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History's Big Patterns The recurring shapes in human history that help you read the present: the farming trap, the Malthusian ceiling and the escape from it, why the West industrialised first, energy, disease, debt, empires, revolutions, and how to use a historical analogy without being captured by it.
45 cards · space to flip · 1–4 to grade · d to go deeper
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Reading list The works this deck draws on, in the order worth reading them. Cards point to a specific chapter or paper where one fits.
01 Book Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers · Richard Neustadt and Ernest May The best starting point, because it teaches how to use everything else in this list: the two-column test for analogies, Known/Unclear/Presumed, and case studies of officials who got it wrong. 02 Book Why Nations Fail · Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson The institutional theory of prosperity, argued through readable cases from Nogales to the Black Death. Influential and contested; the circularity critique in this deck applies, and the authors' later work answers some of it. 03 Book Energy and Civilization: A History · Vaclav Smil The energy story from muscle and wood to oil, with numbers, and the clearest evidence that transitions take generations. Dense; read the chapters on fossil fuels and the final chapter first. 04 Book Plagues and Peoples · William H. McNeill Disease as a force in history, from the first towns to the Columbian exchange. Written in 1976 and still the account specialists point to for the big picture. 05 Book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States · James C. Scott A short, contrarian account of why states formed late, why they ran on grain, and why their collapses were not always disasters. Specialists dispute parts of it; the lens is worth having. 06 Book The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy · Kenneth Pomeranz The book that set the terms of the debate about why industrialisation began in Britain and not the Yangzi delta. The coal-and-colonies camp; read the introduction and conclusion, then the critics. 07 Book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers · Paul Kennedy Five centuries of great-power competition through the lens of economic base versus military commitment. The forecasts about the 1990s missed; the mechanism is still the one to know. 08 Book Guns, Germs, and Steel · Jared Diamond The geographic explanation for why Eurasia conquered the rest. The disease and domestication chapters hold up; the determinist sweep is widely criticised by historians and anthropologists, so read it as one camp rather than the verdict. 