“Chronological reasoning” means thinking logically about how and why the world changes — or, sometimes, stays the same — over time. While practitioners in all fields of knowledge offer arguments based on evidence or make comparisons, historians are uniquely concerned about the past and its relationship to the present. How is the world different now than it was 50 years ago, 500 years ago, or 5,000 years ago? Why did the world change? How have some aspects of the world remained relatively the same over long periods of time? On what basis do historians simplify the long and complicated past by breaking it into smaller eras?
Historical Causation
Causation has to do with explanations about how or why changes take place in history. Sometimes there is an obvious connection between an event and its consequence, like a cue ball striking the eight ball and making it move. And some events are fairly straightforward: the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand by the Serbian revolutionary Gavrilo Princip in June 1914 led Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia, which led Serbia’s ally Russia to declare war on Austria-Hungary and its ally Germany, and ultimately led to World War I. But even this seemingly simple example is more complex. Why did Princip decide to kill Francis Ferdinand? What role did Austria’s 1908 annexation of territories in which substantial numbers of Serbs lived play in his decision? Did Serbian military victories against the Ottoman Empire in 1912 and 1913 enter into his decision? All of these other events took place just a few years before the assassination. If we go even further back, we’ll gain additional insight into the larger context of Princip’s decision. A longer-term analysis might lead, for example, to an understanding of the system of alliances and treaties that had divided Europe into two hostile camps, and the widespread militarism and nationalism that encouraged leaders and citizens to see war as a way of testing national power and individual honor.
Just as there were many factors behind Princip’s action, most examples of historical causation involve multiple causes and effects. Events and processes often result from developments in many realms of life, including social, political, economic, and cultural. Historians cannot test these in laboratories the way scientists can, but they can use historical evidence and reasoning to determine which of these are probable causes and effects. Historical causation also involves large processes, multiple causes, unintended consequences, and contingency, as the chart below describes.
You can begin to develop the skill of determining causation by asking yourself, whenever some significant change in history is described, what reasons explain the development? If the answer seems simple, keep digging, because there’s bound to be a more complicated (and longer-term) explanation.
Patterns of Continuity and Change
Historians are interested in both historical changes and persisting patterns, or “continuities.” Change is easier to see: when one country conquers another one, that event often becomes part of the historical record. But some things stay relatively the same for long periods of time. Because continuity (such as a network of trade that remains in existence for hundreds of years) is less dramatic than change, it can be harder to spot.
What counts as continuity depends on the scale of time you’re working with. The Soviet Union was continuous throughout most of the twentieth century. However, in the time frame of Russia’s history since the formation of Kievan Rus in the ninth century, the Soviet era looks more like a short-lived exception to tsarist rule.
When historians talk about continuity, they’re not implying that a particular pattern applied to everyone in the world or even in a particular country or region. Nor are they claiming that absolutely nothing changed in the pattern they’re describing. For example, agricultural production has been continuous for thousands of years. But there are exceptions to this broad statement: on the one hand, some people have continued to be foragers; on the other hand, methods of farming have changed substantially with technology. So the continuity of agriculture is a generalization but not a completely unchanging pattern or a pattern that applies to everyone on the planet.
| Historical causation involves the following: | |
|---|---|
| Large processes | Many changes take place through major processes that are larger than any one person and occur over a long period of time. Urbanization, for example, is a complex set of changes resulting from the actions of countless different individuals that became an underlying cause of many other developments. |
| Multiple causes | Most events or developments occur due to a combination of factors, not just one. The protests of the late 1960s in many places around the world, for example, had multiple causes, including movements for civil rights and decolonization, the rise of the New Left, the Vietnam War, and the postwar baby boom that produced a new youth culture. |
| Unintended consequences | Many changes take place accidentally. Factory work was often more monotonous than farm or craft work had been, creating demand for stimulants, which was met by the importation of coffee and tea. Trade in coffee and tea provided great wealth for merchants and transformed the economies and sometimes the political structures of the areas where these products were grown. For example, British demand for tea grown in China was one of the main causes of the Opium Wars, in which the British government used military force to keep China open to British merchants trading opium grown in British colonies for Chinese tea. |
| Contingency | Events are not preordained, and history could have turned out differently. This is known as contingency. Because we read major events in history already knowing their outcome, we have a tendency to think they were bound to happen, but that is not the case. For example, the initial Spanish conquest of the Incas was very precarious, and early on the Spanish might have been defeated. |
You can develop the skill of identifying continuities by looking for places in your text where the authors directly indicate that a historical pattern persisted over time and explain why that pattern persisted. But even when an author focuses on change in history, you can still find continuity by inference, since few things ever change completely. When the text describes a new development, ask yourself what didn’t change. For example, new ways of understanding the world developed in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which thinkers emphasized the central importance of human reason as a measure by which all things should be judged. But many of these thinkers used reason to defend traditional stereotypes about the inferiority of women or non-Europeans that had existed for centuries.
Periodization
Periodization refers to the ways that historians break the past into separate periods of time. Historians look for major turning points in history — places where the world looked very different before some event than it did after — to decide how to break the past into chunks. They then give a label to each period to convey the key characteristics and developments of that era.
Because the past is complex, any attempt to create eras and give those eras labels can provoke disagreement. For example, the word Renaissance, which means “rebirth,” was first used in the late sixteenth century by the Italian art historian Giorgio Vasari to describe artists such as his contemporary Michelangelo who Vasari regarded as geniuses even greater than those of the ancient world. Over time, the word’s meaning was broadened to include many aspects of life, was expanded geographically to include developments in many countries, and was extended chronologically to include several centuries. But scholars do not agree about when exactly the Renaissance began and when it ended, and they debate whether certain artists and writers should be considered “Renaissance” figures. Many note that along with significant changes during the Renaissance, there were also striking continuities with the medieval period that preceded it. Others have questioned whether the word Renaissance should be used at all to describe an era in which many social groups saw decline rather than advancement. These debates remind us that all periodization is done by people after the fact, and it all involves value judgments. No English soldier in France in the fifteenth century, for example, knew he was fighting what would later be called “the Hundred Years’ War” or that he was living in a period of time that would later be called “the Middle Ages.”
As you develop this skill, pay attention to the labels for various periods that are used in the chapter you’re reading. Sometimes chapter titles themselves contain a period label, which can give you an idea of what the authors have decided is the main story for that era. Chapter 23, for example, is titled “The Age of Nationalism,” and Chapter 30, the final chapter in the book, is titled “Life in an Age of Globalization.”