. This would be an field of study in its own right, and it would probably be wise to focus less on the original motivating question of explaining why this one coin flip came up heads, and more on, say, measuring the modulus of elasticity of the table or the range of force measurements applied by the thumb.
I think that this is maybe where some of these historians’ frustrations come from. They want to take a mainstream scholarly approach to the study of history, asking and answering the kinds of questions that motivate historians. By contrast, the public wants answers to questions that touch on their own lives and identities, regardless of whether these questions are possible for historians to answer with any confidence. Historians are looking for answers that hold up to scholarly scrutiny, while the public is looking for answers they can understand, that “make sense,” and “explain everything.” Historians would like the public to adopt the motivations and goals of historians. The public doesn’t care about what historians do, but they want somebody to help them with their own project of sense-making. So we get two different projects of “history,” with different motivations, methods, and goals, but touching on similar source materials and getting into each others’ turf. I’ll leave it to others to judge whether this post is written more in the “sense-making” or “scholarly” mode.
According to statista, Eurasia had a strong or overwhelming majority of world population even as far back as 10,000 BCE. If we just assumed that certain aspects of dominance follow “winner-take-all” dynamics, such as the spread of a trade language or currency, and that every population had chance of victory in winner-take-all dynamics proportional to its size, then Eurasia was the probable conqueror for this reason alone.
Europe had 1/5th of Asia’s population by 1500, and Europe + the Americas had about 1/4th of Asia’s population by the 1800s, so it is more surprising to me that Europe was the victor rather than some part of Asia. But maybe it shouldn’t be more surprising than getting heads 2-3 times in a row when flipping a coin.
I find myself more intrigued to learn more about the messy and nuanced historical details than to get an answer to the titlular question. Here’s an analogy to explain why. Let’s say that I flipped a coin, and it landed on heads. We could spend an hour or two doing some quick calculations and estimates of approximately where I flipped the coin from, how hard, the material properties of the surface it landed on, and so on, and come up with some stories that “explain why the coin landed on heads.” But I would be very unlikely to feel confident that whatever story we could tell would truly explain why this coin flip resulted in it landing on heads. Instead, I would feel that we’ve started to make a tiny bit of headway on understanding the physical causes of coin-flipping dynamics in general. This would be an field of study in its own right, and it would probably be wise to focus less on the original motivating question of explaining why this one coin flip came up heads, and more on, say, measuring the modulus of elasticity of the table or the range of force measurements applied by the thumb.
I think that this is maybe where some of these historians’ frustrations come from. They want to take a mainstream scholarly approach to the study of history, asking and answering the kinds of questions that motivate historians. By contrast, the public wants answers to questions that touch on their own lives and identities, regardless of whether these questions are possible for historians to answer with any confidence. Historians are looking for answers that hold up to scholarly scrutiny, while the public is looking for answers they can understand, that “make sense,” and “explain everything.” Historians would like the public to adopt the motivations and goals of historians. The public doesn’t care about what historians do, but they want somebody to help them with their own project of sense-making. So we get two different projects of “history,” with different motivations, methods, and goals, but touching on similar source materials and getting into each others’ turf. I’ll leave it to others to judge whether this post is written more in the “sense-making” or “scholarly” mode.