A complex-systems landscape: Recognizing what is important in world history

Abstract

This article introduces a complex-systems metaphor/model for a world history greater than the sum of its parts. Due to the difficulty of thinking about any event within such a complicated context, we present a visualization to guide researchers’ recognition of the relationships that shape the historical process they study. To support thought, we repurpose a pair of linked visualizations that model gene expression in the morphogenesis of tissues and organs from a fertilized egg. The visual metaphor presents the shaping factors in two ways. First, the historical process encounters, as it moves through the complex-systems landscape, a series of elevations and depressions, which can be identified with significant relations. Second, from below, the metaphor permits the identification of these perturbations, the hills and valleys, with networks connecting the landscape's undulations to developments in specific places and larger geographic areas. These networks also serve to represent the way the complex human system couples with the complex natural systems relevant to the historical process in question. Moreover, the metaphor demands the recognition of hierarchies of instability, on which historians must focus to understand when a level of instability is reduced through some localized development, and when the instability level in places most relevant to the overall human system become so unstable that the system enters a period of phase transition to a new historical system and period. Employing the metaphor in this manner allows historians to defend the importance of their own research by tying it to world historical processes.