• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage

In recent years David Christian and others have promoted “Big History” as an innovative approach to the study of the past. The present paper juxtaposes to Big History an old Big History, namely, the tradition of “universal history” that flourished in Europe from the mid-sixteenth century until well into the nineteenth century. The claim to universality of works in that tradition depended on the assumed truth of Christianity, a fact that was fully acknowledged by the tradition’s adherents. The claim of the new Big History to universality likewise depends on prior assumptions. Simply stated, in its various manifestations the “new” Big History is rooted either in a continuing theology, or in a form of materialism that is assumed to be determinative of human history, or in a somewhat contradictory amalgam of the two. The present paper suggests that “largest-scale history” as exemplified in the old and new Big Histories is less a contribution to historical knowledge than it is a narrativization of one or another worldview. Distinguishing between largest-scale history and history that is “merely” large-scale, the paper also suggests that a better approach to meeting the desire for large scale in historical writing is through more modest endeavors, such as large-scale comparative history, network and exchange history, thematic history, and history of modernization.

Chapter on the trajectory from social fragmentation to socio-political consensus in the Netherlands, surveying the nineteenth and twentieth century, and zooming in on the development of consultative platforms in the interwar period. I analyze three case studies of employer views on issues relating to labour relations and social protection: (1) collective labour agreements in the early 1920s (which opened the door to codetermination and the expansion of more elaborate welfare provisions), (2) the SicknessLaw of 1913–1930, and (3) the Unemployment Law initiatives of 1921–1923.