Global History and Microhistory: A Past and Present Supplement

Now published:

Global History and Microhistory

Global history is not in crisis, but it certainly is a family at war with itself. In part, this has something to do with the ragtag assemblage of tribes that have made a home for themselves, willingly or not, under the big tent of global history. In recent years, serious concerns have been raised about various challenges facing the fi eld, for example, the fate of place-based research, the ability to explain change over time, its relationship to sources and theoretical frameworks, and its record on Eurocentrism. Even so, the field has become a lightning rod for a more general set of issues in historical writing such as how we conceive of space, how we navigate between different contexts and what it means to shift scales in historical analysis. These same questions have also been at the heart of a much older tradition of historical practice, namely the various expressions of microhistory that emerged from the 1980s onwards. Global History and Microhistory brings these two fields together in a purposeful way.

How, therefore, might we usefully combine a distinct practice and method of historical writing such as microhistory with a field of historical analysis such as global history? Or, put in another way, what is the analytical work required of bringing these two fi elds together? How does combining global and microhistory oblige us to revise the questions we ask, the sources we use and the methods we employ? These are questions that are relevant to all kinds of historians, because they are essentially about issues of evidence, interpretation and generalization. They are not the preserve of scholars working on global canvasses. Taken together, the contributions in this volume showcase a group of early modern historians thinking about a similar set of methodological problems across a rather diverse array of historical subjects:

• the role of the social sciences in historical writing (De Vries);
• the divergences between global history and microhistory (Levi);
• the formative instances of trade and economic exchange in the Pacific world (Berg);
• the concentrated nodes of life in imperial cities (Bertrand);
• the practices of transcontinental diplomacy in the shadow of the Portuguese empire (Biedermann);
• the jurisdictional pluralism of the Western Mediterranean (Calafat);
• the dynamic hubs of Mediterranean information networks (de Vivo);
• the practical and scientific sites of knowledge-making and production (Easterby-Smith);
• the processes of mobility and identification that connected the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds (Ghobrial);
• the visual and material lattices of art and costume-books (Riello);
• the accumulated traditions and practices of dynasties (Duindam);
• and the connected singularities of labour in the early modern world (De Vito).

Whether it is global historians looking at small spaces for the first time, or microhistorians pushing their work into new spatial contexts, the contributions seek to unsettle, to surprise, and to oblige us to revise our traditional views of both these subjects and the historical craft itself.

This issue is now available as an Open Access publication. See more here https://academic.oup.com/past/issue/242/Supplement_14