Big and little histories: sizing up ethics in historiography / Marnie Hughes-Warrington ; with Anne Martin

Includes bibliographical references (pages 188-204) and index

Chapter 1: Good histories -- Chapter 2: Universal histories and virtue ethics / Elias Lönnrot, Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus -- Chapter 3: Collective biographies and utilitarian ethics / Liu Xiang, Fan Ye, Mary Hays, Lucy Aikin, Sarah Strickney Ellis, Mary Cowden Clarke, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill -- Chapter 4: Philosophical world histories and deontological ethics / Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Thomas Hill Green, Robin George Collingwood, Kitarō Nishida, Hajime Tanabe, Keiji Nishitani -- Chapter 5: Little world histories and sentiment ethics / Jawaharlal Nehru, Eileen and Rhoda Power, Ernst Gombrich, John Newbery, Franco-Suisse, Adam Smith, David Hume -- Chapter 6: Global histories and cosmopolitan ethics / H. G. Wells, Charles Morazé and Georges-Henri Dumont, Leften Stavrianos, Sebastian Conrad, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Onora O’Neill -- Chapter 7: Microhistories and social contract ethics / Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis, István M. Szijártó, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, Claire Judde de Larivière, John Rawls, David Gauthier, Charles W. Mills, Carol Pateman -- Chapter 8: Slice histories and infinite ethics / Boubacar Boris Diop, Tierno Monénembo, Véronique Tadjo, Abdourahman A. Waberi, Garrett Graff, Mitchell Zuckhoff, Richard Drew, Henry Singer, David Hein, Irene Sankoff, Emmanuel Levinas -- Chapter 9: Big histories and information ethics / Fernand Braudel, David Christian, Jared Diamond, John R. McNeill, William H. McNeill, Luciano Floridi, Katherine Bode -- Chapter 10: Non-human histories and entanglement ethics / Mark Kurlansky, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Sven Beckert, Stephen Budiansky,Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Gerardo Beni, Jing Wang -- Chapter 11: Indigenous histories and place ethics / Written with Aunty Anne Martin Jakelin Troy, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, Sandra D. Styres, Deborah Bird Rose -- Chapter 12: One angel? Scaling the ethics of history

This book introduces students to ethics in historiography through an exploration of how historians in different times and places have explained how history ought to be written and how those views relate to different understandings of ethics. No two histories are the same. The book argues that this is a good thing because the differences between histories are largely a matter of ethics. Looking to histories made across the world and from ancient times until today, readers are introduced to a wide variety of approaches to the ethics of history, including well-known ethical approaches, such as the virtue ethics of universal historians, and utilitarian approaches to collective biography writing while also discovering new and emerging ideas in the ethics of history. Through these approaches, readers are encouraged to challenge their ideas about whether humans are separate from other living and non-living things and whether machines and animals can write histories. The book looks to the fundamental questions posed about the nature of history making by Indigenous history makers and asks whether the ethics at play in the global variety of histories might be better appreciated in professional codes of conduct and approaches to research ethics management. Opening up the topic of ethics to show how historians might have viewed ethics differently in the past, the book requires no background in ethics or history theory and is open to all of those with an interest in how we think about good histories.