Over the last decade, the term “global microhistory” has gained strong currency among historians, particularly English-speaking early modernists.Footnote 1 Rich in promise, it unites the historiographical interest in microhistory that emerged in the 1980s with the global history paradigm that came to prominence in the 1990s. Is this proposed marriage a matter of giving microhistory a new lease on life by making it take the “global turn” that it had neglected? Or is it a question of giving an epistemological second wind to a global history that is struggling to clarify its boundaries, objectives, and methods?
This issue of the Annales examines the enthusiasm for “global microhistory” through four articles with dissimilar content and subjects which, if they cannot provide a complete picture of the vast array of research undertaken today under this banner, nonetheless sketch out some fundamental thematic and methodological trends. First of all, they point to a growing interest in scenes and sites born of the confluence of far-reaching interactions (economic, political, and intellectual) which, when observed within confined areas and over short time-frames, reveal the uneven process of a “first globalization”Footnote 2 underway since at least the fifteenth century.Footnote 3 Thus, using a European travel narrative and sources in conjunction with archaeological and anthropological research on Africa, Roberto Zaugg looks at the trade in tobacco and the Chinese porcelain vessels used as spittoons in the African kingdoms of Hueda and Dahomey from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. This “scene,” where long-distance circulations and interactions converge and concentrate, serves as the starting point for a study on the local uses of objects, their material transformations, and the metamorphosis of their meanings.
Next, the issue illustrates the particular attention paid to global and itinerant biographies, or “global lives,” understood here as a means of scrutinizing and narrating lived connections and their social and cultural consequences.Footnote 4 In this kind of study (if we keep to human actors), the figure of the trickster of globalization—who scoffs at borders and takes on distinct political or confessional identities by turns—long served as a model,Footnote 5 before being eclipsed by the character of the “cultural intermediary,” the broker or go-between, which also originated in the social anthropology of the 1970s.Footnote 6 In this regard, Sebouh David Aslanian offers an in-depth study of the eventful life of an Armenian merchant from Persia in the seventeenth century, tossed across continents and oceans in the course of his trading activities and the lawsuits brought against him by European companies and traders in Italy and France. The narration of these adventures aims not only to document his tumultuous journeys but, more broadly, to revisit the formation of the first French East India Company and the distinct and opposing conceptions of Asian and European nobility under the ancien régime.
In yet another register, an emphasis on the process of political and institutional construction of imperial formations can, by varying the focal length of observation, uncover discontinuous histories and periodizations, thereby drawing attention to the plural and conflicting fabric of localities within overarching political entities that are too often afforded the self-evidence they were wont to claim.Footnote 7 Here, through a microanalysis of the rural jurisdictions and institutions of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in the late eighteenth century, Darío Barriera sheds new light on the Hispanic Monarchy’s methods of remote government: first, by precisely assessing the effects of this distance in the small spaces of power relations; and second, by demonstrating the fundamental involvement of local actors in the institutional changes that took place in Spanish America during the reign of Charles III.
Finally, trials or court cases are fertile locations to explore the issue of intercultural economic or political relations, whose legal foundations are put to the test by the gaps, loopholes, and inconsistencies revealed in the abundant documentation left by litigations.Footnote 8 Jessica Marglin’s article provides a fine illustration of this approach. By looking closely into the legal proceedings over the inheritance of a wealthy Tunisian Jew expatriated to Tuscany in the second half of the nineteenth century, Marglin brings to light the flaws and tensions of the international law emerging at that time, questioning in so doing its geographic, religious, and ideological borders beyond a solely European framework. In this way, the microanalysis of a private international law case serves admirably to reveal the contested manufacture of the principle of nationality.
These approaches differ in that some consider microhistory, in its possible association with global history, as a general method of analyzing documents, while others think of it more as a principle of biographic or monographic narration.Footnote 9 Similar disagreements exist about global history itself. Most often considered as a field or object of study (the long-term history of processes of “globalization”), it can also be understood—in a more theoretical, ambitious, and reflexive vein—as a perspective, or even a heuristic imperative, for research on the causes, methods, temporalities, and forms of regional integration and discontinuity. As with the divergent interpretations and intellectual appropriations of microhistory, it seems particularly difficult today to agree on an unequivocal definition of the potentially immense field of global history, even more so if one seeks to identify a common set of methods.Footnote 10 It is therefore hardly surprising that “global microhistory” can sometimes refer to travel biographies, sometimes to the in-depth examination of past connections and processes of transformation of objects or things, and sometimes to the dense description of situations and sites of far-reaching economic, political, or normative interactions. These studies nonetheless have several points in common, including the predilection for circulation and mobility over a period ranging from the “first globalization” of the fifteenth century to the decline of the European colonial empires, consideration of non-European realities, and an approach focused on situations or interactions rather than on events or individuals taken in isolation.Footnote 11
From this point of view, the proposed marriage between global history and microhistory does not seem surprising, nor, to be frank, particularly novel. Indeed, the Annales published the banns back in 2001, exploring the conditions in which global history might be made compatible with a microanalysis attentive to the social experiences linked to the emergence and establishment of connections and systems of circulation.Footnote 12 Elsewhere, too, a good deal of scholarship has associated—most often implicitly—the methods and questionnaires of microhistory with those of global history in its many variations, without necessarily bearing the “global microhistory” label. This is true of connected history, which in some of its recent works takes up the field of objects specific to global history—diasporas, circulations, contact situations—but endeavors to capture them “at ground level,” with the tools of microanalysis and a concern to replace an explanatory approach with an interpretative method better able to capture the motives of all the actors involved.Footnote 13
These hybrid histories, which readily “move from the details to the whole”Footnote 14—in other words, which alternate between vast panoramas and meticulous descriptions of small arenas of action—have tended to focus on the itineraries and networks of travelers, explorers, diplomats, merchants, sailors, missionaries, and soldiers of the early modern period, and to confine the inquiry to the conditions of these protagonists’ more or less violent contact with non-European actors.Footnote 15 They also concern the travel of goods and resources: porcelain, coral, diamonds, sugar, cotton, indigo, cochineal, and so on,Footnote 16 and include the biographies of “exotic” animals brought to Europe, in studies at the intersection of the history of science, intellectual history, and economic history.Footnote 17 Of course, the history of humans, that of animals, and that of things do not engage the same considerations, the same methods of investigation, or, most importantly, the same types of sources. Few still imagine, however, that one can go without the other; what would a history of a journey to India be, for example, without mention of the shipworm or the currents? Attesting to material connections, or at least to exchanges and circulations of beings and objects, inevitably questions the cartographies of “globalization” and hence the conditions of possibility and felicity for the travels and acclimations that contribute to the world’s transformations.
“Global Microhistory” and the Need for Reflexivity
As the literature stands today, “global microhistory” seems to refer not so much to a field that promotes original methods as to a form of intellectual convergence between “relational” and “interactionist” approaches to history—from shared history to connected history to histoire croisée.Footnote 18 This convergence is not based on similar research protocols or agendas, but rather on a common library of methodological references and critical reflections on the more or less reasoned uses of comparison in history and the social sciences.Footnote 19 In this respect, the term “microhistory,” weighted with the adjective “global,” does not necessarily entail a methodological repudiation; it can retain its full reflexive power so long as it strives to reveal how things are done, the making of sources and contexts—aspects sometimes neglected by a global history that, in its macrohistorical or synthetic variants, seeks to capture all things from an overarching position.Footnote 20 The microhistorical approach also implies a form of generalization that is never given at the outset, neither by the scale of analysis nor by structures or variables that are listed or defined a priori. It therefore questions the definition and ambitions of a global history that tends to set out in advance the entities that serve as a backdrop for its narratives.Footnote 21
It is striking how quickly the use of the term “global microhistory” was accompanied by warnings about the historiographical misunderstandings replete in a label as enticing as it is polysemic.Footnote 22 From the outset, in fact, the term’s vagueness and seemingly oxymoronic character prompted efforts to recall the distinct interpretations of microhistory cultivated in different academic contexts, from its Italian matrix (microstoria) and its French and German modulations (micro-analyse, Alltagsgeschichte) to its English-language reception.Footnote 23 As such, the relative vogue for global microhistory is currently fostering wider dissemination of microhistorical methods, from the first generation of Italian authors to the recent issues of the journal Quaderni storici.Footnote 24 While references to microhistory sometimes remain instrumental, if not cosmetic, centered on a few big names more or less aptly associated with this approach, the term “global microhistory” can contribute positively to a more careful rereading of microhistorical studies, far from the lazy caricatures that see them as simple monographs or biographical case studies. Consequently, it is gradually being accepted that microhistory corresponds less to a set of themes than to a family of methods geared toward experimentation—whether these involve delineating the object observed under the magnifying glass, challenging the major explanatory paradigms, close dialogue with the social sciences, narrative inventiveness, attention to the production of categories and social contexts, or reflexivity as to analytical focal points.Footnote 25
The “global” attached to microhistory therefore seems to open up an enterprise of clarification, not only of the intellectual foundations of the microhistorical undertaking but also of the multiple ways it is received. This deserves to be properly appreciated at a time when some researchers, apparently hostile on principle to what they see as nothing more than parochial monographs and narrow specializations, now swear by the golden calf of big data.Footnote 26 To remain locked in the rhetoric of the size of objects or issues, and to seek at all costs and despite all evidence to the contrary to reduce the microhistorical approach to an ancillary science of details or hidden recesses, is to betray the spirit of a historiographical project that has in fact explained a great deal about its intentions and amply demonstrated both its macrosociological potential and its capacity to contribute to anthropological inquiry.Footnote 27 It is also to pass up the opportunity of giving global history an epistemological framework (oriented toward the social sciences) and thematic coherence (concerning the social divergences in the process of “globalization”) —and this at a time when global history itself is questioning, belatedly but lucidly, the type of irenic and disembodied descriptions it has been known to engender.Footnote 28 Moreover, it is not always easy to take British and American global history at its word when it speaks to us of the world’s diversity; its bibliographies, all but exclusively made up of English-language references, often contradict in advance the polyglotism that it calls for.Footnote 29
The experimental nature of microhistory is precious precisely because it enables us to avoid linearities and teleologies, to point out detours and discontinuities, and to recount instances of trial and error and procrastination. Attention to the sources and the slow reading of documentation make it possible to acknowledge, in the narrative, the actors’ uncertainties and the often operative misunderstandings that result from the iterative, rather than random, nature of their interactions.Footnote 30 It is not hard to see the benefits to be had from this methodological position for a history of long-term exchanges involving a great many beings and entities and changing in proportion to the relationships they form. This certainly does not excuse “global microhistory” from reflection on its own protocols of generalization, without which it risks being nothing more than a reservoir of narratives. The danger remains of a division of historical work between specialized researchers documenting aspects of the past in an in-depth (and more or less isolated) manner on the one hand, and the architects of grand syntheses on the other. The idea of increasing the level of generality by colligating cases, that is, by aggregating empirical research results, makes little sense when dealing with a field of study that covers a potentially infinite number of situations. The oft-invoked notion of the “exceptional normal” first put forward by Edoardo Grendi only holds when conceived of as a gateway to social regularities whose overall logic must be pieced together. The “exceptional normal” is not an instance of pure singularity, since it appears in the archives as a discrepancy in a series.Footnote 31 And it is precisely the principle of regularity in this series that provides the outline of the relevant context—a context that must be set out in order to chart a range of action made of spaces of constraint, leeway, and choice. As such, recourse to the “biographical” level cannot be confined to blithely highlighting individuals’ agency. To escape a conception of individuality that overemphasizes its present-day meanings, “global microhistory” must serve as a tool with which to test, again and again, the necessarily labile relationships between collective norms and particular behaviors.Footnote 32
“Following”: A Multi-Sited Approach to Social Contexts
One of the paradigms that structure most studies classified as “global microhistory” is that of following beings, things, objects, disputes, and even emotions outside a strictly European setting—with the understanding that the definitions of this setting are themselves evolutionary and polysemic.Footnote 33 The heuristic presuppositions of this approach are numerous. Itineraries and trajectories are viewed in terms of their power to reveal networks, relationships, and contacts; these attested connections preclude an a priori judgment regarding the relevance of scales (of analysis, of comparison, or of a historical phenomenon). In other words, mobilities, circulations, and travel invite us to study the intersection of contexts, to carry out productive processes of translation on a variety of sources, whose conditions of emergence and layered meanings must be elucidated. Obviously, the documentation is not an immediately clear and accessible material, a set of raw and transparent data that would allow all the points of itineraries to be connected in a straight line; it undergoes the selection and construction associated with historical inquiry.Footnote 34 Yet it is precisely this emphasis on the source, on the search for clues and traces within what may be highly heterogeneous sets of documents, that presents a pressing challenge to an overarching global history that allegedly stays well away from the archives and, if so, is rightly accused of simply compiling second-hand sources.Footnote 35 In contrast, real “global microhistory” entails using documents of different kinds, making it possible to identify the variety of sources and resources available to historians in the multiple spaces they observe and study (situations of departure and arrival, places of transit, institutions of political, judicial, or diplomatic arbitration, etc.). It is consequently worth reflecting on which types of sources are encountered according to the sites under scrutiny, whether they entail an abundance or a dearth of documentary material.Footnote 36
Following beings, things, and ideas is a proven method of the microhistorical approach. Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni saw names as a kind of “Ariadne’s thread” that could guide researchers across multiple archival collections.Footnote 37 This process of tracking down names or things in their various holding places, facilitated in part today by the digitization of documents, has strong methodological affinities with the “multi-sited ethnography” promoted in the mid-1990s by the anthropologist George Marcus.Footnote 38 Consideration of the “global” is understood here in two ways: not only in the sense of a “multidimensional” history that takes account of “society as a whole,”Footnote 39 but above all as an invitation to follow right to the end each of the paths that the actors and “actants” traveled—whether as a consequence of their own movement or under the effect of ebbs and flows that trace out restrictive courses of action. The technique of “following” does not presuppose a homogeneous world, populated with fixed, immutable entities and regulated by stabilized metrologies. On the contrary, it reveals the fragmentation and multiplicity of contexts, shot through with asymmetries, diffracted within the documentation by differential enunciative skills and unevenly distributed access to information. “Multi-siting” the analysis therefore does not mean standardizing the reality that serves as its reference, even if it is possible, in the course of the inquiry, to bring to light continuums, forms of commonplace or intermixture that call into question not necessarily the specificity of the contexts, but at least the premise of their absolute singularity.Footnote 40
This process also enables an interactive analysis of borders (political, linguistic, religious) apt to do justice to the thousand ways in which they are conceived of and practiced, crossed or circumvented. Barring a willingness to seriously violate the lived world of historical agents, that is, to forgo identifying the indigenous categories that organize their apprehension of the world, “global microhistory” cannot look to “framing data” foreign to its documentation to carry out its “contextualizations.”Footnote 41 Whatever the scale of the connection, it is important to disclose, as closely as possible to the social trajectories that are traced, the languages, sources, and categories encountered, just as it proves necessary to make the researcher’s translation operations visible in the body of the narrative itself. Following an actor or object may well lead historians to investigate situations unfamiliar to them, that is, poorly documented and rarely mentioned in the same size type as those usually found in narratives of public history.Footnote 42 “Global microhistory” does not escape one of the suspicions generally associated with the comparative ambition, namely that it is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve equal mastery of the different fields being compared.Footnote 43 Yet beyond the question of researchers’ linguistic and philological skills, knowledge of the “followed” being or thing makes it possible to give all the documentation collected a signification distinct from that ascribed to it in the comparative project: here it is the relationship between the sources that forms a space of meaning. Moreover, there is nothing to prevent “global microhistory” from being written by several authors together. As with global history, collaborative writing is worth venturing, not only to bring connections and relevant comparisons from the past back into the narrative, but also to link disciplinary specialties, skills, and questionnaires.Footnote 44
Questioning the Making of Distance
Finally, following beings or things from place to place forces us to think seriously about the nature of connections and distances, and thereby leads us to consider itineraries and contact situations as low-altitude observation points that test the very definition of the global and the local.Footnote 45 “Global microhistory” can thus gain from getting the measure of distances rather than hypostasizing them. First of all, this involves sociologically characterizing the awareness of distance guiding the actors’ behavior and, proceeding at the same cautious pace as they did, recognizing as an integral part of the experience of far-off places their uncertainties and doubts about how to get to and move through them.Footnote 46 Second, it involves taking into account the environmental and topographic constraints that establish not only borders or obligatory routes, but also dislocations or ruptures, considering the history of the production of places before making them the places of history.Footnote 47 The local is neither the facsimile nor the synonym of the micro scale (the street, the neighborhood, the village, etc.), but the sum of spatialized interactions and relations that cannot be described in detail without noting the plurality of identifications, allegiances, and memberships.Footnote 48 Here, “global microhistory” takes advantage of reflections on “translocality” or “transregionality,” which coincide in many respects—particularly the histories of kinship, social groups, or diasporas—with the “multi-sited” approach.Footnote 49
One of the remaining questions, however, concerns the use of this approach for periods before the early modern period, for which documentary resources are rarer or subject to specific serial forms of inscription. If globality is not the world but a conventional scale to be pushed back and reworked, if global history itself aspires to be an approach, not a field of objects, nothing precludes the production of “global microhistories” of antiquity or the Middle Ages.Footnote 50 It would, of course, be absurd to deny the intensification of wider-scale interrelationships documented from the fifteenth century on, which partly explains why “global microhistory” is primarily a matter for early modernists. Yet this tropism toward the early modern and modern periods speaks more to a state of documentation than a peculiarity of method due to the change of scale.
It therefore seems possible and even desirable to produce a choral narrative of the (multi-)sited experiences of these distances, rather than to think of the divergences between distant societies through comparison or analogy. To put it another way, cultural, legal, or economic divergence is not necessarily indexed to geographic or linguistic distance.Footnote 51 And yet there are indeed distance effects that influenced actors’ expectations and conduct. Here again, anachronism lies in wait for anyone who transfers their instinctive idea of religious or cultural difference to situations of commercial, diplomatic, or judicial exchange regulated by specific metrologies—which are not to be speculated on, but detailed. This relative scale of distances proves decisive, if only to avoid postulating the exceptional character of certain circulation areas which, while they have served as laboratories for the study of large-scale connections, are too often treated as historiographical isolates (the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean of the early modern period, or the Caribbean of the “revolutionary Atlantic,” for example). The situations of intercultural dispute arbitration characteristic of long-distance trading networks—which reflect the interplay of sovereign justice as much as the implementation of flexible mechanisms for the control and sanction of agents and commissioners—appear, as such, as valuable instances for the calibration of relevant distances.Footnote 52 Consequently, the commensurability of entities and experiences is no longer a matter of theory, but of the field of objects. It once again becomes an open question for research, which calls for a fine-grained sociology of the measurement and translation devices and instruments that the actors used over the course of their interactions.Footnote 53
Distance is not just a geographic problem. First of all, it questions the representativeness of the cases studied, which invites us to think about the recurrence of connections or the apparent anomaly of their existence. It prompts reflection on the length of focus required to keep the historical problem relevant: halfway between the use of categories too general for analysis and a lack of thresholds, boundaries, or differences that justify the comparison.Footnote 54 Finally, distance has a temporal dimension: in contrast to the grand teleological narratives of “modernization” or “globalization,” “global microhistory” gains from taking a close interest in disconnection, the more or less sudden severing of links which also influences the way we consider the relevance of an area and a chronological scale for making comparisons.Footnote 55 Here, a dialogue can be established between the early modern and preceding periods, as can the promise of collective research undertaken in conjunction with anthropology and archaeology.
From this perspective, where does the process of comparison fit in? Should it precede or stem from the identification of connections? Does it fall within the reflexive privilege of the historian or the practical competence of the actor? How can one reintroduce the study of changes (socioeconomic and cultural) to the analysis of connections that are often revealed synchronically? How can one narrate the dispersion and asymmetry of the sources and sites of action without giving in to the temptation of hastily reconstructing a grand narrative of the “birth of the modern world” or its “Westernization”? Because the use of “global microhistory” is always a kind of experiment, it carries with it its share of questions and challenges. It is never easy to answer or meet them, but it is always beneficial to state them clearly. This is, no doubt, the precondition for “global microhistory” to become not just a label, but a true paradigm.
