Microanalysis and Global History

Dossier

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https://doi.org/10.1017/ahsse.2020.9 Published online by Cambridge University Press
 G lob a l Micr ohist or y : A C a s e
to Follow

Romain Bertrand and Guillaume Calafat

Over the last decade, the term “global microhistory” has gained strong currency
among historians, particularly English-speaking early modernists.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

This introduction was translated from the French by Jessica Edwards and edited by
Chloe Morgan and Nicolas Barreyre.
1. Among the most widely discussed articles that use the label directly—but in very
different ways—see Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a
Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory,” Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2010):
573–91; Francesca Trivellato, “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of
Global History?” California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): http://escholarship.org/uc/item/
0z94n9hq; John-Paul A. Ghobrial, “The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses
of Global Microhistory,” Past and Present 222, no. 1 (2014): 51–93. See also Carlo
Ginzburg, “Microhistory and World History,” in The Cambridge World History, vol. 6,
The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 CE, part 2, Patterns of Change, ed. Jerry H.
Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015), 446–73; Hans Medick, “Turning Global? Microhistory
in Extension,” Historische Anthropologie 24, no. 2 (2016): 241–52; Giovanni Levi,
“Microhistoria e historia global,” Historia crítica 69 (2018): 21–35; Angelo Torre, “Micro/
macro: ¿local/global? El problema de la localidad en una historia espacializada,” Historia
crítica 69 (2018): 37–67; John-Paul A. Ghobrial, ed., “Global History and Microhistory,”
special issue, Past and Present 242, supplement 14 (2019). This issue of Past and Present aims
to provide a space for encounters and discussion between British and American global his-
3
tory scholars and practitioners of microhistory, who tend to come from continental Europe).

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 ROMAIN BERTRAND · GUILLAUME CALAFAT

take the “global turn” that it had neglected? Or is it a question of giving an epis-
temological 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”2 underway since at least the fifteenth
century.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.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

2. Serge Gruzinski, Les quatre parties du monde. Histoire d’une mondialisation (Paris: La
Martinière, 2004); Patrick Boucheron, ed., Histoire du monde au XVe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2009).
3. This individual and collective research can take various forms. See, for instance,
Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global
World (London: Profile Books, 2008); Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things (New
York: Routledge, 2013); Dagmar Freist, “Historische Praxeologie als Mikro-Historie,”
in Praktiken der Frühen Neuzeit. Akteure, Handlungen, Artefakte, ed. Arndt Brendecke
(Cologne: De Gruyter, 2015), 62–77; Maxine Berg et al., eds., Goods from the East,
1600–1800: Trading Eurasia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Anne Gerritsen
and Giorgio Riello, eds., The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections
in the Early Modern World (London: Routledge, 2016); Zoltán Biedermann, Anne
Gerritsen, and Giorgio Riello, eds., Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in
Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
4. Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008). These studies on global lives mostly follow on from Jonathan D.
Spence, The Question of Hu (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). See, for instance, Allan D.
Austin, “Mohammed Ali Ben Said: Travels on Five Continents,” Contributions in Black
Studies 12 (1994): 129–58; Leonard Blussé, Bitter Bonds: A Colonial Divorce Drama of the
Seventeenth Century [1998], trans. Dianne Webb (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2002); Linda
Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (London: Harper Press,
2007); Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the
Age of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Isabella Löhr, “Lives
Beyond Borders, or How to Trace Global Biographies, 1880–1950,” Comparativ.
4
Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 23, no. 6 (2013): 6–20.

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 MICROANALYSIS AND GLOBAL HISTORY

turns—long served as a model,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.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 overarch-
ing political entities that are too often afforded the self-evidence they were wont to
claim.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

5. Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Two Worlds
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Lucette Valensi, Mardochée Naggiar. Enquête sur un
inconnu (Paris: Stock, 2008); Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Albert Wiegers, A
Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe
[1999], trans. Martin Beagles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
This narrative vein is explicitly claimed in Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer,” and
Ghobrial, “The Secret Life.”
6. Simon Schaffer et al., eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence,
1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach: Science History, 2009); Bernard Heyberger and
Chantal Verdeil, eds., Hommes de l’entre-deux. Parcours individuels et portraits de groupes
sur la frontière de la Méditerranée, XVIe – XXe siècle (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2009);
László Kontler et al., eds., Negotiating Knowledge in Early-Modern Empires: A Decentered
View (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
7. Here we have an important work in mind: Edoardo Grendi, I Balbi. Una famiglia geno-
vese fra Spagna e Impero (Turin: Einaudi, 1997). For more recent studies, see Lara
Putnam, “To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World,”
Journal of Social History 39, no. 3 (2006): 615–30; Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of
Empire: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011);
Noel Malcolm, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-
Century Mediterranean World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Gagan D. S.
Sood, India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and
5
Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

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 ROMAIN BERTRAND · GUILLAUME CALAFAT

documentation left by litigations.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 micro-
analysis 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.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.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.11

8. Alan Watson, Legal Transplants: An Approach to Comparative Law (Edinburgh: Scottish

Academic Press, 1974); Lauren A. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in
World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Guillaume
Calafat, “Ramadam Fatet vs. John Jucker: Trials and Forgery in Egypt, Syria
and Tuscany (1739–1740),” Quaderni storici 48, no. 2 (2013): 419–40; Tamar Herzog,
Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2015).
9. Francesca Trivellato, “A New Battle for History in the Twenty-First Century,”
Annales HSS (English Edition) 70, no. 2 (2015): 261–70; Trivellato, “Microstoria/
Microhistoire/Microhistory,” French Politics, Culture and Society 33, no. 1 (2015): 122–34.
10. For a very broad and optimistic overview of the development and field of global history,
see Richard Drayton and David Motadel, “Discussion: The Futures of Global History,” Journal
of Global History 13, no. 1 (2018): 1–21; Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2016); Hugo Fazio Vengoa and Luciana Fazio Vargas, “La historia
global y la globalidad histórica contemporánea,” Historia crítica 69 (2018): 3–20.
11. In this sense, studies of “global events” do not fall within the field of “global micro-
history.” For an overview of this type of research, see Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The
6
Eruption that Changed the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

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 MICROANALYSIS AND GLOBAL HISTORY

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.12 Elsewhere, too, a good deal of scholarship has
associated—most often implicitly—the methods and questionnaires of micro-
history 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.13
These hybrid histories, which readily “move from the details to the
whole”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.15
They also concern the travel of goods and resources: porcelain, coral, diamonds,
sugar, cotton, indigo, cochineal, and so on,16 and include the biographies of

12. “Une histoire à l’échelle globale,” Annales HSS 56, no. 1 (2001): 3–4; Roger Chartier,
“La conscience de la globalité (commentaire),” ibid., 119–23; Serge Gruzinski, “Les
mondes mêlés de la monarchie catholique et autres ‘connected histories,’” ibid.,
85–117. In this article, Gruzinski claimed his study was based on “data often ascribable
to microhistory,” while adding that microhistory had “trained our eye so well for observ-
ing the near that some researchers have ended up neglecting the distant” (p. 88).
13. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of
Early Modern Eurasia,” in Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to c. 1830, ed.
Victor Lieberman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 289–316;
Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World
(Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2011); Caroline Douki and Philippe Minard,
“Histoire globale, histoires connectées : un changement d’échelle historiographique ?”
Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 5/54, no. 4 bis (2007): 7–21.
14. Anaclet Pons, “De los detalles al todo : historia cultural y biografías globales,” História
da historiografía 12 (2013): 156–75.
15. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997); Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of
Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early
Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Romain Bertrand,
L’histoire à parts égales. Récits d’une rencontre Orient-Occident, XVIe – XVIIe siècle (Paris:
Éd. du Seuil, 2011).
16. Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Gerritsen and Riello, The Global Lives of Things; Kim
7
Siebenhüner, “Les joyaux du souk. Marchandises globales, pratiques marchandes et

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 ROMAIN BERTRAND · GUILLAUME CALAFAT

“exotic” animals brought to Europe, in studies at the intersection of the history

of science, intellectual history, and economic history.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.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.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

espaces commerciaux locaux à Alep à l’époque moderne,” in La loge et le fondouk. Les

dimensions spatiales des pratiques marchandes en Méditerranée. Moyen Âge–Époque moderne,
ed. Wolfgang Kaiser (Paris/Aix-en-Provence: Karthala/Maison méditerranéenne des
sciences de l’homme, 2014), 71–98.
17. Silvio A. Bedini, The Pope’s Elephant (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1997); Glynis
Ridley, Clara’s Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe
(London: Atlantic Books, 2004); Silvia Sebastiani, “La caravane des animaux.
Circulation des ‘orangs-outans’ et des savoirs, reconfigurations des frontières de
l’humain,” Diasporas 29 (2017): 53–70.
18. On this constellation of relational approaches, see Michael Werner and Bénédicte
Zimmermann, “Penser l’histoire croisée : entre empirie et réflexivité,” Annales HSS 58,
no. 1 (2003): 7–36.
19. This criticism is directed above all at radical morphological approaches that call for
“comparing the incomparable.” For a well-balanced overview of the potential of com-
parative history, see Alessandro Stanziani, “Comparaison réciproque et histoire.
Quelques propositions à partir du cas russe,” in Pratiques du transnational. Terrains, preu-
ves, limites, ed. Jean-Paul Zúñiga (Paris: Centre de recherches historiques, 2011),
209–30; Philippa Levine, “Is Comparative History Possible?” History and Theory 53,
no. 3 (2014): 331–47; George Steinmetz, “Comparative History and Its Critics: A
Genealogy and a Possible Solution,” in A Companion to Global Historical Thought, ed.
Prasenjit Duara, Viren Murthy, and Andrew Sartori (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014),
8
412–36.

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 MICROANALYSIS AND GLOBAL HISTORY

variants, seeks to capture all things from an overarching position.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.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.22 From the outset, in fact, the term’s
vagueness and seemingly oxymoronic character prompted efforts to recall the dis-
tinct 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.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.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.25

20. On the expectations of this criticism and the specifications for reconciling
approaches, see Trivellato, “Is There a Future”; Levi, “Microhistoria e historia global.”
21. Natividad Planas, “L’agency des étrangers. De l’appartenance locale à l’histoire du
monde,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 60, no. 1 (2013): 37–56.
22. Trivellato, “Is There a Future”; Étienne Anheim and Enrico Castelli Gattinara,
“Jeux d’échelles. Une histoire internationale,” Revue de synthèse 130, no. 4 (2009):
661–77; Filippo de Vivo, “Prospect or Refuge? Microhistory, History on the Large
Scale: A Response,” Cultural and Social History 7, no. 3 (2010): 387–97; Ginzburg,
“Microhistory and World History”; Torre, “Micro/macro.”
23. Trivellato, “Microstoria/Microhistoire/Microhistory”; Medick, “Turning Global?”
24. See the forum “Microstoria e storia globale” set up by the journal Quaderni storici. Of
note among the articles in this series are Osvaldo Raggio, “A proposito di ‘The Ordeal of
Elizabeth Marsh’ di Linda Colley. Storie individuali e storia dell’Impero Britannico,”
Quaderni storici 149, no. 2 (2015): 551–66; Christian G. De Vito, “Verso una microstoria
translocale (micro-spatial history),” Quaderni storici 150, no. 3 (2015): 815–33; Dagmar
Freist, “A Global Microhistory of the Early Modern Period: Social Sites and the
Interconnectedness of Human Lives,” Quaderni storici 155, no. 2 (2017): 537–56;
Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, “A ‘New Wave’ of Microhistory? Or: It’s the Same Old
Story. A Fight for Love and Glory,” Quaderni storici 155, no. 2 (2017): 557–76.
25. Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris: Gallimard/Le
Seuil, 1996; Revel, “Paysage par gros temps,” in La forza delle incertezze. Dialoghi storiog-
9
rafici con Jacques Revel, ed. Antonella Romano and Silvia Sebastiani (Bologna: Il Mulino,

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The “global” attached to microhistory therefore seems to open up an enterprise

of clarification, not only of the intellectual foundations of the microhistorical under-
taking 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.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.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.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.29

2016), 353–69; Simona Cerutti, “Microhistory: Social Relations versus Cultural

Models?” in Between Sociology and History: Essays on Microhistory, Collective Action, and
Nation-Building, ed. Anna-Maija Castrén, Markku Lonkila, and Matti Peltonen
(Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2004), 17–40; Carlo Ginzburg, “Our Words,
and Theirs: A Reflection on the Historian’s Craft, Today,” in Historical Knowledge: In
Quest of Theory, Method and Evidence, ed. Susanna Fellman and Marjatta Rahikainen
(Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 97–119.
26. See the debate surrounding the proposals of David Armitage and Jo Guldi in the
thematic dossier “Debating the Longue Durée,” Annales HSS (English Edition) 70, no. 2
(2015): 215–303.
27. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath [1989], trans. Raymond
Rosenthal (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991).
28. Jeremy Adelman, “What Is Global History Now?” 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-
history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment.
29. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2013); Maxine Berg, ed., Writing the History of the Global:
Challenges for the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). This point was
raised early on by Chartier, “La conscience de la globalité,” 120, and echoed more than
fifteen years later by Adelman, “What Is Global History Now?” and Drayton and
Motadel, “Discussion: The Futures of Global History,” 8. Ironically, the linguistic pro-
vincialism of global history goes hand in hand with incantatory criticism of a
Eurocentrism consubstantial with the rhetoric of an inescapable “rise of the West.”
Attempts are being made, however, to find new international spaces for academic
and intellectual dialogue, which include reflection on how visas are granted to research-
ers from the Global South and developing a policy for the translation of concepts and
references. See, for example, Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds., Global
History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2018),
which attempts to rise to the challenge posed in Dominic Sachsenmaier, “World
10
History as Ecumenical History?” Journal of World History 18, no. 4 (2007): 465–89.

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 MICROANALYSIS AND GLOBAL HISTORY

The experimental nature of microhistory is precious precisely because it

enables us to avoid linearities and teleologies, to point out detours and disconti-
nuities, 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.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.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.32

30. Carlo Ginzburg, “‘L’historien et l’avocat du diable.’ Entretien avec Charles Illouz et
Laurent Vidal. Première partie,” Genèses 53, no. 4 (2003): 113–38; Simona Cerutti,
“Histoire pragmatique, ou de la rencontre entre histoire sociale et histoire culturelle,”
Tracés. Revue de sciences humaines 15 (2008): 147–68.
31. Edoardo Grendi, “Micro-analisi e storia sociale,” Quaderni storici 12, no. 35 (1977):
506–20; Grendi, In altri termini. Etnografia e storia di una società di antico regime, ed.
Osvaldo Raggio and Angelo Torre (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004); Matteo Giuli, “Morfologia
social e contextualização topográfica. A micro-história de Edoardo Grendi,” Revista
brasileira de história 37, no. 76 (2017): 137–62.
32. Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel, eds., Penser par cas (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS,
2005); Giovanni Levi, “Les usages de la biographie,” Annales ESC 44, no. 6 (1989):
1325–36; Sabrina Loriga, Le “petit x.” De la biographie à l’histoire (Paris: Éd. du Seuil,
11
2010).

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“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.33 The heuristic presupposi-
tions 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.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.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.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.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

33. Antonella Romano, Impressions de Chine. L’Europe et l’englobement du monde (XVIe – XVIIe
siècle) (Paris: Fayard, 2016).
34. Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel, “Penser par cas. Raisonner à partir de
singularités,” in Passeron and Revel, Penser par cas, 15–21.
35. A point that Sebouh David Aslanian raises in his article in this issue.
36. Romain Bertrand, Le long remords de la conquête. Manille-Mexico-Madrid : l’affaire Diego
de Àvila, 1577–1580 (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2015). On the asymmetry of sources, see
Roberto Zaugg’s article in this issue.
37. Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, “La micro-histoire,” Le Débat 10, no. 17 (1981):
12
133–36.

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George Marcus.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,”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.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.”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.42 “Global microhistory” does not escape one of the

38. George E. Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-
Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117. Multi-sited eth-
nography shares certain methodological affinities with the approach of Bruno Latour. On
this subject, see the remarks of Conrad, What Is Global History? 121–22 and 128–29.
39. In the sense intended by Bernard Lepetit, “La société comme un tout : sur trois for-
mes d’analyse de la totalité sociale,” Cahiers du Centre de recherches historiques 22 (1999):
http://journals.openedition.org/ccrh/2342. This was also the meaning it was given by
Fernand Braudel, “En guise de conclusion [with discussion],” Review (Fernand
Braudel Center) 1, no. 3/4 (1978): 245, for whom “globality” was not the “puerile, con-
genial and insane ::: pretension ::: to write a total history of the world,” but simply the
“desire, when addressing a problem, to systematically go beyond its limits.”
40. Jocelyne Dakhlia, “La question des lieux communs. Des modèles de souveraineté
dans l’Islam méditerranéen,” in Les formes de l’expérience. Une autre histoire sociale, ed.
Bernard Lepetit (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 39–61.
41. Simona Cerutti and Isabelle Grangaud, “Sources and Contextualizations: Comparing
Eighteenth-Century North African and Western European Institutions,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 59, no. 1 (2017): 5–33.
42. See, for example, how Emma Rothschild brings to light, through a subtle “interplay
13
of scales,” the fabric of economic and personal relations that the inhabitants of

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 ROMAIN BERTRAND · GUILLAUME CALAFAT

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.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.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.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.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

Angoulême forged across the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, thereby overcoming
the simplistic dichotomy between the “connected world” and the “isolated world”:
Rothschild, “Isolation and Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century France,” American
Historical Review 119, no. 4 (2014): 1055–82 (which uses Ginzburg and Poni’s article,
“La micro-histoire,” on names as Ariadne’s thread). As Torre, “Micro/macro,” 52, points
out, there is still a need to investigate the social practices involved in establishing and
maintaining these connections in order to explain their meanings and issues.
43. Jean-Frédéric Schaub, “Survivre aux asymmetries,” in L’expérience historiographique.
Autour de Jacques Revel, ed. Antoine Lilti et al. (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 2016), 165–79;
Bertrand, Le long remords.
44. See the call for plural and collective writings made by Lynn Hunt, Writing History in
the Global Era (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2015), 151. For examples of
pooling skills to document connections, see García-Arenal and Wiegers, A Man of
Three Worlds; Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers. In a different vein, for collaborative
writing based on a comparison of social and textual practices, see Cerutti and
Grangaud, “Sources and Contextualizations.”
45. Romain Bertrand, “Histoire globale, histoires connectées : un ‘tournant historiogra-
phique’ ?” in Le “tournant global” des sciences sociales, ed. Alain Caillé and Stéphane
Dufoix (Paris: La Découverte, 2013), 44–66.
14
46. On this point, see Darío G. Barriera’s reflections in this issue.

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 MICROANALYSIS AND GLOBAL HISTORY

the production of places before making them the places of history.47 The local is nei-
ther 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.48 Here, “global microhistory” takes advantage of reflections on “trans-
locality” or “transregionality,” which coincide in many respects—particularly the
histories of kinship, social groups, or diasporas—with the “multi-sited” approach.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.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.51 And yet there are indeed distance effects that
influenced actors’ expectations and conduct. Here again, anachronism lies in wait

47. Torre, “Micro/macro”; Torre, “‘Faire communauté.’ Confréries et localité dans une
vallée du Piémont (XVIIe – XVIIIe siècle),” Annales HSS 62, no. 1 (2007): 101–35. In a
different vein, see Anne Gerritsen, “Scales of a Local: The Place of Locality in a
Globalizing World,” in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrop (Malden:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 213–26.
48. Darío G. Barriera, “Entre el retrato jurídico y la experiencia en el territorio. Una
reflexión sobre la función distancia a partir de las normas de los Habsburgo sobre las socia-
bilidades locales de los oidores Americanos,” Caravelle 101 (2013): 133–54.
49. De Vito, “Verso una microstoria translocale”; Christopher H. Johnson et al., eds.,
Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences Since the
Middle Ages (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011); Johannes Paulmann, “Regionen und
Welten. Arenen und Akteure regionaler Weltbeziehungen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert,”
Historische Zeitschrift 296, no. 3 (2013): 660–99.
50. See, for example, Nicholas Purcell, “Unnecessary Dependences,” in The Prospect of
Global History, ed. James Belich et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 65–79.
Focusing on the production, distribution, and consumption of aromatic resins in
the High Middle Ages, Purcell borrows from Jan de Vries the concept of “soft
globalization,” that is, a globalization (even in the early modern period) seen not as
the enduring and inescapable mold of the present world, but as a composite historical
process of regional integrations and disconnections: Jan de Vries, “The Limits of
Globalization in the Early Modern World,” Economic History Review 63, no. 3 (2010):
710–33.
51. This is effectively shown in Jessica Marglin’s article in this issue on the boundaries of
15
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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.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.53
Distance is not just a geographic problem. First of all, it questions the rep-
resentativeness 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.54 Finally, distance has a tem-
poral 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.55 Here, a dialogue can be established between the early modern and

52. Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers; Guillaume Calafat, “Familles, réseaux et

confiance dans l’économie de l’époque moderne. Diasporas marchandes et commerce
intercultural,” Annales HSS 66, no. 2 (2011): 513–31, here pp. 527–28; Dagmar
Freist, “‘Ich schicke Dir etwas Fremdes und nicht Vertrautes.’ Briefpraktiken als
Vergewisserungsstrategie zwischen Raum und Zeit im Kolonialgefüge der Frühen
Neuzeit,” in Diskurse, Körper, Artefakte. Historische Praxeologie in der Frühneuzeitforschung,
ed. Dagmar Freist (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), 374–404.
53. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Par-delà l’incommensurabilité : pour une histoire connectée
des empires aux temps modernes,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 5/54, no. 4 bis
(2007): 34–53; Jocelyne Dakhlia and Wolfgang Kaiser, “Une Méditerranée entre deux
mondes, ou des mondes continus,” in Les musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe, vol. 2,
Passages et contacts en Méditerranée, ed. Jocelyne Dakhlia and Wolfgang Kaiser (Paris:
Albin Michel, 2013), 7–31.
54. A reflexive activity of “casing” promoted in particular by Charles C. Ragin and
Howard S. Becker, eds., What Is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
55. Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830,
2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003–2009); Fazio Vengoa and Fazio
16
Vargas, “La historia global.”

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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 micro-
history” 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.

Romain Bertrand
CERI (Sciences Po‐CNRS)
Guillaume Calafat
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Institut d’histoire moderne et contemporaine)

17

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