John Gaddis' The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past advances the interesting point that historians and biographers have been aware of scaling aspects of history for a very long time.
Drawing distinctions between history and the social sciences, Gaddis notes
This is one way scaling is used in history: the illustrative anecdote as narrative device. Historians use particular events to make make general points, implying a similar structure across many scales. That is,
Another example of scaling is revealed in the work of Michel Foucault, who shows similar patterns of authority from cultures to nations to states to cities to families.
Biography also seeks similarity across scales. "Biographers seek pattens that persist as one moves from micro- to macro-levels of analysis."
Gaddis notes similarities between history and the non-laboratory sciences (astronomy, paleontology, ecology, for example): process is deduced from structure. History is much more ecological than reductionist.
Another interesting point is that Gaddis says historians deny the distinction between independent and dependent variables. "Historians have a web like sense of reality, in that we see everything as connected in some way to everything else." This is a ripe setting for noticing the presence of chaos. Indeed, historians do: "particular actions had larger consequences than might otherwise have been expected." By following the work of Poincare, Henry Adams seems to have noted this aspect of history with remarkable clarity. In fact, now chaos is providing historians with a collection of tools for making sense of the problem that small events can have large consequences.