From Western-centric visions of the liberal world order to the Enlightenment story of history as Reason’s onward march, we rightly distrust grand narratives. But, argues Turkish international-relations theorist Ayşe Zarakol, without them we struggle to make sense of the world. We also risk uncritically slipping back into outdated narratives without realising it. The way forward, she argues, is to build new, better grand narratives, that recognize themselves as products of their own time and biases, rather trying to justify the status quo from a position outside of history.

We all operate with grand historical narratives in the back of our minds, but these days new ones are hard to find, except in the airport nonfiction section. Social scientists and historians are not encouraged to produce them. This creates an odd situation where academics either produce highly nuanced empirical research that is underwritten by an unexamined zombie grand narrative, likely left over from the nineteenth century, or they settle for criticizing existing narratives for being reductive and Eurocentric. Few of us grapple with the question of how to replace the problematic grand historical narratives with better ones.

We need histories which make vivid what Charles Tilly called “big structures, large processes and huge comparisons.” There are numerous reasons why such macro-history gets a bad rap these days, some fair, some not. First, there is the fetishization of method. Because doing macro-history inevitably involves synthetic work based on secondary sources, nowadays it is not considered proper academic work, compared to the intellectual manual labor of working in the archives with primary documents. One reason for this (among many) is that in the academy we are often asked to evaluate work that is outside our period or region of expertise. In such situations, methods become the common language, creating a twisted incentive structure for methods and methodology to matter more than substantive contributions. The way to stand out as a scholar has become to invent a new technique, creating methods fads across the social sciences. In such a climate, PhD students cannot take the risk of claiming that their methodology is to synthetically put together narratives from secondary sources. That would sound old hat.

Second, macro-history is often charged with reductionism and oversimplification. Many consider it to be an ahistorical approach to history, failing to take into account historical context, and the contingent and constitutive impact of particular events. My own discipline of International Relations, for instance, desperately needs to make macro-historical claims to support its claim to be a proper social science that can come up with law-like generalizations about human and state behaviour. But it operates most of the time with ossified, essentialised, schematic narratives about the past abhorred by actual historians: e.g. “the Westphalian System,” “the Concert of Europe,” “why the League of Nations failed,” “the bipolar dynamics of the Cold War,” etc. The charge of oversimplification is right, but the solution should not be to stop doing macro-history; rather, the solution is to construct better grand narratives.

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The fetishization of archival methods and micro-histories can also reproduce Eurocentrism

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