Ferguson Human Story

What is the human story? Naturally, as a student of history, I turned to histories like Civilization by Niall Ferguson for an eloquent yet ultimately asymmetric analysis of the past 500 years of human creation. In it, Ferguson places the European Enlightenment as the most consequential event in the human story — particularly, the French philosophes that professed a need for separation between church and state that launched the Industrial Revolution. This compelling linear narrative, of the most consequential revolution that changed human history both gripped and entranced me. Ergonomically, Ferguson’s story slid comfortably into the narrow historical framework which I had constructed for myself — it had made sense of the human story. Regardless
So is the past 500 years of human history, when the feudal chains began to uncoil and mass migrations to cities began, truly the parameters with which to understand the human story? Various academics have argued that this method of understanding the human story is not only reductionist, but wholly incomplete and even destructive. Beginning, in The Big Story historian Edmund Burke immediately takes issue with the narrow historical scope of analysis employed by Ferguson. Instead, Burke enhances Ferguson’s narrative of the human story by placing the Industrial Revolution along a much broader historical continuum spanning from the Paleolithic era to the present. Focussing intently on the relationship between humans and the environment — Burke contextualizes how the Industrial Revolution was not merely a technological revolution, but a fundamental realignment of the relationship between humans and energy consumption. Moreover, he defines two ages, the age of solar energy, a renewable resource, lasting from 10,000 B.C.E. to 1800 C.E., and the more recent age of fossil fuels, a nonrenewable resource, from 1800 C.E. to the present. And