Time and the Shape of History
Publisher: Yale University Press
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. For the historian time is not an unproblematic given but, as for the physicist or the philosopher, a means to understanding the changing patterns of life on earth. 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