For most, miniature art tends only to conjure up a culture’s lonely eccentricities — toy trains, dusty runes, weekend hobbyists tweezing ships into bottles. But John Mack’s absorbing new book, “The Art of Small Things” (Harvard University Press, 224 pages, $24.95), argues persuasively that the miniature is society writ small: Squint hard at the world’s knickknackery and find the cultures that produced it.

Mr. Mack chases this conviction through millennia of artifacts, fascinated with a historically recurrent sense that “small is beautiful.” That aphorism (coined by economist Ernst Schumacher in 1973) speaks to a perceptual phenomenon which for Mr. Mack is as mysterious and universal as beauty itself. The magnetic, expressive power of the miniature shows up everywhere, from dollhouses and divination bowls to the kingly faces on small change. Even the diminutive language of affection reflects our love affair with the small.

For those determined to browse, nearly every page boasts gorgeous color plates, many of which are by necessity larger than the objects being photographed. But more than a catalog of tiny curiosities, “The Art of Small Things” is a study of how we relate to objects of all sizes, and of how the miniature strangely enables experiences of the vast or ephemeral. In this way the world of the miniature is experienced by turns of paradox. Up close, small is large and sharp is blunt. Miniaturists specialize in designing or reproducing artwork on excruciatingly reduced scales, which means their calligraphy is illegibly small and their grand murals fit onto modest pendants. They delight in crafting functional models that, ironically, are so small nobody can use them. And while these creations require perfect use of the space available, their size makes inevitable imperfections that are much harder to catch with the naked eye. Indeed, by degrees of smallness the visible traces of production disappear, and so what is most painstakingly crafted looks all the more natural for it.

The pleasure of this encyclopedic book lies in the resonances Mr. Mack finds between his many historical anecdotes. Mr. Mack’s roving, capacious sections are not organized within an academic thesis so much as they are arranged like a bouquet of flowers, in evocative rather than linear groupings. The book itself enacts a kind of miniaturization by surveying so many artifacts in one volume — much the way Oxford’s Enlightenment-era collecting projects crammed in a tour of “the world under one roof” by shelving the various souvenirs of British colonialism. (Thankfully, Mr. Mack, a professor of world art studies at the University of East Anglia, pursues more enlightened anthropology.) Mr. Mack hits his stride about midway through, as he begins more gracefully analyzing the objects themselves. He elsewhere skips uneasily between focused ethnography and his more cerebral discussions of scale and relativity.

Putting the small into (or, rather, out of) perspective, Mr. Mack argues that miniaturization taps deeply into our notions of the universe as a whole, emerging wherever artists have sought to understand the local in terms of the limitless or the metaphysical. Cultures have long used the miniature to express a cosmological continuity between things of all sizes. Ancient Babylonians tried to foresee major events in the minute lines of sheep livers. Later, medieval Spanish zodiacs would map the humors, human ages, seasons, and stars in concentric alignment, all bound on one scroll of paper with “the containedness of the image.”

Schumacher’s full quotation reads, “Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.” While the human body orients our sense of scale, Mr. Mack is quick to note that miniaturization isn’t confined to handheld crafts. What is miniature may only be small in comparison with the heavens. Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers gaped at a now-legendary sacred garden cloistered in the Inca empire’s Temple of the Sun, the synecdochal “navel of the universe.” The Inca and Islamic paradise gardens, as with Chinese imperial parks and Kublai Kahn’s pleasure dome, were built to enclose and aestheticize a distilled, formalized conception of nature. Like medieval maps or the Japanese bonsai, they shared a notion that the cosmos ultimately reduces to perfection and harmony.

This notion has changed. After the development of strong microscopes in the 1600s, Robert Hooke, one of London’s premier scientists, published in his “Micrographia” a provocative series of fine drawings he made of fleas, mites, plant cells, and other intriguing samples of small matter. The microscope was thought to restore vision that prelapsarian Adam had with the naked eye, exposing again the elaborate micromosaic that lay everywhere. But while Hooke’s “Micrographia” was widely advertised as confirmation of God’s infinite attention to detail, the ghastly features of the flea also evinced a more modern reality, one in shivering tension with the gardens. Here was a portrait of nature on a scale so basic it defied mortal eyesight, and it showed a monstrous parasite, hostile to humans and terrifically well-designed to prey on them. Given the flea’s unknown role in the Black Plague — a scourge of even smaller proportions — the implications of Hooke’s sketch were eerily apropos, and prophesied Louis Pasteur’s progress on germ theory in the early 19th century.

Mr. Mack is a thoughtful ethnographer, and he regularly draws parallels between the various conceptions inspiring miniature art. We see, for example, that where Plato imagines the universe as a “living creature” made of smaller living creatures, the creator god A’a of the Austral Islands of French Polynesia is represented beautifully with a wood sculpture into which are carved miniature bodies. Despite these commonalities, and putting aside the virtuosic aesthetic achievements on every continent, most of the truly remarkable feats of small-scale production seem to hail from Europe, where designs have been the smallest and most elaborate. As early as the 18th century, a French father-and-son team designed a little mechanical doll that would devilishly write, with his miniature quill, “I think therefore I am.” This was more than a watchmaker’s trick. It reflects an unusual mastery of the impulse to encapsulate big questions within the parameters of small objects — a drive for substance that Mr. Mack finds everywhere.

Mr. Axelrod is an editor of Contemporary Poetry Review. He has contributed to Parnassus, New Partisan, and other publications.