Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson (Eds), Natural Experiments of History. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010, 288 pages, $29.95 hardcover

摘要

In their new volume Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson call for an injection of scientific methodology into the practice of traditional archive and text-based history. Natural Experiments of History is not bound by theme, time period, or geography. Instead, the eight essays in this volume are intended as case studies for what Diamond calls 'the comparative method' (a perspective he argues is already at work in the historical sciences of evolutionary biology, geology, and paleontology in addition to the social sciences).