ABSTRACT
The Anthropocene is a qualitatively new epoch in human and planetary history, and historical studies are beginning to reflect this. The flourishing of world history reinforces the people-planet perspective, as more and more historians examine the past through an internationalist lens, although the traditional emphasis on national history still persists in popular studies. One of the most influential interpretations of history is G.W.F. Hegel’s Philosophy of History, originally published in 1836. This adopted an early and boldly internationalist perspective on human history, proposing that it has an ‘ultimate design’ which is revealed through ‘a series of increasingly adequate expressions or manifestations of Freedom’, which can be described as humanity’s ‘absolute goal’. The state-based hierarchies of the Holocene are not the only form of human organization. The Holocene epoch only accounts for the 5% of human history which broadly corresponds to the era of human technology known as the Neolithic or the New Stone Age.
