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Time and the Shape of History
This ambitious book explores the relationship between time and history and shows how an appreciation of long-term time helps to make sense of the past. The book is devoted to a wide-ranging analysis of the way different societies have conceived and interpreted time, and it develops a theory of the threefold roles of continuity, gradual change, and revolution which together form a "braided" history. Linking the interpretative chapters are intriguing brief expositions on time travel, time cycles, time lines, and time pieces, showing the different ways in which human history has been located in time.
In its global approach the book is part of the new shift toward “big history,” in which traditional period divisions are challenged in favor of looking at the entire past of the world from start to end. The approach is thematic. The result is a view of world history in which outcomes are shown to be explicable, once they happen, but not necessarily predictable before they do. This book will inform the work of historians of all periods and at all levels, and contributes to the current reconsideration of traditional period divisions (such as Modernity and Postmodernity), which the author finds outmoded.
In its global approach the book is part of the new shift toward “big history,” in which traditional period divisions are challenged in favor of looking at the entire past of the world from start to end. The approach is thematic. The result is a view of world history in which outcomes are shown to be explicable, once they happen, but not necessarily predictable before they do. This book will inform the work of historians of all periods and at all levels, and contributes to the current reconsideration of traditional period divisions (such as Modernity and Postmodernity), which the author finds outmoded.
- GenresHistory
309 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2007
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October 22, 2024This is a very ambitious book. In essence, it focusses on the attempts to look at history over the long term. Corfield carefully analyses the various approaches, both in the Western historiographical tradition, but also beyond, in religions, mythologies and so on. She shows a considerable erudition in this domain, and even includes the more or less recent evolutions in the natural sciences in her story. Her reflections on the fundamental characteristics of temporality (the experience of time) are spot-on; she rightly points to the asymmetry in these temporalities of past, present and future: “It is the unshakeable asymmetry of time's arrow that makes it possible to analyse the past retrospectively, as we investigate evidence of things that have gone before from the ever-changing perspective of the unfolding present. By contrast, we can anticipate and try to forecast the future, but we cannot study its workings in the same way. Its relationship with the present is asymmetrically different from the relationship of the past to the present”.
Her criticism of historiographical long-term attempts makes sense: they are often very one-sided (cyclical, linear), too rigid or too fragmented, and the labels used (especially terms like 'modernity') easily get overstretched or become outdated. She also has an interesting take on the focus of the different long-term visions: there are those who mainly emphasize continuity in history, others that highlight gradual change, and others that focus on radical breaks. There is something to be said for each of these approaches, but on their own they are not very satisfaying. Especially the classical historiographical tradition to divide history into successive stages (antiquity-middle ages-modern times/feudal-capitalist-communist, etc.) falters. “Collectively, the general problem is that of fitting sometimes different and sometimes similar experiences across all world cultures within one set of stages in linear sequence. Too many aspects of history refuse such corralling. Indeed, while stage theories do well at highlighting fundamental transformations, they consistently underplay both deep continuities and the micro-changes that bridge turning points”.
In between, Corfield nicely indicates how our view of the past is permanently shifting, due to a constantly changing present, and she also deals with the postmodernist thesis that the past cannot be known and therefore all histories are relative. Corfield is convinced that the past can be approached and known in a structural way: “Underlying all historical explanations is the assumption that history is not so fragmented as to be beyond explanation; and that history unfolds within a consecutive time-space that is ultimately coherent. These features are potentially knowable by time-based humans. Historical causation can therefore be studied and communicated to others, even if the answers are subject to debate and revision.”
This is all pretty interesting and well documented. Only: which alternative Corfield puts forward? At this point this book falls short. In the final chapters, she haphazardly puts forward an approach that she calls ‘trialectic’. This takes both continuity (persistence) and micro-change (graduality) and macro-change (radical discontinuity) seriously in a complex and somewhat chaotic tangle. “Rather than separate tiers or sorts of temporality, then, each with their separate rate characteristics, it is more helpful to envisage within one complex temporality a range of different dimensions that continuously interact, intersect and counteract longitudinally. Such an alternative allows for flexibility, overlapping ping and fuzzy boundaries.” That of course sounds very abstract, and that is precisely the weakness of this book: Corfield does not really clarifies her alternative, and above all she does not show how it could work. Moreover, the model in its three-part division is too rigid and is very reminiscent of the classical dialectical thinking of Hegel and Marx.
But that does not alter the fact that Corfield, with her plea certainly opens an interesting path. In a way her trialectics corresponds with ‘systemic thinking’, a particular branch of addressing reality within the positive sciences, biology and the social sciences. It sees reality as infinitely complex, with a dynamic interaction between the whole and the parts, and between the whole and the environment, as expressed in feedback loops, recurrence, emergent properties, etc. and which acknowledges non-linearity and uncertainty as fundamental traits of reality.
Curiously, in her final chapter Corfield formulates the ambition that looking at the past can certainly say something about the future. That is not entirely illogical, since she sees both continuity and gradual change as legs of her trialectics: “The past, as it merges with the present, provides ample evidence of human experiences of the familiar mixture of persistence, with its components of stability-location-addition, micro-change, with its elements of adaptation-accumulation-trend, accumulation-trend, and radical discontinuity, with its contribution of turbulence-friction-and macro-transformation. On the strength of that long history, it is also likely that the same features will be manifested within different circumstances in the future”. Still, it remains risky to state this so explicitly.
Finally, I do not understand why Corfield almost completely ignores the huge developments in the field of Global History/Big History/Transnational History and Connected History. Corfield’s book was published in 2013, when those approaches were already at least 15 years in development. Unfortunately, there is no trace of them, although some of them come reasonably close to her alternative.
This is a condense and erudite approach to the long-term view of history. As far as I'm concerned, this book deserves much more attention than it has received so far, because the attempt to look at the past in a dynamic, interactive way is absolutely commendable. As Corfield says: “The challenge is to find multidimensional ways of interpreting the combination of persistence, accumulation and transformation that between them shape the past and present and, prospectively, the future too”. But in the formulation of an alternative this book unfortunately lacks maturity.
Her criticism of historiographical long-term attempts makes sense: they are often very one-sided (cyclical, linear), too rigid or too fragmented, and the labels used (especially terms like 'modernity') easily get overstretched or become outdated. She also has an interesting take on the focus of the different long-term visions: there are those who mainly emphasize continuity in history, others that highlight gradual change, and others that focus on radical breaks. There is something to be said for each of these approaches, but on their own they are not very satisfaying. Especially the classical historiographical tradition to divide history into successive stages (antiquity-middle ages-modern times/feudal-capitalist-communist, etc.) falters. “Collectively, the general problem is that of fitting sometimes different and sometimes similar experiences across all world cultures within one set of stages in linear sequence. Too many aspects of history refuse such corralling. Indeed, while stage theories do well at highlighting fundamental transformations, they consistently underplay both deep continuities and the micro-changes that bridge turning points”.
In between, Corfield nicely indicates how our view of the past is permanently shifting, due to a constantly changing present, and she also deals with the postmodernist thesis that the past cannot be known and therefore all histories are relative. Corfield is convinced that the past can be approached and known in a structural way: “Underlying all historical explanations is the assumption that history is not so fragmented as to be beyond explanation; and that history unfolds within a consecutive time-space that is ultimately coherent. These features are potentially knowable by time-based humans. Historical causation can therefore be studied and communicated to others, even if the answers are subject to debate and revision.”
This is all pretty interesting and well documented. Only: which alternative Corfield puts forward? At this point this book falls short. In the final chapters, she haphazardly puts forward an approach that she calls ‘trialectic’. This takes both continuity (persistence) and micro-change (graduality) and macro-change (radical discontinuity) seriously in a complex and somewhat chaotic tangle. “Rather than separate tiers or sorts of temporality, then, each with their separate rate characteristics, it is more helpful to envisage within one complex temporality a range of different dimensions that continuously interact, intersect and counteract longitudinally. Such an alternative allows for flexibility, overlapping ping and fuzzy boundaries.” That of course sounds very abstract, and that is precisely the weakness of this book: Corfield does not really clarifies her alternative, and above all she does not show how it could work. Moreover, the model in its three-part division is too rigid and is very reminiscent of the classical dialectical thinking of Hegel and Marx.
But that does not alter the fact that Corfield, with her plea certainly opens an interesting path. In a way her trialectics corresponds with ‘systemic thinking’, a particular branch of addressing reality within the positive sciences, biology and the social sciences. It sees reality as infinitely complex, with a dynamic interaction between the whole and the parts, and between the whole and the environment, as expressed in feedback loops, recurrence, emergent properties, etc. and which acknowledges non-linearity and uncertainty as fundamental traits of reality.
Curiously, in her final chapter Corfield formulates the ambition that looking at the past can certainly say something about the future. That is not entirely illogical, since she sees both continuity and gradual change as legs of her trialectics: “The past, as it merges with the present, provides ample evidence of human experiences of the familiar mixture of persistence, with its components of stability-location-addition, micro-change, with its elements of adaptation-accumulation-trend, accumulation-trend, and radical discontinuity, with its contribution of turbulence-friction-and macro-transformation. On the strength of that long history, it is also likely that the same features will be manifested within different circumstances in the future”. Still, it remains risky to state this so explicitly.
Finally, I do not understand why Corfield almost completely ignores the huge developments in the field of Global History/Big History/Transnational History and Connected History. Corfield’s book was published in 2013, when those approaches were already at least 15 years in development. Unfortunately, there is no trace of them, although some of them come reasonably close to her alternative.
This is a condense and erudite approach to the long-term view of history. As far as I'm concerned, this book deserves much more attention than it has received so far, because the attempt to look at the past in a dynamic, interactive way is absolutely commendable. As Corfield says: “The challenge is to find multidimensional ways of interpreting the combination of persistence, accumulation and transformation that between them shape the past and present and, prospectively, the future too”. But in the formulation of an alternative this book unfortunately lacks maturity.
January 25, 2020
This book contains many interesting insights about looking at history over the long term. Corfield has a broad field of vision and cleverly analyzes existing views. As her own alternative, she launches the concept of 'trialectics': looking at history as a complex interaction of continuity, gradual change and sudden breaks. That is certainly a valid approach (although perhaps a little too close to the classical 'dialectic'), but unfortunately she does not elaborate this alternative in concrete examples. For a detailed review, see my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
September 4, 2012
This book is a little wacky. I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way! But a nice encapsulation of this book can be found by taking a quick look at the illustration table of contents at the books start. Over the first hundred or so pages, images include: 15th century Aztec calendrical map; Alice and the Red Queen from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass; oaken cart wheel, 2500 BCE; Reconstruction of pre-erosian Andean-type mountains some 1,700 million years ago; lithograph poster of Battleship Potemkin; Detail from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In the text of these pages, references run from The Big Bang to dinosaurs, to Doctor Who.
Penelope Corfield is convinced that modern problems in historiography - especially trying to fit history into neat and tidy periods - is tied to the fact that historians don't have a proper understanding of how time works. They tend to simplify it, emphasizing either continuities, gradual changes (either in terms of progress or decline), or radical turning points. Corfield suggests that none of these suffice by themselves. To get a real understanding of history you have to look at them all together, how they intertwine, bolster, or counteract each other. Historiographic disagreements, in this view, are just arguments over proportion.
I think that's an interesting point, and Corfield's book is really fun to read. But it's almost a little too all over the map. It skips around over literally billions of years without ever really pausing to analyze the things it brings up. It's hugely comprehensive, but also kinda superficial. It probably should have been a lot shorter or a lot longer.
That said, it's a pretty imaginative book, and it made me think.
Penelope Corfield is convinced that modern problems in historiography - especially trying to fit history into neat and tidy periods - is tied to the fact that historians don't have a proper understanding of how time works. They tend to simplify it, emphasizing either continuities, gradual changes (either in terms of progress or decline), or radical turning points. Corfield suggests that none of these suffice by themselves. To get a real understanding of history you have to look at them all together, how they intertwine, bolster, or counteract each other. Historiographic disagreements, in this view, are just arguments over proportion.
I think that's an interesting point, and Corfield's book is really fun to read. But it's almost a little too all over the map. It skips around over literally billions of years without ever really pausing to analyze the things it brings up. It's hugely comprehensive, but also kinda superficial. It probably should have been a lot shorter or a lot longer.
That said, it's a pretty imaginative book, and it made me think.
March 3, 2026
This book redefines what it means to study history. Rather than presenting the past as a linear procession of dates and events, it unveils history as a dynamic interplay of continuity, transformation, and revolution. The “braided” concept is not just clever, it is illuminating. It changes how one sees civilization itself.
The author’s global scope and thematic courage feel visionary. This is not merely scholarship; it is intellectual artistry. Few books make you rethink the architecture of time itself, this one does.
The author’s global scope and thematic courage feel visionary. This is not merely scholarship; it is intellectual artistry. Few books make you rethink the architecture of time itself, this one does.
March 3, 2026
I finished this book feeling both humbled and awakened. The argument that history becomes explicable only after it unfolds is profoundly human,It reminds us of our limitations and our responsibility.
The rejection of rigid historical divisions is bold and refreshing. The author has clearly invested years of thought into this work, and it shows in every meticulous yet inspired page.
The rejection of rigid historical divisions is bold and refreshing. The author has clearly invested years of thought into this work, and it shows in every meticulous yet inspired page.
March 3, 2026
I felt genuinely transformed after reading this. The argument that history is understandable only in hindsight hit me with surprising emotional force . It thougthful, bold and profoundly human. A remarkable achievement.
March 3, 2026
This book challenges, inspires, and enlightens. The thematic scope is breathtaking.
It is bold scholarship executed with precision.
It is bold scholarship executed with precision.
March 3, 2026
A refreshing departure from rigid historical categories. The author reclaims nuance and complexity,
this is history with intellectual courage.
this is history with intellectual courage.
Read
March 3, 2026A refreshing departure from rigid historical categories. The author reclaims nuance and complexity,
This is history with intellectual courage.
This is history with intellectual courage.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews