The History Manifesto

Jo Guldi is just beginning her disciplinary career as Assistant Professor of History at Brown University. She has held fellowships at the University of Chicago, the Harvard Metalab, and the Harvard Society of Fellows. She is author of Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (2011) and What is the Spatial Turn? (2012), as well as various articles and blog posts on aspects of British property law and digital history. She is the designer of Papermachines.org, digital software designed to facilitate the visualization of large amounts of text for historical and political analysis. She has published in Counterpunch and The Huffington Post, and maintains a personal website at http://landscape.blogspot.com. Her next monograph, The Long Land War (thelonglandwar.com) will tell the story of the rise of transnational land grabs, rent strikes, and land reform movements since 1880. David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of thirteen books, including The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013), Milton and Republicanism (co-edited, 1995), Bolingbroke: Political Writings (edited, 1997), British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory (co-edited, 2006) and Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (co-edited, 2009), all from Cambridge University Press. A prize-winning author and teacher, he has lectured on six continents and his works have been translated into Chinese, Danish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.

'This is a very important and refreshing book. For too long, we have seen increasing specialization within historical research and between the disciplines of social sciences. Armitage and Guldi rightly plead for a return of the 'longue durée'. They call for more global, long-run and transdisciplinary approaches to big questions, including climate change, inequality and the future of capitalism. Their book will be an important milestone in this direction. A must-read.' Thomas Piketty, Paris School of Economics

• Introduction: the bonfire of the humanities?; 1. Going forward by looking back: the rise of the longue durée; 2. The short past: or, the retreat of the longue durée; 3. The long and the short: climate change, governance and inequality since the 1970s; 4. Big questions, big data; Conclusion: the public future of the past.