and went wild over Mao instead. (2) The Chinese
will never have a Gorbachev. American policy
analysts give the American-led “arms race” too
much credit for splintering the Soviet Union. In
pursuit of nuclear weapons, both the Pakistanis
and the Chinese forced serious deprivations on
their people in the 20th century.By trying to re-
form the Soviet model, Gorbachev facilitated its
destruction. No one like Gorbachev will ever be
the head of the Chinese Communist Party. (3)
The traditional political science theory regarding
state power and capitalism has it that capitalism
creates a middle class that then pressures the
government for economic reform. If a state is
successful in creating top-down capitalism, then
it will create the class that destroys single party
dominance. How is the Chinese Communist
party simultaneously creating a middle class and
preventing democratic political reform? The an-
swer is that they are not doing this. Instead, the
Chinese government outsources well over a mil-
lion educated engineers and entrepreneurs into
Africa and Pakistan. The former is occurring at
such a scale that the journalist Howard W.
French calls Africa “China’s Second Continent”
(the title of his excellent 2014 book).VII. “Big History” is a derivative of World History.
Big History is a result of the overlap between the
sciences and history that really began with
William McNeill’s 1961 textbook A World History.
A revered professor at the University of Chicago,
McNeill was one of the only world historians to
practice from inside a traditional academic struc-
ture. From McNeill, David Christian conceived of
“Big History” that is, as McNeill wrote in his in-
troduction to Christian’s 2005 book Maps of Time:
An Introduction to Big History, a book that “unites
natural history and human history in a single,
grand, and intelligible narrative” (xv).
VIII. The world is becoming a Femocracy and
this will be (mostly) good. The most impressive
effect of democracy has been to facilitate the de-
velopment of feminism.In the year 1919, women
in the United States had no federally-guaranteed
right to vote, and tens of millions of women in
China still had their feet broken at a young age
and bound tightly so that they would be physi-
cally and socially crippled for life. In 2019, nei-
ther of these was true. Historians like to focus on
political developments, treaties, etc., but, given
the overwhelming rise of feminism since the late
18th century, everything else should be seen as a
sub-subject to the rise of women.
More important than the 1776 American
Revolution, or the 1789 French Revolution, was
the 1792 publication of the feminist polemic,
Vindication of the Rights of Womenby Mary Woll-
stonecraft. The year 1848 saw lower-class revolu-
tions across Europe and the publication of the
Communist Manifesto, but the significance of both
means almost nothing next to the Declaration of
Sentimentsthat was written in Seneca Falls, New
York (first line:“We hold these truths to be self-evi-
dent that all men and women are created equal.”) It
could be argued that neither WWI nor WWII
were as important for the 20th century as the
development of the birth control pill. Enlighten-
ment philosophy and democratic institutions al-
lowed for the rise of feminism. The spread of
Femocracy—the combination of democratic in-
stitutions and women’s rights—is the story of the
modern world.No single narrative or approach can ever “Ex-
plain it All,” but world history remains the best place
for thinkers to develop cross-curricular analogies, and
that means that world history is most useful as an edu-
cational tool. It is the only subject best suited for poly-
maths rather than specialists. Instead of trying to
create a single narrative to be presented to students
and the public from the top-down, world history
should be a flexible discipline that allows for cross-
curricular thinkers to see connections across disci-
plines from the bottom-up. World history would then
be what it has always been, the perfect subject for peo-
ple who are interested in all the subjects.volume 25 number 1 2020 W W W. S K E P T I C. C O M 5 1Acemoglu, Daron; Robinson, James A. 2012. Why Na-
tions Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and
Pover ty.New York: Random House.
Christian, David. 2005. Maps of Time: An Introduction to
Big Histor y.Berkeley: University of California Press.
Christian, David. 2016. Big Histor y: Examines Our Past,
Explains Our Present, Imagines our Future. London:
DK.
Fukuyama, Francis. 2015. Political Order and Political
Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Global-
ization of Democracy.New York: Farrar, Strauss,
and Giroux.
McNeill, William. 1998, reprint. A World Histor y. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Polybius, “On History.” In On Writing Histor y: From
Herodotus to Herodian,edited by John Marincola,- NewYork: PenguinClassics, 2017.
Wells, H.G. 1920. The Outline of Histor y. London:
George Newnes.
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