Evolutionary history

Abstract

Few academic historians take an evolutionary perspective on the past, but this outcome was not inevitable. Leading eighteenth-century intellectuals often took evolutionary perspectives, but particularists largely discredited them in and after the 1780s. By the time Spencer and Darwin revived evolutionism in the 1850s, distinctive historical questions and methods were very well-established. Public intellectuals regularly called for Darwinian history, but almost no academics saw much to gain in it. Most twentieth-century social scientists became generalizers but not evolutionists, while most historians not only refused to engage in generalization of any kind but also criticized divisions of labor in which evolutionists would test theories against data generated by historians. Possibilities remain open for a properly evolutionary history, in which scholars trained as historians but asking evolutionary questions would work alongside those trained as evolutionists but analyzing historical data, but currently, this field's prospects depend too much on individual personalities and even luck.

The Question

“Historians,” the historian and journalist Martin Stuart-Jones observed in the dying days of the last century, “have been slow to adopt an evolutionary perspective” (Stuart-Jones 1999: 33-34). That was an understatement then, and, if anything, is more so now. In this paper, I ask why. This question, I suggest, actually begs a second, of why historians have been slow to adopt explicit theorizing and law-like generalizations of any kind; and, being largely a historian myself, I offer a largely historical answer.

Inevitably, the answer to such questions depends heavily on how we define their terms, but on that there is little agreement. Some scholars who call themselves social or cultural evolutionists insist, looking back to Herbert Spencer, that evolution is directional, from a simple/undifferentiated universe toward a complex/differentiated one; others, looking more to Charles Darwin, insist that evolution is by its nature undirected. Some apply the label evolutionist only to scholarship identifying selection at the genetic level; others happily speak of multilevel selection. It might be easier to define sociocultural evolutionists by their arguments than by what they agree on, but in what follows, I will use the expression to refer to scholars who see some conceptual continuity between human history and biological evolution, who consider sociocultural evolution to be governed by identifiable mechanisms functioning somewhat like natural selection, who see these mechanisms as involving adaptation to the environment, who believe that the mechanisms operate on all societies regardless of time and space, and—usually, but not always—who recognize stages of social/cultural evolution. (The literature is enormous; I draw particularly on Boyd and Richerson 2005 and Messoudi 2011.)

Historians argue even more than sociocultural evolutionists about what their job is, but complicate discussion by rarely making their definitions explicit (it is striking how few of the many books asking what history is, going right back to E. H. Carr's classic What is History? [Carr 1961], include an index entry for “history, definition”). In English, “history” can mean all sorts of things, from the totality of what happened in the past to inquiries into any part of that totality. I will start from the circular, tongue-in-cheek truism that history is whatever historians do, and will define “historians” as people employed in university departments of History. The question I am trying to answer is therefore why historians, in this sense, are so rarely evolutionists, in the sense I defined them in the previous paragraph. (The literature is again enormous; Evans 2000 provides a good, and nicely opinionated, way in.)

Before getting going, I need to introduce one more pair of definitions, borrowed from the sociologist Max Weber. Following an older German tradition, Weber divided academic disciplines into arts/humanities, which aim to understand (verstehen) the world, and sciences, which aim to explain (erklären) it (Weber 1968 [1922]: 4-22). Scholars working in humanistic disciplines tend to emphasize uniqueness, nuance, context, agency, culture, and contingency, while those in the sciences lean more toward comparison, clarity, causation, pattern, materialism, and structure. Humanists typically try to make sense of the webs of meaning that entangle personalities, texts, and artifacts, and evaluate scholarship through its success in adding meaning; scientists are more likely to reduce the teeming variety of the everyday world to deeper, simpler, underlying causes, treating individual data as members of larger classes, amenable to comparison and quantification. A good humanistic interpretation, said the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate. What gets better is the precision with which we vex each other” (Geertz 1973: 29). The physicist Albert Einstein, by contrast, reportedly believed (although no one has ever traced the quotation back to a primary source [Robinson 2018]) that “In science, everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

It is hardly controversial to suggest that academic historians have been slow to adopt explicit theorizing and law-like generalizations—including those of evolutionism—because most of them are quite comfortable on the humanistic side of Weber's divide. It might be more controversial, however, to suggest that there is nothing inevitable about that. As I will try to show in my next section, there have been multiple moments in the roughly 250-year history of the modern academic disciplines when university-based history might have gone the other way, turning into a nomothetic, generalizing science of the human past.

But it didn't. Of course, it is not necessarily a bad thing if humanists focus on what they do well and leave the generalizing to those better at it; plenty of scientists, Weber included, have looked forward to a productive academic division of labor, with historians grubbing up facts and social scientists theorizing about them. However, the marketplace in ideas has not worked as smoothly as Weber hoped. Two generations ago, it was already obvious to C. P. Snow—as fine a novelist as he was a physicist—that humanists and scientists in 1950s Cambridge formed “two groups—comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had ceased to communicate at all … Between the two,” he thought, there was “a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding” (Snow 1959: 2, 4). Scientists regularly complain that historians rarely present their results in ways that would make them easy for generalizers to use, but when generalizers go ahead and test their theories against historical data anyway, historians frequently “take offence at seeing their field mishandled” (Dwyer and Micale 2021, criticizing psychologist Steven Pinker's [2011] theory of a long-term decline in violence). This situation is neither productive nor necessary; and it can, if the will is there, be changed.

The History of Evolutionary History

All societies practice history, now defining that word loosely to mean telling stories about where the tellers come from, why they are different from everyone else, and which exemplary ancestors made them special (Eliade 1954 is particularly good on this). Folklorists have documented myths of this kind among nonliterate people on every continent. Nor did the invention of writing, roughly five thousand years ago in the Middle East, greatly change this; it merely allowed storytellers to be more empirical about their past. The result was usually a kind of Russian-doll history, with contemporary traditions traced back to some real but poorly known founding father in the distant past, who in turn drew on the wisdom of an even earlier and even less-well known ancestor, and so on back to figures every bit as mythical as those who filled nonliterate traditions.

In China, for instance, scholars had largely agreed by the first century BCE that the fifth-century BCE sage Confucius was the ancestor who had forged the current version of their own traditions. Confucius presented himself, however, as a mere vessel; “I transmit but I do not create,” he insisted. “I am an admirer of antiquity” (Confucius, Analects 7.1, 12.1). The ultimate model of virtue, said Confucius, was the Duke of Zhou, a real but completely mythicized statesman of the eleventh century BCE; and even the duke himself had simply refurbished still older ideas, going all the way back to the entirely legendary Yellow Emperor. Similarly, Jews of the first century BCE traced their ways back to the very real King Josiah in the seventh century, who had made a new beginning after his high priest discovered (or fabricated) a second book of divine laws hidden in God's temple. Josiah's revolution built on earlier beginnings made by the tenth-century Kings David and Solomon (probably real, but heavily mythicized), and theirs built in turn on the even older and even more mythicized beginnings associated with Moses (twelfth-century BCE?) and Abraham (twenty-second century?). (Ancient historiography has its own massive bibliography; Feldherr and Hardy 2011 and Wang 2021 are useful introductions).

This sort of exemplary history, organized around idealized ancestors of varying levels of reality, remained adequate almost everywhere until the second millennium CE. By that point, long-distance travel was increasing rapidly, and awareness was growing all across Eurasia that the world contained multiple cultures that did not fit comfortably into any civilization's exemplary narratives. Western Europeans, more exposed than anyone else to new worlds and often also deeply in awe of the wealth and sophistication of the East, were particularly affected. By the 1720s, French and Scottish thinkers were sketching comparative, generalizing, and somewhat evolutionary theories. They often called these ideas “philosophical history,” on the grounds that its questions were deeper than those their predecessors had asked. These philosophical historians—among them such giants as Hume, Smith, Ferguson, Turgot, Voltaire, and Montesquieu—disagreed on many things, but most saw Native Americans as relics of what all mankind had once been like, and speculated that societies could be arranged in a sequence. First came foraging bands, which grew into larger and more sophisticated herding and farming populations, finally becoming modern commercial civilizations. The most radical concluded that Christian Europe was no more advanced—actually, said Voltaire, less advanced—than China.

Other thinkers, particularly in Germany and England, were unconvinced. One response was to weave the new flood of facts about Africa, Asia, and the Americas into a medieval tradition of “Universal Histories” showing how events illustrated the playing-out of God's will. In England, multiple authors collaborated on a 65-volume Universal History, from the Earliest Account of Time, published between 1747 and 1768; and, better remembered today, the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant outlined an Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose in 1784. Both insisted on Europe's superiority to other civilizations, but since the 1760s, some Eurocentrists were going much further. Philosophical history, they argued, should really be called “conjectural history,” because none of its philosophizing had actually proved anything. Where, naysayers asked, was the concrete evidence that contemporary hunter-gatherers were survivals from prehistory? Or that hunting, herding, farming, and trading were stages in a sequence? What was needed, said the critics, was not conjecture but serious scholarship—like the Altertumswissenschaft (“science of antiquity”) that German professors were currently applying to classical literature and sculpture. Most of these scholars took comparison seriously, but concluded from it that when modern techniques of philology and connoisseurship were deployed on Greek and Roman art and texts, they revealed a “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” (art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann's words [Butler 1935: 43-48]) that exposed other cultures as merely decadent. Conjectures about social stages were therefore not just unprovable; they were also unimportant, because what comparison showed was that the Greeks and Romans were incomparable.

Arguments raged for decades, but by the 1790s, the classicists’ intellectual rigor, sophisticated methods, and massive compendia of data were making philosophical/conjectural historians look slightly absurd. George Eliot caught the mood perfectly with the character of Mr. Casaubon in her novel Middlemarch, set in the England of 1832. Equipped only with “plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world,” Casaubon fritters his life away on a fruitless quest for “the key to all mythologies.” Out of date on the specialized scholarship, he cannot even read German.

German reformers began reorganizing universities into departments focused on specific disciplines, each with its own distinctive methods. By the 1830s, History departments were moving decisively toward a set of practices that came to be associated with Leopold von Ranke of the University of Berlin (Stern 1956 translates some of Ranke's key texts). The first of these practices was Historismus, “historicism,” the principle of understanding each age on its own terms, which Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel had popularized in the 1790s. To Ranke, historicism meant that while historians should always be on the lookout for signs of God's hand, their primary duty was to describe the past wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, “as it actually happened.” Second, the most important historical method was Quellenkritik, “source criticism,” meaning mining archives for primary texts, dissecting them to ascertain their trustworthiness, and writing narratives based directly on them. Finally, Ranke and his students wrote chiefly about the activities of the state (Eskildsen 2008, 2022). This was a sensible decision, given that government archives were often the most easily accessible; but Ranke also gave this a theoretical basis, arguing that Europe's emerging nation-states were “spiritual essences” reflecting “thoughts of God” (cited from Evans 2000: 15)—an idea that made sense to many educated Europeans in that age of intense nationalism.

Ranke's kind of history proved highly teachable, easily adaptable to individual practitioners’ tastes, and—above all—hugely productive. Students trained in the new style of argumentative, source-focused seminar that he pioneered fanned out across Europe, scouring archives and writing particularistic histories of unprecedented rigor and reliability. Some professional historians won fame and fortune; an elite, including Ranke himself, rose high in state service. And so, while generalizing about humanity in the style of the old conjectural historians never entirely died out—Auguste Comte published his Course in Positive Philosophy between 1830 and 1842—it won few followers among the professionalizing historians.

Not even Herbert Spencer's and Charles Darwin's revolutions in evolution in the 1850s-60s tempted many historians back to the eighteenth-century search for lawlike propositions. This struck many intellectuals outside university History departments as odd. When elected president of the American Historical Association in 1894, the towering man of letters Henry Adams—a writer of great histories, but definitely not a professional historian by sensibility—told the academics that “Those of us who … read the Origin of Species and felt the violent impulse which Darwin gave to the study of natural laws, never doubted that historians would follow until they had exhausted every possible hypothesis to create a science of history.” However, Adams observed, “little progress has been made. Perhaps the mass of students are more skeptical now than they were thirty years ago of the possibility that such a science can be created.” He was appalled: “That the effort to make history a science may fail is possible, and perhaps probable; but that it should cease, unless for reasons that would cause all science to cease, is not within the range of experience” (Adams 1894: 18).

Yet it did largely cease, at least within History departments. Outside the universities, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels produced massively influential evolutionary accounts of history, even if Engels found more inspiration in the writings of the lawyer and ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan than in Spencer or Darwin (Marx 1964 [1857/58]; Engels 1972 [1884]; Morgan 1877). In due course, many historians embraced Marxism, but not until the 1930s (the exception that proves the rule is probably Charles Beard's classic, Marxist-influenced Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, which appeared in 1913 but only won wide attention twenty years later). Even when Marxism did catch on, what appealed to historians (outside the Soviet Union, that is) seems to have been less Marx's evolutionism than his usefulness for signaling the historian's opposition to fascism (Novick 1988; Appleby et al. 1994: 68-82).

Academic historians overwhelmingly chose to stay on the humanistic side of the verstehen/erklären divide. The most obvious reasons were methodological: the moment historians had begun going into archives and ruthlessly interrogating primary sources, anyone who declined to do so had been exposed as a Casaubon, certainly an amateur and perhaps a charlatan. Using the archives effectively, however, called for deep knowledge of the obscure languages in which many sources were written and the equally arcane skills of paleography, plus mastery of the labyrinthine ways of state archives, all of which took years to acquire. It might take further years to cultivate the personal connections needed to access jealously guarded collections; and, as the celebrated historian Geoffrey Elton described it, even more time was required before a historian could not just “read in a period until you can hear its people speak,” but also “read them, study their creations and think about them until one knows what they are going to say next” (Elton 1967: 30). Mastering so many skills could easily consume an entire academic career, and so long as historians insisted that Rankean methods were the only valid ones, the need to scale this steep learning curve over and over again to use documents from multiple times and places made broad comparisons and generalizations simply impossible.

It makes a certain amount of sense that historians overwhelmingly opted to stick to what they did best and leave the generalizing to others. It is also understandable that these generalizers constituted themselves in the late nineteenth century into the new social-science disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, political science, psychology, sociology (and more). Few of these social scientists, however, thought that evolutionism made a good framework for generalizing about society. One obvious reason is that between the 1880s and 1920s, the years when the social sciences were emerging, biologists themselves often harbored deep doubts about Darwinism, which lacked a clear theory of inheritance (Bowler 2003: 224-324). Only in the 1920-30s did population geneticists really solve this problem, giving biology a sound theoretical core in a “new synthesis” of Darwinian evolutionism and Mendelian genetics (Huxley 1942). Several prominent social scientists rapidly recognized the possibilities this offered (particularly Alchian 1950; Parsons 1964, 1966), but social scientists remain generally unenthusiastic, despite continuing calls to action (Thayer 2004; Dunbar 2007; Gough et al. 2008; Maryanski et al. 2015; Hodgson 2019).

Anthropology is a complicated but instructive case. Its founding fathers in the 1860s-90s tended not to undertake extensive fieldwork (Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, rarely left England), preferring to theorize broadly based on secondary accounts of small-scale societies written mostly by missionaries and colonial administrators. But between the 1890s and 1920s, a new generation of anthropologists moved in a direction rather like the one historians had taken in the 1830s, immersing themselves in voices from a single culture. For historians, that meant long days in the archives; for anthropologists, it meant becoming participant-observers, spending months or even years living in a small-scale society. They regularly had to be as particularistic as any historian, learning languages that lacked dictionaries or grammars, under conditions far more difficult (and even dangerous) than anything encountered in an archive. Most anthropologists embraced the very humanistic idea that every culture must be understood on its own terms—but most also insisted that every culture also had something to say about human universals. The tension between “the microscopic nature of ethnography” and broad generalizations, the prominent anthropologist Clifford Geertz explained, “is not to be resolved by regarding a remote locality as the world in a teacup or as the sociological equivalent of a cloud chamber.” Rather, “small facts speak to large issues … because they are made to” (Geertz 1973: 23).

Anthropologists argued heatedly over how to make the facts do this, but—like most other social scientists, but unlike most historians—nearly all of them agreed that that was what they should be doing. Overwhelmingly, social scientists concluded that connecting primary data to broad generalizations was the central intellectual challenge in their disciplines. Some embraced large-n statistical surveys, while others looked to hermeneutics. Even economists, on average probably the social scientists least sympathetic to particularism, left some space for historians who talked about institutions and culture. What made twentieth-century History departments distinct was not that they were humanistic while Anthropology, Archaeology, Economics, Geography, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology departments were not. Rather, it was that while verstehen and erklären co-existed in a variety of uneasy equilibria among social scientists, historians’ commitment to humanistic and particularistic questions and methods verged on the monomaniacal.

There were, naturally, exceptions to kneejerk humanism. In France, a group of historians known as the Annales school borrowed extensively from demographers, economists, and geographers between the 1920s and 1970s. Little of their work could be called evolutionist, but they did write the kinds of histories that evolutionists found useful (for example, Bintliff 1991). However, their freedom to do this (particularly from the 1950s onward) rested heavily on their success in winning an unusual degree of institutional independence from mainstream History departments; and this is turn rested heavily on the great Fernand Braudel's success in seizing the commanding heights of the highly centralized French academic system. By 1960, Annaliste historians had their own journal, publishing house, funding streams, and degree-granting section of the École pratique des hautes études (Burke 1990). The American historian J. H. Hexter was quite right to observe that his own country's historical profession, fragmented across hundreds of separate universities and colleges, could never produce a thought-leader who would match Braudel's impact (Hexter 1972).

Perhaps the closest thing the United States had to an Annaliste movement was the very different experience of economists attempting to export quantitative techniques from their home departments to History departments, beginning in the 1950s, peaking in the 1970s, and largely abandoned by the 1990s. Like the Annalistes in France, these “cliometricians” had no interest in forcing historians to replace their traditional questions with generalizing, evolutionary ones. All they asked was that historians recognize that computers, big data, and sophisticated statistical methods might offer new answers to such well-established historical questions as the role of railroads in American economic growth (Fogel 1964) or the efficiency of American slavery (Fogel and Engerman 1974). However, the storm of criticism poured on the quantifiers’ heads (particularly Gutman 1975) went well beyond the normally subdued tones of historical discourse. To be sure, cliometricians were sometimes their own worst enemies. “Historians who wanted to know the basis for Robert Fogel's and Stanley Engerman's conclusion that slaves were only moderately exploited,” Peter Novick observes, “were told that the answer was $E_x={\displaystyle \frac{B}{\sum _{t=0}^n{\displaystyle \frac{{\lambda }_t({\alpha }_1{P}_{ct}{Q}_t{L}_t^{-1})}{{(1+i)}^t}}}}$ .” (Novick 1988: 588). Even allowing for such provocation, it remains remarkable how much cliometrics irritated historians in the 1970s. All the same, by the 1980s, humanistic historians were negotiating ways to accommodate it while still rejecting its claim that statistics must now be part of every historian's training (Fogel and Elton 1983 is a fascinating example). “In the 1990s,” says Richard Evans, “quantitative history has become a subspecialism with its own societies, its own journals, and its own specialized language, coexisting happily with all the other subspecialisms” (Evans 2000: 174 [“happily” might be an overstatement]).

By then, most historians worried less about cliometricians’ accusations that they were being too humanistic than about a new charge that they were not being humanistic enough. Variously referred to as the linguistic turn, postmodernism, or (more narrowly) poststructuralism, this line of thought combined ideas borrowed from French literary theorists and Oxford philosophers of language to claim that language can never directly refer to anything but itself. “There is nothing outside the text,” Jacques Derrida famously insisted (Derrida 1988 [1967]: 188)—which, some humanists claimed, meant that historical accounts could be judged only on internal consistency, style, or political values, not by goodness-of-fit with primary sources that were assumed (wrongly) to offer unmediated access to an external, already-existing truth (White 1973).

To some, this postmodern assault seemed far more threatening than cliometrics had ever been, “necessarily jeopardi[zing] historical study as normally understood” (Spiegel 1992: 195). Most postmodern critics themselves, however, felt that “far from the historian being beleaguered,” the profession's “dominant response” was “rank indifference rather than outright hostility” (Joyce 1991: 204-205). By the 2010s, the challenge had gone much the same way as that mounted by cliometrics, being subsumed as just another disciplinary subspecialism; but my impression (as a participant-observer) is that the net effect of twenty years of arguments over language was to draw the historical profession's intellectual center of gravity further away from evolutionism than ever.

To untangle these issues properly, we badly need a meticulous, archivally based history of historians’ resistance to cultural evolutionism, looking not just at the ideas in scholarly papers, but at everything from institutions, politics, emotions, and money to the decisions of promotion and hiring committees and the quirks and feuds of individual scholars (Novick 1988, on the history of American historians’ ideas about objectivity, is an outstanding example of the kind of thing I have in mind). However, such a book remains to be written. In its absence, all I can offer is a tentative hypothesis, illustrated by nothing more than personal anecdotes.

Philosopher Kings

The gulf of incomprehension separating historians and evolutionists, I believe, is the result of nothing more complicated than path dependence. The defeat of philosophical history weighed heavily on early-nineteenth-century European scholars, and it is hardly surprising that when German administrators reorganized their universities around discipline-specific departments, their historians focused on particularistic questions, especially ones about nation-states. It is equally unsurprising that when the archival, source-centric methods associated with Ranke proved spectacularly good at answering these questions, historians seeking to professionalize their craft in other countries rushed to copy the German model, creating a kind of founders’ effect. “That Germany possessed the sole secret of scholarship,” one American historian recalled, “was no more doubted by us young fellows in the eighteen-eighties than it had been doubted by George Ticknor and Edward Everett when they sailed from Boston, bound for Göttingen, in 1814” (Bliss Perry, cited in Novick 1988: 21). By the 1860s, when intellectuals were realizing just how powerful Spencer's and Darwin's evolutionary ideas could be, academic history was already securely institutionalized in Western universities in humanistic, particularistic departments. Asking evolutionary questions would require professional historians to forgo the tightly defined topics for which it was humanly possible to master the primary sources—but relying on secondary was the mark of the amateur and the conjectural historian. It was therefore entirely rational to ignore evolutionism. Most departments of Anthropology, Archaeology, Economics, Geography, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology, by contrast, were created in or after the 1880s, to answer precisely the kinds of questions that evolutionism and other sciences posed for students of the human condition. It was all very well for a dilettante like Henry Adams to wax lyrical about the “immortality that would be achieved by the man who should successfully apply Darwin's methods to the facts of human history” (Adams 1894: 19), but the professionals knew better. There were few incentives for nineteenth-century historians to rebel against an entire academic system of questions, methods, and data—and there are arguably even fewer incentives in the twenty-first century.

Yet some historians do launch such rebellions, and that, I believe, is a good thing. The marketplace of ideas, in which particularistic historians feed facts to generalizing scientists and then use fresh facts to test their theories, has not worked very well. Enterprising scientists have responded to this market failure by learning the historical facts for themselves, but, as historians regularly observe, they do not often master the actual skills that the historians use to generate and evaluate these data. This suggests—to me, at least—that having a few historians who have mastered these skills join the evolutionists in their quest has got to be positive. On the one hand, having some historians ask evolutionary questions will add to the intellectual diversity of History departments; on the other, it will add to the methodological rigor of evolutionism by bringing to bear methods better attuned to historical evidence. If I may be allowed an evolutionary metaphor, historians and evolutionists currently reproduce their professions by cloning. Mixing things up and merging the professions’ intellectual DNA will be the academic equivalent of the evolution of sexual reproduction, dramatically increasing the number of potentially beneficial mutations.

Historians like to say that no source is so unreliable as an autobiography, but given that we have no systematic study, my own experiences are almost the only tools I have for thinking about the selective pressures operating on the would-be evolutionary historian. So, I will close this essay by indulging in a few personal reminiscences. Following a common practice among historians of ideas, I divide the selective pressures that I believe shaped my own evolution into two broad categories: first, “cognitivist” forces, above all the substance of research publications, the explicit arguments between practitioners, and the institutions within which these take place; and then “non-cognitivist” ones, which include politics, prestige, money, personalities, and all the other forces that we academics generally prefer not to think of as determining our scholarly choices.

Most academics, I suspect, would find it easy to write a cognitivist memoir. My own begins with a PhD thesis (published as Morris 1987) on a topic emphasized in essays since the 1950s by the ancient historian Moses Finley: how and why Athens, a city-state totally dominated by its aristocrats before 600 BCE, became the most radical of Greek democracies after 500 BCE (Finley 1980, 1981). Because very few written sources survive from this period, I turned to archaeological evidence, beginning with arguments about population growth recently presented by my dissertation advisor, Anthony Snodgrass (Snodgrass 1980: 15-84). Right away, I found that even a little knowledge about cognate disciplines—in my case, demography, statistics, anthropology, and development economics—changed the way I saw my evidence, and that looking at bigger slices of time and space threw up entirely new answers to my initial questions. By the mid-1990s, I had realized that developments at Athens between 700 and 500 BCE only made sense within a geographical framework embracing the whole Greek world and a chronological one extending back to 1100 and forward to 300 BCE. On this scale, it seemed obvious that what happened in seventh- and sixth-century-BCE Athens was part of a larger story of a peculiar kind of state-formation, characterized by male egalitarianism, large-scale chattel slavery, and extreme gender hierarchies. In 2000, stimulated by several scholars’ arguments that Greek history actually only made sense within its broader Mediterranean context (especially Burkert 1992 [1984] and Sherratt and Sherratt 1993), I started digging at an indigenous Sicilian site from the age of Greek colonization (Morris and Tusa 2004). However, the main thing the excavation seemed to show was that the processes at work in the first-millennium-BCE Mediterranean were strikingly like those in the contemporary Middle East, India, and China; and so I concluded that I could never understand Athens until I set it in a Eurasian context too.

Up till this point, I had been telling myself that I still relied overwhelmingly on primary sources, as any proper historian should. But now that I had begun spending much of my time studying East Asian societies whose languages I could not even read, that illusion became unsustainable. It also gradually dawned on me that I was no longer looking at thousands of years of Eurasian history to find new answers to questions about Athens. It was the long-term history of Eurasia itself that I was thinking about, with Athens relegated to being one case study among many. I therefore decided to try to answer one of these larger questions, writing a book called Why the West Rules—For Now (Morris 2010). Wrestling with this question drove me to conclude that evolutionism was the only framework that made sense of history on such a scale (hence the book's subtitle, The Patterns of the Past, and What they Reveal about the Future). I did not at first admit to myself that I had evolved into an evolutionist—that only came when I was invited to deliver a Darwin Lecture at Cambridge University in 2014 (Morris 2017)—but so effective does evolutionism now seem to me as a framework for thinking about large-scale, long-term history that I see no way back. After spending thirty years scaling up from Athens to the entire world, my most recent book, Geography is Destiny: Britain and the World, a 10,000-Year History (Morris 2022), is an attempt to show that evolutionary thinking remains the best tool even when we scale back down, trying to explain the history of one small region in more human terms.

One of the reasons that historians are so wary of autobiographies is that it is just too easy to describe a career with this kind of self-congratulatory, cognitivist narrative, in which one idea after another leaps fully formed from the author's head. In my experience, reality is messier and less cognitivist. When I chose an undergraduate program (in the 1970s, British students locked into a major before even setting foot on campus), I was already interested in the ancient world, but had few preconceptions about how to study it and no plans to make it my career. I chose to go to Birmingham University, where antiquity was studied in a Department of Ancient History and Archaeology rather than a conventional History department, for personal rather than academic reasons. Ancient History and Archaeology was a very humanistic program, with not a hint of evolutionism, but it did insist that archaeologists and historians were engaged in a shared enterprise, and required all students to know something about the history and archaeology of multiple ancient societies.

Having learned at Birmingham that studying antiquity would be more fun than holding a real job, I began a PhD at Cambridge in 1982 because I had been mesmerized by the latest book by Anthony Snodgrass, the university's professor of classical archaeology, arguing that an ancient demographic explosion had revolutionized Greek society in the eighth century BCE (Snodgrass 1980). On arriving, I found myself in the middle of an intensely engaged community of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. This had roots going back at least to the 1950s, but had taken off under Moses Finley's leadership in the 1960s-70s (Jew et al. 2020) and especially since Snodgrass’ arrival in 1976 (Nevett and Whitley 2018). By the early 1980s, many members had stronger intellectual ties to the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology than to Classics or History; most were Marxists of some stripe; and several were explicitly engaged with social evolutionism. At the very first seminar I attended, a young postdoc—now a distinguished professor of ancient history—presented a somewhat theoretical paper on the nature of the Greek city-state. I had no idea what he was talking about. Worse, when the question-and-answer session began, I realized to my horror that the rest of the audience had not only understood perfectly well what he was saying, but were now leveling devastating criticisms against it.

Some of my fellow graduate students reacted against Cambridge's Marxism, materialism, and generalizations by doubling down on humanistic questions and methods, but others, me among them, discovered personal predispositions for big stories over small, explanation over understanding, and clarity over nuance. This experience suggests to me that two non-cognitivist conditions are necessary for evolutionary history to succeed—first, institutions that ignore established disciplinary boundaries, mixing and matching skills developed by humanists and scientists and taking both particular and general questions seriously; and second, mechanisms for identifying students who will thrive in such settings.

Neither of these conditions is sufficient, however, and my own career suggests that a tremendous amount depends on a third condition: luck. After leaving Cambridge in 1987 as a mild Marxist, occasional evolutionist, and fairly active generalizer, I then drifted back toward more humanistic questions in the eight years I spent at the University of Chicago—not because Chicago lacked commitment to humanistic-scientific consilience (quite the reverse: the cliometrician Robert Fogel held a joint appointment in those years between the History department and the Business School), but because the most engaged colleagues I encountered, making the most interesting arguments, were concerned above all with what postmodernism meant for history. In their own way, their questions were every bit as interesting as the evolutionists’, and in the 1990s I went through a modest cultural turn of my own (Morris 2000). That ended abruptly when, after moving to Stanford, I served as associate dean for the humanities departments, which reminded me in no uncertain terms that my predispositions did not run in their direction.

Further pieces of luck added a pull toward evolutionism to this push away from the humanities. There was a lunch with Steve Haber, a Stanford historian in the process of reinventing himself as a political scientist, who invited me to join a new Social Science History Institute, where I spent many hours discussing the past with economists, political scientists, and sociologists. There was coffee with David Christian, then a historian at San Diego State University, whose book Maps of Time (Christian 2004) would soon launch the field of “big history,” trying to explain historical patterns going all the way back to the Big Bang. And there was the arrival of Walter Scheidel, a fellow ancient historian whose conversion to sociobiology (nicely illustrated by his paper in this volume) was already complete by 2000. It was in fact a conference that Walter organized in 2005, comparing the Chinese and Roman Empires, that started me thinking along the lines that led to my book Why the West Rules—For Now.

Despite all this luck, I suspect that I would still not actually have taken the plunge into evolutionism had it not been for one further piece of serendipity. One of the great disincentives for historians flirting with evolutionism is that evolutionary historians have no obvious academic home. History departments rarely want them (I left Stanford's History department in 2013); they are far from ideal fits for Political Science or Economics; and Anthropology, which might once have provided a berth, has turned strongly away from evolutionism since the 1970s. If I invested several years in writing Why the West Rules—For Now, most likely alienating my humanistic colleagues in the process, would anyone actually read it?

The answer came from my colleague and old friend Adrienne Mayor, who, shortly after Walter's China-Rome conference in 2005, connected me with her literary agent Sandra Dijkstra. The main readership for evolutionary history is among people who are not locked into specific disciplinary perspectives because they are not locked into academic institutions at all. There is, and has been since the eighteenth century, a vast audience outside universities hungry for what evolutionary historians have to say. Hume, Montesquieu, Spencer, and Darwin did not worry about whether their readers were professional academics, and in recent times the biologist/evolutionist/geographer Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) and the historian Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens (2015) have both reached millions of readers.

Making evolutionary history an accepted part of the historical profession—even if it is only as a subspecialism, like cliometrics or postmodernism, and even if its greatest influence remains outside the university—remains merely an aspiration. Overcoming the inertia created by several centuries of academic path dependence is a daunting task, made more so by historians’ distracting arguments over the linguistic turn. But all the same, there are reasons to be optimistic in the 2020s. The creation of large-scale databases, such as the Seshat Global History Databank (http://seshatdatabank.info; Turchin, this vol.), will make it much easier for evolutionists to test hypotheses, and in some corners of the historical profession, evolutionism is making inroads. My own original field of ancient Greco-Roman history, which led the charge against philosophical history in the 1780s-90s and since then has often seemed the very model of humanistic scholarship, has recently generated a series of outstanding evolutionist studies (Scheidel 2017; Woolf 2020; Harper 2021). All these authors have their own cognitivist and non-cognitivist backstories, each of them doubtless different from the ones I have told about myself; but all share similar formative experiences of passing through institutions that valued scientific and generalizing approaches to the past, of running into the right people at the right times, and of Road-to-Damascus recognitions that evolutionism is the most powerful analytical tool for long-term, large-scale history. The challenge facing us in the early twenty-first century is to widen and straighten the roads connecting historical scholarship with evolutionary theory, because—to paraphrase Plato (Republic 5.473d), one of the original evolutionary historians—we will never succeed in explaining or understanding humanity until evolutionists become historians and historians become evolutionists.