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The terms ‘microhistory’ and ‘global history’ have been the source of a deal
of muddle: ‘micro’ and ‘global’, which originally indicated clear-cut his-
toriographic domains, soon became umbrellas under which many differ-
ent 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 historio-
graphical, 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 micro-
scope 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

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638578).

Past and Present (2019), Supplement 14 ß The Past and Present Society
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38 PAST AND PRESENT SUPPLEMENT 14

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

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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 inter-
connected 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 unpre-
dictable in their actions, at the same time as by a plethora of conflicts, popu-
lations 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 discrim-
inations. 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 charac-
teristics. 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, empha-
sizing 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,

1
I am referring of course to the works published in the Turin publisher Einaudi’s 1980s
‘Microstorie’ series, which initiated this approach. The series contained books by Carlo
Ginzburg, Piero Redondi, Franco Ramella, Alain Boureau, Edoardo Grendi, myself and
others, as well as translations of works by Natalie Zemon Davis and Edward P.
Thompson. In the same period, the journal Quaderni Storici published numerous micro-
historical articles by Edoardo Grendi, Carlo Poni and others.
2
See Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton, 2016); Jeremy Adelman, What
is Global History Now?, 5https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-
it-had-its-moment4, 2 March 2017 (accessed 10 June 2019).
 FRAIL FRONTIERS? 39

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 econ-
omies.5 The second approach looks rather at the networks connecting diverse

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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.

I
SPACE
For global history practitioners, space has generally speaking meant three
things: it is extended and often refers to relations operating between con-
nected but wide-apart areas; it suggests that political borders are weak com-
pared 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 par-
ticular) and certain areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where the nation

3
Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture and
the World Economy, 1400 to the Present (New York, 1999); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great
Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton,
2000).
4
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014).
5
See, for example, Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World: Global
Connections and Comparisons, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004); Maxine Berg, Luxury and
Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2005).
6
For example, John-Paul A. Ghobrial, ‘The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of
Global Microhistory’, Past and Present, no. 222 (Feb. 2014); Romain Bertrand, L’histoire
à parts égales: récits d’une rencontre Orient-Occident (XVI e–XVII e siècle) (Paris, 2011).
7
Sydney Wilfred Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New
York, 1985); Redcliffe Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato
(Cambridge, 1985); Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the
World (New York and London, 1997).
40 PAST AND PRESENT SUPPLEMENT 14

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

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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 character-
istics by the different players involved, and be defined not only by its geo-
graphical situation but by the significance attached to a place and a given
situation that may be contained or determined by a broad range of connec-
tions 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

II
TIME
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 inter-
pretation. 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 inadvert-
ently teleological and European/US-centred perspective, even while conced-
ing 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

8
See Angelo Torre, Luoghi: La produzione di località in età moderna e contemporanea
(Rome, 2011); Angelo Torre, ‘Micro/macro: local/global? El problema de la localidad
en una historia specializada’, Historia Critica, lxix (2018), 37–67. I am in agreement here
with Christian De Vito, ‘History Without Scale: The Micro-Spatial Perspective’, in this
volume.
 FRAIL FRONTIERS? 41

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

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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 influ-
ences 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 theo-
logical origins, leaving, nonetheless, a residue of lasting unconscious behav-
iours,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

III
SOURCES
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 invol-
untary implications. The concept of ‘the exceptional normal’ means exactly

9
Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Time and History’, in History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of
History, vi, (1966), 68.
10
Giovanni Levi, ‘Fur eine politische Anthropologie der katolischen Staaten des
Mittelmeerraums’ in Franck Hofmann and Markus Messling (eds.), Fluchtpunkt: Das
Mittelmeer und die europaische Krise (Berlin, 2017), 141–56.
11
Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and
Theory, viii (1969); Carlo Ginzburg, Nondimanco: Machiavelli, Pascal (Milano, 2018).
42 PAST AND PRESENT SUPPLEMENT 14

highlighting what the unexpected and the unusual, what unmediated and
unconsciously transmitted information, can tell us.12

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IV
POLITICS
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 per-
spectives 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 historiog-
raphy 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 full-throated exaltation of

12
Edoardo Grendi, ‘Microanalisi e storia sociale’, Quaderni Storici, xii (1977), 506–20; and
Edoardo Grendi, ‘Ripensare la microstoria’, Quaderni Storici, xxix (1994), 539–49;
Simona Cerutti and Isabelle Grangaud, ‘Sources and Contextualizations: Comparing
Eighteenth-Century North Africa and Western European Institutions’, Comparative
Studies in Society and History, lix (2017), 5–33.
13
See Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London and New York,
2013); and the debate with Partha Chatterjee in Rosie Warren (ed.), The Debate on
Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London and New York, 2017).
 FRAIL FRONTIERS? 43

global capitalism cleansed of its more shameful Eurocentric and nationalistic

aspects. The implicit ideology harbours a strong dose of a culture wanting to
maintain its supremacy even in a globalized world — a political and stand-

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ardizing aspect that I find worrying, and by no means free of the vested
interests that have dominated a globalization that has supposedly been tri-
umphant over the last thirty years but has begun to show weaknesses and
limits with the latest political and economic crises. According to Jeremy
Adelman’s, What is Global History Now?, ‘it is hard not to conclude that
global history is another Anglospheric invention to integrate the Other into
a cosmopolitan narrative on our terms, in our tongues’ unless we remember
that ‘what was global was not the object of study, but the emphasis on con-
nections, scale and, most of all, integration’. The Adelman opinion is that ‘we
need narratives of global life that reckon with disintegration as well as inte-
gration, the costs and not just the bounty of interdependence’.14 Sanjay
Subrahmanyam makes reference to the same danger: he suggests that we
should treat this much argued-over global history with a degree of caution:
‘Global history is at the centre of a number of controversies . . . it is sometimes
thought of as nothing more than a desire by American academic imperialism
to destroy the good old (European) tradition of national history and to re-
place it by an imperial and imperialist perspective’.15

V
THE ISSUE OF RATIONALITY
I want to touch now on two ulterior and fundamental differences between
global history and microhistory. The social sciences have lately been much
occupied with questioning rationality, in the sense of questioning whether it
is possible to extract from past and present facts a set of laws that determine
individual and collective behaviour. Social anthropology in particular has
long been concerned with differences in the deployment of reason in different
societies, nonetheless persisting with a functionalist reading that looked for
explanations in a difference in contexts while assuming the internal homo-
geneity of the societies examined. Fredrik Barth, in his Balinese Worlds, taking
issue with Clifford Geertz, criticized this simplification, showing how within
every society reason is employed in different ways, alongside established

14
Adelman, What is Global History Now?, 15.
15
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, On the Origins of Global History,5http://www.openedition.org/
65404, trans. Liz Libbrecht, 25. I quote from the English translation but the original
paper was in French (Aux origines de l’histoire globale, Paris, 2014). The term (European)
was not in the French original. Why European? Was not a problem in American univer-
sities the separation between History and American History departments?
44 PAST AND PRESENT SUPPLEMENT 14

common norms, opening up a range of possible choices and behaviours.16

The same issue has weighed even more heavily on recent economic theory.
Economic theory, constructed on the assumption of a broad conformity of

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behaviour among human beings, such as to allow the formulation of general
theories and the forecasting of future conduct, has been thrown into crisis by
the relative unpredictability of psychological reactions, which take different
forms according to places, contexts, cultures, customs and the whims of
individuals. From differential information theories to Herbert Simon’s
‘bounded rationality’, L. J. Savage’s or Harvey Leibenstein’s uncertainty,
John Elster’s strict rationality, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s pro-
spect theory of economic behaviour, Amartya Sen’s or Albert Hirschman’s
moral philosophy, Richard Thaler’s behavioural analysis, the inhomogen-
eous behaviour of actual men and women has become central to the reinter-
pretation and reformulation of economic theories.17 It remains a work still
in progress.
On this issue, historians have lagged behind: any probing of the psychology
of historical protagonists has tended to be limited to banal rehearsals of the
obvious. It seems to me that global history, with its historicist realism, has
been particularly simplistic here: the individual disappears into the general
uniformity. While economics aims to be a forecasting discipline, history,
knowing how things turned out, all too often oversimplifies the causal
chain that got us there.
Microhistory has instead attempted to make its contribution to the debate
on rationality and not only at the individual level, making the issue one of its
particular concerns, with some significant results, giving a voice to the de-
feated too, evaluating their role, their alternative programmes and their rear-
guard resistance.

VI
GENERALIZATION
A second, crucial difference concerns when and where one can generalize in
history. Kracauer, for one, underlined that the risk of generalization, other
than leading to the suppression of concrete facts inconsistent with the gen-
eral storyline, is that of imposing a linear historicist idea of progress, muf-
fling all the disruptions, false starts, or incongruities that exist in the real
world, as in a detective story where you already know the culprit. He

16
Fredrik Barth, Balinese Worlds (Chicago, 1993), 163–71; Clifford Geertz, The
Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973).
17
‘Introduction’, in Louis-André Gérard-Varet and Jean-Claude Passeron (eds.), Le modèle
et l’enquête: Les usages du principe de rationalité dans les sciences sociales (Paris, 1995).
 FRAIL FRONTIERS? 45

maintained that the general and the particular do not necessarily meet at
some midpoint: an understanding of the inhomogeneous structure of the
intellectual world and the life experiences of men, and the multiplicity of

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overlapping time frames concerned, would seem to favour the ‘pari passu’
principle.18 In my view, we could go a little further; to be sure, nothing can
be separated from its content, and we certainly have to take that into ac-
count, but microhistory does prompt us to ask what more general questions
are suggested by the particular facts we study under the microscope. What
emerges from behind the too-general vision concealed in the concepts de-
ployed by the social sciences and social history? What can we understand of
the over-generic terms such as ‘working class’, ‘democracy’, ‘Catholicism’,
even ‘Baroque’, by delving deeper? What genuinely new questions are
evoked by such procedures? — general questions, which will elicit different
responses but all generated by an over-simplistic generalizing model. As far
as microhistory is concerned, then, history is a discipline of general ques-
tions and ‘local’ answers. To give an example of unwarranted generaliza-
tion: Jan de Vries — I’m sure he’ll excuse the irony — would have
microhistory, ‘broadly defined’, be ‘petites narratives at a human scale’,
‘lacking an agreed methodology to achieve its goals’, ‘the belief that this is
the only way to honour and recover human agency and to leave room for
contingency and subjectivity’, ‘motivated by an animus against social sci-
ence history, Annales School models and especially economic history’, ‘a
history that starts with the sources rather than with the problem’. Might it
not have been better had he actually looked at the research undertaken and
the results produced by microhistorians? The general is in fact the starting
point and not the endpoint of our researches, and it is precisely unwar-
ranted generalizations that microhistorians criticize while using them to
suggest new issues and new questions.19
Microhistory, then, sets out to create generative procedures that can use a
given general issue to test a multitude of possible outcomes, in different
contexts under a variety of conditions; procedures that can then suggest new
problems and new questions that propose a rereading of the initial unwar-
ranted generalizations of an insistently generalizing historicist vision of
history. Two examples: Freud’s discovery of the wide relevance of the
Oedipus complex (a general question, therefore); but each one of us deals
with his personal Oedipus complex in his own way (infinite responses,
then): quoting Freud, ‘Everyone must set himself the task of dominating

18
Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (New York, 1969), 135–71.
19
See Jan de Vries’s contribution to this volume, ‘Playing with Scales: The Global and the
Micro, the Macro and the Nano’.
46 PAST AND PRESENT SUPPLEMENT 14

the Oedipus complex’;20 and — a second example — the relevance of the

relationship between sellers and buyers in the modern land market (a gen-
eral question) but these relationships — kinship, land proximity, extraneity

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— determine prices in different ways, as I demonstrated myself studying a
particular local case.21
This is actually a way of proceeding remarkably close to that suggested in
the field of anthropology by Fredrik Barth,22 and in the philosophical field
by the debate on heterogenesis, that is, the dynamics of a system that allows
it to generate mutations.23

VII
DIVERGENCES
Of course, global history and globalization are two very different things: what
was being proposed to historians was the abandonment of a Eurocentric
reading of the world in favour of studying the ramification of interconnec-
tions, of reciprocal influences, but at the same time of conflicts and isolation-
ism — to try to read political and cultural situations as phenomena that
spread beyond a focus on individual nation states with a view to seeing
how borders were continually being transcended, most obviously by cultural
and economic exchanges. This was not a new idea from the point of view of
methodology, but it involved a degree of moral self-criticism regarding a
historiography that had excluded, or at least sidelined, non-western peoples:
what was required was to get beyond the reconstruction of history viewed as
generated by the internal processes of individual nations. Part and parcel of
this perspective was the idea of trying to compensate for inequalities of docu-
mentation by applying as far as possible an even-handed consideration to all
contextual aspects of the cases being studied. But it does not seem to me that
global history, as a collection of appeals to be more alert to the interconnect-
edness of the world as a whole, to be less Eurocentric, in which the role of
nation states is relegated to the background, really deserves to be trumpeted as
a new departure deserving of so much special attention, so much endowment,

20
Sigmund Freud, Drei Abhandlunghen zur Sexualtheorie (Wien and Leipzig, 1905 but, in
the 1920 last revision done by Freud, in an added footnote), 82.
21
Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane
(Chicago and London, 1988). Celebrated cases, on the other hand, of apparent micro-
history are, for example, Luis González y González, Pueblo en Vilo (Mexico DF, 1968)
which is in fact local history, while Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou (Paris, 1975),
is rather ‘history from below’, where the general problem too much ignored by the book is
the villagers’ Catharism, inducing them to accept death rather then deny their faith.
22
Fredrik Barth, Process and Form in Social Life (London, 1981), 14–104.
23
Enrico Castelli Gattinara, Strane alleanze (Milano, 2003), 57–80 and 145–56.
 FRAIL FRONTIERS? 47

so many extra professorial chairs. Wouldn’t it be sufficient to create many

study centres to promote such a perspective?
Nonetheless, here too there is a potential for misinterpretation in so far as

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today, as in the past, the effects of globalization have not been equally felt
everywhere, even in an interconnected world: an over-emphasis on economic
factors and underestimate of the issue of political influence over global phe-
nomena, and therefore of the role of nation states as long as they continue to
exist, runs the risk of making global history coterminous with economic
globalization. Fernand Braudel had already observed capitalism’s supreme
mobility in switching between investment sectors (between manufacturing
industries and financial speculation) and geographical areas, demonstrating
an agility and adaptability far greater than those of the state and its institu-
tions in their attempts to control it. For all that, the nation state, now as in the
past, continues to play a key role in the direction of economic development:
but, according to Braudel, in the modern era, capitalism was able to triumph
only when it identified with the state, and this occurred only in western
Europe. These elements combined in a potent mix which impelled the
European states towards colonial conquest, towards a concentration of cap-
italism and towards inter-state conflicts for supremacy and the still greater
concentration of capitalistic power, even while the state was more and more
clearly losing its capacity to actually control capitalism itself, particularly its
financial aspects, and the inequality resulting from them.24
Braudel’s position has subsequently required updating, and we have seen
an increased concern with the relations between states and supranational
economic phenomena: capitalism’s flexibility has meant that it has become
progressively de-territorialized and moved beyond the economy of produc-
tion and markets to finance itself and to free itself from the political control of
states, or indeed from any need for them. Giovanni Arrighi, for example, has
formulated a reading of this process based on market and production cycles,
whereby capitalism becomes cyclically financialized and lifts itself to ‘a higher
level in the trade stakes’, overriding state hegemonies, from Genoa to
Holland, to England, to the United States, even these days to the countries
of the Far East.25

24
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, iii, The Perspective of the
World (1979), trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley, 1992).
25
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (New York, 1994). Contrastingly, Thomas
Piketty’s bestselling Le capital au XXI e siècle (Paris, 2013), concludes with an improbable
global utopia: a vision of a union of states imposing an asset tax to reduce inequality and
put a brake on finance capital.
48 PAST AND PRESENT SUPPLEMENT 14

It seems to me that the political factor remains crucial, above and beyond
merely economic factors and that we also need to move on from the under-
estimation of the role of states, to which the tradition stretching from Marx

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and Weber through to Braudel gave such significance, keeping in focus the
global aspects of the scenario of states competing with one another while at
the same time bound together by horizontal ties through a variety of markets.
The concentration of power in the hands of blocks of political and business
interests which increased immeasurably over the previous two centuries has
slackened somewhat in the last fifty years in the face of a financial globaliza-
tion process that has left behind the players slowest to embrace the trend, who
have remained tied to fragmented territorial areas (and their fiscal systems,
monetary and welfare policies and their legal systems), accentuating disjunc-
tions and inequalities. Nonetheless, it cannot escape our attention that, now
as much as previously, fragmentation continues to occur and the nation
states, even in their moment of crisis, still play a far from negligible role.
But are these issues that microhistory can confront? In a transnational
world the problem is to identify not only the uniformities but the specific
answer produced in every political state and local situation.

VIII
CONCLUSION
I would like to close with a general observation: I do not believe it to be useful
to imagine a fundamental opposition between global history and microhis-
tory. I think it is essential, rather, to concentrate on the undoubtedly very
different contributions these research approaches have given, and can still
give, to the revitalization of historical studies. Microhistory provides a
method of seeing, through a reduction of scale, how new perspectives and
new explanations can arise, which global history has a tendency to take for
granted, having decided in advance how things work because it already knows
what happened subsequent to the period being studied, and therefore fails to
register surprising discoveries that are right there under its nose. Increasingly,
historians that take their cue from global history are applying it in the second
sense I referred to at the outset, retaining as a central theme the relations
between people having to deal with distant cultures over long distances, and
believing this to be global history, when they are in fact practising a type of
historiography very similar to microhistory.26 What we have is a sort of
halfway house — many of these intermediate solutions clearly belong to

26
For example Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora,
Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, 2009); John-
Paul Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London and Paris in
 FRAIL FRONTIERS? 49

‘connected history’. It is surely no coincidence that the most interesting of the

historians associated with connected history, Sunjay Subrahmanyam, might
be said to oscillate between global history — in his work on the Portuguese

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empire in Asia — and microhistory — in the three examples presented in
Textures of Time.27 His opinion on this debate advocates showing a balanced
judgement, avoiding a contrast based more on words than on concrete things:
‘Personally I remain sceptical (agnostique in the French original) as to the
usefulness of the concept of ‘‘globalization’’ and of any such magic potion
with a strong teleological content’.28 And he concludes:
As I have endeavoured to explain, the field has a fairly complex and
varied genealogy, but to my mind it is important, from the outset, to
rule out the idea that it is largely a field where synthesis always
prevails, rather than first-hand research on archives and texts.
This means that it is impossible to write a global history from no-
where or, as some have proposed by adopting an ‘‘extraterrestrial’’
perspective . . . Like any historian, I remain attached to particular
places and spaces, and my knowledge is a direct product of training
in the reading of texts, archives and images.29
I am in agreement with Subrahmanyam: global microhistory is essentially
an acknowledgement that any real contrariety is pointless, at least until
global history has more closely defined its remit and ceased to use the
idea of the global as a sort of flag of convenience that too many different
ships sail under.30

Ca’Foscari University, Venice Giovanni Levi

the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford, 2013); Romain Bertrand, Le long remords de la
conquête: Manille–Mexico–Madrid: l’affaire Diego de Avila (1577–1580) (Paris, 2015).
27
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800 (New
York, 2002).
28
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, On the Origins of Global History, 21.
29
Ibid., 26.
30
Here I am in agreement with Conrad, What is Global History?, conclusion.