Frail Frontiers?*

Abstract

The terms ‘microhistory’ and ‘global history’ have been the source of a deal of muddle: ‘micro’ and ‘global’, which originally indicated clear-cut historiographic domains, soon became umbrellas under which many different procedures took refuge. Their original intention was not, in fact, to talk exclusively, in the first case, about small things and in the second about broad areas, the first only about local history and the second about the history of spatially distant events. This simplistic view has obscured much of the innovatory momentum which they initially produced. To start talking now about global microhistory runs the risk of creating further misunderstanding; risks, in fact, appearing to promote a marriage between different people who do not know each other that well and have different objectives, even if enjoying a degree of consanguinity. Which is why I would like to put forward a few suggestions aimed at clarifying aims, affinities and divergencies. Both microhistory and global history emerged at the height of the crisis, even trauma, of the end of a bipolar world order, and significantly expressed two distinct choices of field: microhistory, which came into being on the threshold of the 1980s, bounced in a confrontational manner off a historiographical, and more generally off a social sciences mindset which followed the rather rigid and mechanical models of a relatively stable world governed by an equilibrium between two superpowers, proposing a reading of the past and of the present, alert to the first significant signs of political, social, even cultural crisis that was becoming ever more apparent. It was the product, then, of a widespread feeling that had not yet fully taken hold of the social sciences, and still less of academic historical practice. What it promoted was a reduced-scale focus on the innards of historical phenomena, reading through a microscope to identify significant details not immediately evident on the surface, in order to find out how, by looking closely at specific cases, events, places, objects and individuals, one could come up with general questions that might nonetheless have different and not necessarily generalizable answers: history therefore as a science of general questions and their resulting specific answers, not generated mechanically but varying according to the usages, institutions, actions and personal interpretations of individual human beings. It is not therefore the ‘microness’ of the phenomenon studied that characterizes microhistory, but its habit of reading microscopically in order to highlight facts and issues of relevance: the close examination of a cardinal’s letter concerning Galileo or Piero della Francesca’s depiction of the Flagellation of Christ, no less than events in a small village or a circumscribed area, the vicissitudes of a returning soldier or the behaviour of a group of rebels.1 Global history, on the other hand, arose as a research model particularly from the 1990s onwards, after the end of the bipolar world, in a new world order characterized by uncertainty and unpredictability, one certainly interconnected and sensitive to economic and financial variations and in thrall to burgeoning new information technologies, but centred around a multiplicity of new dominant sub-imperial centres, as uncontrollable as they were unpredictable in their actions, at the same time as by a plethora of conflicts, populations in movement, different political organizations, resistance movements, cultural influences, and social structures increasingly polarized between rich and poor, that fomented new nationalisms, new fragmentation, new discriminations. This was a globalization without political control, disorganized, confrontational and dangerous. But given that global history and microhistory are both nowadays invoked in an inconsistent and confused manner, it seems to me that it would be a useful exercise to look at the differences between them in the context of a few fundamental themes: space, time, sources, rationality and political characteristics. First of all we need to be clear that while global history has been tagged with, or subsumed, any number of definitions and nuances (histoire croisée, ‘entangled’ history, transnational history, world history, connected history, et cetera),2 it has developed two main and distinct approaches: the first is the study of temporally and spatially extended phenomena, emphasizing the connections between apparently different situations, generally adopting a Eurocentric perspective but denying any centrality to the role of the nation state. This approach would include works dealing, for example, with debates over different forms of development and the so-called ‘great divergence’,3 or the key relevance of ideas or materials that unite large parts of the world4 or trading (and other) relations between widely distant economies.5 The second approach looks rather at the networks connecting diverse cultures and practices.6 The first method is not exactly new (one might cite comparative history, or transnational studies of particular products, such as sugar, the potato or cod);7 nonetheless it is this stream that is most often referred to as global history, among other things because it has had the merit of dispatching a host of scholars about the globe to study distant countries, busying themselves in the archives and studying the languages of parts of the world that had rarely engaged the attention of western historians. The second, which is perhaps more accurately defined as ‘connected history’, harks back to the 1960s ‘total history’ of the Annales school, which actually has much in common with microhistory. My own scepticism concerns particularly the first tendency, and that is what I will be talking about here. For global history practitioners, space has generally speaking meant three things: it is extended and often refers to relations operating between connected but wide-apart areas; it suggests that political borders are weak compared with the strength of pertinent economic and cultural relations; and it centres on connections that outstrip political areas defined on the basis of nation-state characteristics, although this aspect is frequently overlooked because ‘wide-apart’ generally refers to European nations (England in particular) and certain areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where the nation state developed along different lines. Nonetheless, a general reluctance to allow comparative history of states defined by political borders is par for the course. Its spaces are wholly geographic and quantitative and not defined by states, nations or by a centre. Microhistory is more concerned with the symbolic significance of space as a cultural datum: it concentrates therefore on a precise point, but one which may be invested with different characteristics by the different players involved, and be defined not only by its geographical situation but by the significance attached to a place and a given situation that may be contained or determined by a broad range of connections and thus linked to other, widely distributed spaces. It seems to me to be less characterized by spatial dimensions than by the network of meanings and interrelations set up by the particular phenomenon being studied, and reads places as ever-evolving cultural and social constructions.8 Even in the context of the ongoing debate about globalization, time, for global history, is generally viewed in a historicist perspective as homogenous and concerned with evolving reality, without allowing a relevance for different temporalities that might come together in a single moment. An example would again be Kenneth Pomeranz’s book, where time periods are connected to a notion of development and modernization as a general model of interpretation. It is also true that the majority of studies that would come under the heading ‘global’ concentrate on the last three centuries, when the growth of western capitalism was the dominant narrative. The result is an inadvertently teleological and European/US-centred perspective, even while conceding some sort of role to the rest of the world. Causality, too, generally evolves in a linear fashion and recent events are of greater relevance in identifying the causes of what has happened, in so far as, with a linear chronology, the mere succession of events implicitly assumes a causal character and even the idea of steady progress towards a more developed and global world. Microhistory finds more relevance in the disjunctions of time and ‘models of historicity’: ‘chronologically simultaneous achievements should be expected to occupy different places on their respective time curves … They fall into the same period but differ in age … At a given historical moment, then, we are confronted with numbers of events which, because of their location in different areas, are simultaneous only in a formal sense’.9 Differential temporalities are, in fact — according to Siegfried Kracauer — of central concern in investigating issues that arise in economic, cultural and social situations that meet or clash, often through significantly divergent and non-communicating readings, giving rise to reciprocal influences that are interpreted or variously assimilated. Microhistory, then, adopts a vision of time in which remote or recent causes intermingle in unpredictable ways, akin to the time frames of dreams which mingle events in a non-linear fashion. One might cite the role of religions, whose influence on today’s world is produced by a mixture of remote and recent pasts, over which men’s beliefs have progressively become detached from their theological origins, leaving, nonetheless, a residue of lasting unconscious behaviours,10 or alternatively how the evolution of concepts and languages and their meanings carry with them a distant past but also their mutations in different contexts.11 The approaches to sources of global history and of microhistory are very different. Global research tends perforce to be based on secondary sources, for example on databases or local research carried out by others, in order to encompass huge areas and long stretches of time — sources produced in a number of different languages but already translated and homogenized. Global history is generally less familiar with archives and documentation that differ from those that western historiography has traditionally employed. Microhistory, by contrast, makes a key virtue of a considerably scaled-down reading of archival documentation and of all kinds of supplementary records actively sought out. Its minute focus involves reading documents beyond the edge of the page, delving beneath their explicit content to elicit all the clues hidden in the language used, in indirect suggestions, or involuntary implications. The concept of ‘the exceptional normal’ means exactly highlighting what the unexpected and the unusual, what unmediated and unconsciously transmitted information, can tell us.12 There is also another aspect, which we might call political, that distinguishes the two approaches. Global history is currently on the crest of the wave: it is rewarded with funding and university chairs in countries that have hitherto long practised a Eurocentric reading of the world. Now that the West has taken note of a fading of the role of the nation state in a world economically dominated by financial mechanisms and supranational powers that evade political oversight, it has begun to retrospectively criticize its own Eurocentrism, because the Other has burst in a powerful if chaotic fashion onto the world stage. Thus, while the former colonial and capitalist powers promote a novel attention towards those parts of the world long regarded as peripheral and effectively without history, some of those same countries (China, India) are asserting their own central role, giving rise to new perspectives emerging from the ex-colonial ‘new’ nation states of Asia and Africa, naturally concerned with the construction of new state realities. The earlier economic and political ascendancy of the West is being revived, in the hour of its decline, in historiographical form, still blithely promoting a European/US-centred ideology: we have always been the best, and while there may be some point in studying why others have been less successful, even so it is our universities, our common language, our bibliography, our ‘America first’ or ‘Britain first’ that, if no longer ruling the world, still holds sway over historical studies, playing both parts in the drama — the losers and the winners, the guilty of Eurocentrism and the reformers of Eurocentrism — with significant ideological consequences. Even postcolonial historiography is largely financed and manufactured in American and other western universities.13 In short, we in the West are best at world domination, best at self-criticism, and will soon be the best at producing a new and of global capitalism of its more Eurocentric and The a of a to its even in a world — a political and aspect that I find and by no means of the that have dominated a globalization that has been over the last but has begun to and with the political and economic to What is Global is not to that global history is another to the Other into a on our in our we that was global was not the of but the on most of The is that need of global that with as well as the and not the of makes to the same suggests that we should this much global history with a degree of history is at the of a number of … it is of as more than a by American academic to the of history and to it by an and I to now on two and fundamental differences between global history and microhistory. The social sciences have been much with in the of it is to from past and facts a set of that individual and in particular has long been concerned with differences in the of in different nonetheless with a reading that for in a in while the of the in with this how is in different ways, common up a range of choices and The same has even more on recent economic on the of a broad of behaviour among human such as to allow the of general and the of has been into crisis by the of which different forms according to places, and the of information to or and of economic or the behaviour of and has become central to the and of economic It a still in this have any of the of historical has to be to of the It seems to me that global history, with its historicist has been particularly simplistic the individual into the general to be a history, how things all often the causal that Microhistory has to its to the debate on rationality and not only at the individual the one of its particular with some significant giving a to the too, their role, their and their second, concerns when and where one can in for that the risk of other than to the of facts inconsistent with the general is that of a linear historicist idea of all the or that in the world, as in a where already know the that the general and the particular do not necessarily meet at some an of the of the world and the of and the multiplicity of time frames would to the In we could a to be can be from its and we certainly have to that into but microhistory to what more general questions are by the particular facts we study under the What from the vision in the concepts by the social sciences and social What can we of the terms such as even by delving What new questions are by such — general which will elicit different but all generated by an far as microhistory is then, history is a of general questions and To an example of — the — would have microhistory, be at a human an to its ‘the that this is the only to and human and to for and by an social science history, Annales models and economic history’, history that with the sources rather than with the it not have been had actually at the research and the produced by The general is in fact the point and not the of our and it is that criticize while them to new issues and new Microhistory, then, out to procedures that can a given general to a of in different under a of procedures that can new and new questions that a of the of an historicist vision of of the relevance of the general but each one of with personal in own set the of the and — a second example — the relevance of the between and in the general but — — in different ways, as I studying a particular local This is actually a of close to that in the of by and in the by the debate on that the of a that it to global history and globalization are two very different things: what was being to was the of a Eurocentric reading of the world in of studying the of of reciprocal influences, but at the same time of and — to to political and cultural situations as that beyond a focus on individual nation states with a view to how borders were being most by cultural and economic This was not a new idea from the point of view of but it a degree of a historiography that had or at what was was to beyond the of history viewed as generated by the of individual and of this perspective was the idea of to for of documentation by as far as an to all of the being But it not to me that global history, as a of to be more alert to the of the world as a to be less in which the role of nation states is to the to be as a new of so much so much so many it be to many study centres to promote such a Nonetheless, there is a for in so far as as in the the of globalization have not been even in an interconnected an on economic and of the of political influence over global phenomena, and therefore of the role of nation states as long as they to runs the risk of global history with economic had already in between and financial and geographical areas, an and far greater than those of the state and its in their to For all that, the nation now as in the to a key role in the of economic according to in the capitalism was to only when it with the and this only in western in a which the European states towards colonial towards a of capitalism and towards for and the still greater of even while the state was more and more its to actually capitalism particularly its financial and the resulting from has and we have an concern with the relations between states and supranational economic has meant that it has become progressively and beyond the of and to and to from the political of states, or from any need for for example, has a reading of this based on and capitalism and to in the state from to to to the even to the countries of the It seems to me that the political and beyond economic and that we also need to on from the of the role of states, to which the from and through to such in focus the global of the of states with one another while at the same time together by through a of The of in the of of political and which over the two has in the last in the of a financial globalization that has the players to the who have to areas (and their and and their disjunctions and Nonetheless, it our attention that, now as much as to and the nation states, even in their of crisis, still a far from But are issues that microhistory can In a transnational world the is to identify not only the but the specific produced in political state and local I would like to close with a general I do not it to be useful to a fundamental between global history and microhistory. I it is to concentrate on the very different research approaches have and can still to the of historical Microhistory a method of through a of how new perspectives and new can which global history has a to for in how things because it already what to the period being studied, and therefore to that are there under its that their from global history are it in the second I referred to at the as a central the relations between people to deal with distant cultures over long and this to be global history, when they are in fact a of historiography very to What we have is a sort of — many o

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