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My reading continues. A few scattered thoughts from my phone while I sit with the goblin.

In reading about these various big picture developments - movements of people, invasions and battles, the rise and fall of dynasties - I feel the relative lack of an accompanying sociology or anthropology. To be fair, Koenigsberger is quite good I think in discussing economic and political developments. He mentions things too like childhood mortality and agricultural developments. He is not just dryly rattling off dates and battles. And I suppose he was simply working within the genre of "history" as traditionally understood, especially in the 80s.

I recall from my undergraduate minor in history that since then there have been pushes to expand on this genre (i.e. histories of workers, histories of women), or to approach from a materialist / Marxist frame. I suppose there must be a good deal of sociological-history too by now. That's something id be interested in.

For example, Koenigsberger doesn't discuss patriarchy really at all. Only indirectly when it comes to subjects such as the Frankish tradition of apportioning land to the kings sons.

I guess I want to understand better some of the basic realities of organised human life that serve as motive forces for traditional big picture accounts of "history", while not reducing said history to mere epiphenomenon.

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