This course offers an overview of human history placed within the context of the history of life, the Earth, the Solar System and the Universe as a whole. This approach to human history is known as big history. Special attention will be paid to the last 10,000 years of human history, when culture took over as the main adaptive mechanism. This period witnessed the worldwide emergence of agriculture as well as the rise of state societies, while during the past five hundred years, globalization, science, industrialization, urbanization and democratization have all contributed to deeply transform human societies. During all lectures, we will systematically focus on how humans have been transforming their natural environment. The last lecture will deal with the question of what we may expect from the future.
The course starts by a series of introductory lectures. First we will consider why we actually study history. We will pay attention to what historians consider to be the big questions as well as what you think the big questions should be. Then we will consider how history can be studied. Finally we will examine what might be gained by looking at human history from a big history point of view. Our claim is that by looking at human history in this way, it becomes possible to understand both yourself and the world around you in a way no other approach to history offers. Furthermore, by contemplating the grand sweep of history, simple general theoretical principles emerge which would otherwise have remained hidden. These guiding principles will hopefully help you to understand better how everything has become the way it is now, as well as what the future may look like.
The course will consist of a series of 30 lectures, each followed by an interactive session during which students will discuss important points of view as well as execute challenging tasks. The required reading will probably consist of two text books as well as a few seminal articles.
