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At the end of Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah's edited work Macrohistory and Macrohistorians there is a fascinating collection of pictorial representations of various world historical theories.¹ Sima Qian's and Lovelock's theories are rendered by the creator of the appendix, Daniela Minerbi, as curvy; Hegel's, Comte's, Marx's and Gramsci's as step-like; Sorokin's as spiky, and Steiner's as a series of necklaces with dangling pendants. Though it was probably assumed by the editors that the diagrams would be viewed as ancillary to the text, the text need not be read in order to make sense of Minerbi's project. For though idiosyncratic and perhaps even mistaken — surely, for example, Vico's theory should look like a spiral — she has rendered in images what we take for granted in words: that world histories are narratives of differing shapes.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230523401_6

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