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2019, Past and Present
This is the introduction to a collection of essays edited under the title Global History and Microhistory, which was published as a supplement volume of Past & Present in November 2019. The whole volume is available open access at the following link: https://academic.oup.com/past/issue/242/Supplement_14
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Micro-spatial history brings together the analytical perspective of microhistory and the methodology of global history. It views historical processes as the outcomes of multiple social practices across time, and across singular, yet connected places. This article argues that a micro-spatial approach implies the rejection of the concept of ‘scale’ and is based on the avoidance of the standard conflation between the type of analysis (micro/macro) and its spatial scope (local/global). Grounding social processes opens up historical studies to views that are alternative to the local/global, the agency/structure and the short-term/long-term divides. Moreover, it allows seeing the construction of scales as an object of historical research. An invitation to self-reflexivity on the epistemology and methodology of history, the micro-spatial perspective also offers new visions of the social role of the historian, foregrounds ‘usable pasts’ that subvert contemporary common places and accentuates the importance of scholarly co-operation.
2019, Past and Present
This essay was included as part of a collected volume under the title Global History and Microhistory, which was published as a supplement volume of Past & Present in November 2019. The whole volume is available open access at the following link: https://academic.oup.com/past/issue/242/Supplement_14
2019, Past & Present
In the first section, this article introduces the three main litigants of the Pietro v. Franchi hard case, namely Murād Bey, Anton Marco Pietro and Simone Francesco Franchi. Their short biographies provide an account of the Corsican merchant milieu, family ties and networks, and systems of patronage across multiple sites in the western Mediterranean (especially Tunis, northern Corsica and Livorno). The second section investigates the role of written documentation and oral proof in a context of jurisdictional pluralism. One follows the multi-sited hard case in different magistracies and appeals courts, from Tunis to Pisa, focusing on the role of enforcement as a key issue to understanding long-lasting litigation in different jurisdictions. The third section deals with the social uses of law as a constitutive and endogenous dimension of the hard case: emotion, humiliation and anger will take centre stage as a way to analyse the transformation of disputes and the question of legal qualifications. Hostility between litigants reveals mechanisms of political and economic intimidation in order to influence and even corrupt judges. Finally, the fourth section focuses on the translation of Muslim rules of succession between Tunisia and Tuscany: special attention is paid to the role of witnesses and merchants’ knowledge of practices and customs, but also to the vocabulary of religious antagonism as a way to discredit the opposing side.
The article identifies an imbalance in the attention given to global history’s two fundamental objectives, the focus hitherto having fallen more on the study of cross-border connections than on the vaunted decentring of historiographical perspective. The example of the modern history of the prison serves to illustrate some basic problems faced by efforts to identify cross-border transfers and assess their historical significance for local, national or regional developments. The need for a decentring of historiographical perspectives is illustrated firstly by reference to the fact that, contrary to the established narrative, the globalization of the prison was a process characterized by a multiplicity of shifting centres. To help grasp such global processes it proposes the concept of a multiple “frame of references”. Secondly, the article emphasizes the importance to global historical research, alongside attention to transfers, of the comparative approach. Deploying the distinction between “hard” and “soft” versions of global history, it finally distinguishes between polycentric global history and global history still written from the standpoint of area history, only the former properly engaging with the globality of historical phenomena.
2019, Romain Bertrand
Este artículo se pregunta por los posibles límites de la historia local dentro del paradigma de la historia global. A partir de criticar la ecuación que hace de la relación entre local y global una analogía de aquella entre micro y macro, el trabajo intenta reconstruir las implicaciones metodológicas del denominado “giro espacial” y analizar las contradicciones de un análisis metafórico del espacio. En particular, el rechazo de las explicaciones endógenas por parte de la historia global permite subrayar los límites analíticos del paradigma de la circulación, sobre el cual esta se funda. * This paper discusses the possible local history boundaries within the paradigm of global history. Based on the questioning to the existing equation between local and global, by means of an analogy between micro and macro levels, the current research attempts to rebuild the methodological implications of the so-called “Spatial turn”. Likewise, it analyzes the contradictions of the metaphorical analysis of space. Particularly, this research will focus on the rejection to the endogenous explanations of global history. This, in turn, contributes to the highlighting of the analytical boundaries of the circulation paradigm on which this is, likewise, based on.
In my previous work I have established a theoretical framework called ‘the Singularization of History’by criticizing the way social, cultural and microhistorians have practiced their scholarship in the last two or three decades. I have paid particular attention to one element common to the theoretical orientations of all microhistorians, viz. the connections between micro and macro. Microhistorians of all persuasions emphasize the importance of placing small units of research within larger contexts. I refute this principle and demonstrate its inherent contradictions. I encourage historians to cut the umbilical cord that ties them to what has been called ‘a great historical question’. The challenge of my paper will be to consider whether this research focus excludes the global perspective from historical inquiry. If that is not the case, what is the best possible approach to gain that vision?
This interview was made in March 2018 and published in Estonian in the Estonian edition of Sebastian Conrad’s "What is Global History?": Sebastian Conrad, "Mis on globaalne ajalugu?" Tallinn: Tallinn University Press, 2018, pp. 243–256. This is the original English version of the interview, made available with the kind consent of the interviewee.
Microhistory is a relative recent approach in history, dating back from the late 1970's. Nevertheless, considering its evolutive features and the developments that it has experienced since its first introduction by historians, any analysis thereon includes the prerequisite to roughly define the notion as I intend to use it in my developments to follow. I would then suggest that such a definition includes the ideas of (i) scope, (ii) historiographical background and (iii) relationship with sources .
2003, Journal of Social History
How history matters for organizations is subject to debate, in which overly simplistic descriptions of organization theory and history are juxtaposed, that do not do justice to the internal diversity of these disciplines. When the focus is shifted to specific research agendas, such as microhistory and institutional work, similarities emerge in terms of challenging macro-social modes of inquiry that aim to bring the individual back into theorizing by researching complex and equivocal responses to institutional forces. What microhistory can contribute to the research agenda of institutional work is a further challenge to the definition of institutions and institutional paradoxes, as well as a more emancipatory rather than an inertial view of the past and the multiple ways in which history may be employed to question the status quo or envisage a different future. Importantly, it also offers alternative research methods that permit research into longer time spans through retrospective methods such as archival research or oral history.
Co-authored paper: Sebouh Aslanian, Joyce Chaplin, Ann McGrath and Kristin Mann.
El artículo discute la configuración de la tendencia reciente llamada historia microglobal. Se analiza la manera como la escala microhistórica se ha convertido en una opción metodológica para resolver algunos problemas de la historia global. Se propone que, a diferencia de las tendencias asociadas con los estudios postestructurales que usan y abusan de aspectos culturales como raza, género, etnia, o de la figura de los subalternos, la introducción nuevamente del sujeto en una escala translocal puede servir para analizar grandes preguntas y escapar de la historia como narrativa. Se propone que se debe pensar la agencia no simplemente como razones culturales, sino que el sujeto debe ser estudiado en una escala global, donde diferentes procesos translocales impactan sus capacidades de decidir y hacer. * The present article discusses the configuration of the recent tendency known as microglobal history. It analyzes the way the microhistorical scale has become a methodological option to solve some problems of global history. Unlike the tendencies associated with post-structural studies, which use and abuse cultural aspects like race, gender, ethnic group, or figure of subordinates, the introduction of the subject in a translocal scale is presented as an alternative to analyze great questions and to escape again from history as a narrative. The article proposes that agency must not simply be thought as cultural reasons. Instead the subject must be studied on a global scale, where different translocal processes impact capabilities to decide and act.
‘People’s history’ focuses on the lives of ordinary people, with an eye to their struggles, everyday practices, beliefs, values, and mentalities. Influenced by the Annales School and cultural anthropology, but reacting against traditional social history’s emphasis on social structures and serial trends, its practitioners emphasize the importance of individual agency while trying to demonstrate the complexity of lived experience, the fluidity of identity, and the subjective nature of meaning. Important types of ‘people’s history’ include ‘history from below,’ Alltagsgeschichte (the ‘history of everyday life’), and ‘microhistory,’ all of which involve a dramatic reduction of historical scale, focusing on a single individual, community, or spectacular event.
2020, Storicamente. Laboratorio di storia
The contribution deals with “Centro e periferia”, a 1979 essay, written by Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg and recently republished by Officina Libraria. It investigates the genesis of the essay and addresses the fruitful dialogue between the social history of art promoted by Castelnuovo and the experience of Italian micro-history. According to Ginzburg’s suggestions in the new Preface, Centro e periferia is discussed in relation to the historical studies’ current panorama. The focus is therefore on the analysis of a concrete cases’ sample and their composition in a model for the study of relations between centres and peripheries on whose potential — in the context of the challenge the globalized world posed to the humanities — the question is still open. It is a challenge taken up and relaunched by World history and Global history that makes once again the problems of comparison and self-reflexivity posed by the micro-history’s experiments urgent.
2018, Fronteiras: Journal of Social, Technological and Environmental Science
The late flourishing of environmental history has been accompanied by attempts to combine it with a microhistorical approach, improving our understanding of specific events of the past as well as pointing to relevant historical insights at the macro level, which might inform policy-driven contemporary debates on environmental issues. Therefore, this article attempts to shed light on the epistemology and historiography of microhistory, stressing its basis on the indiciary paradigm as avowed by the Italian microhistorian Carlo Ginzburg, its emphasis on context, relations and connections, and its potential for unveiling new information at the macro level. It is asserted that these features make the microhistorical approach an adequate methodological tool to environmental history, anticipating a fruitful future for environmental microhistory.
2010, Cultural and Social History 7 (2010): 387-97.
This seminar offers an overview of recent approaches to, and discussions about, global history. It thus aims to take stock of the much broader global turn in history that has taken place during the last 30 years. By discussing writings and research widely drawn upon by global historians, the seminar provides students with a toolkit for better understanding the turn away from nation-centered ways of seeing history, which have given way to histories focusing on the movements of people, goods, and ideas across boundaries and on how these movements have been determinants of historical change. The seminar situates global history within related fields, such as transnational history and imperial history. Finally, it delves into recent challenges to global history, which in the eyes of some of its critics has given up on some classic virtues of historians altogether. Throughout the seminar, a particular focus will be on the manifestations and implications of Eurocentrism in historical writing.
2020, Comparativ
After revisiting transnationally oriented historiography from within a regional South Asian ambit, this article makes a plea for a very specific take on global history-writing that promises to appeal especially to historians who have learned to value dense regional / cultural contextualisation. . Comparativ | Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung, forthcoming (2020) Heft ?, pp. 49-74.
2019, Papers of the Institute of Archaeology
Archaeology has always kept an inconsistent relationship with history. For decades, archaeology has either largely rejected what history could offer, such as among certain processual archaeologists, or it has cherry-picked certain elements of historical methods. The closest that archaeologists have ever come to establishing a complete historical method to be applied in archaeology was through the adoption of the idea of the Annales School of history. Part of what made the Annales School so attractive to archaeologists of all backgrounds was that it tackled the past in a way that was very practical and useful for archaeology: it engaged with the past in the form of total histories, which could then be segmented in three separate durations and could be studied in an interdisciplinary manner. Additionally, the way the Annales School envisaged the past allowed for the study of the past in a very scientific way (e.g. quantitative, statistical), but also allowed the qualitative study of mentalities of the past people under analysis. However, one of the greatest problems of the Annales School is that it suppressed the human agent. Whether they were hidden behind structural economic forces or long-term symbolic structures, the individual remained always buried under the large-scale — history, according to annalistes, could not be the result of individual action. This, in turn, is what eventually led to the demise of the Annales School, in favour of the Italian microhistory. Does this mean that the AnnalesSchool of History must be complete scraped? No, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate that archaeology can in fact have a fruitful historical paradigm based on some ideas of the Annales School, and at the same time, some ideas of Italian microhistory. This would require understanding microhistory as the reconstruction of the life of agents, small-scale case-studies that serve as exemplars of large-scale phenomena.
Former president Zuma's false narrative (and ANC myth) have been exposed. It reveals a little more of ANC secrecy and an organizational culture driven by many of its incumbents in their neo-hegemonic positions of domination in post-apartheid society at the expense of all South Africans. The Judge's Order alludes to far-reaching consequences for the perpetuation false narratives against the rising tide of post-truth (PT) praxis. The application of Micro-history as an analytical historical approach, has a valuable role to play in freeing South African historiography from traditional thinking, mostly in class, race and capital terms. This study shows how a single event (seemingly a small one) has far-reaching impact not only on social media, but also conversely. This all bodes well for future Micro-historical study should such finds its ways into South African academia.
1999, History and Theory
On 4 June 2016, Jürgen Osterhammel of the University of Konstanz and Geoffrey Parker of Ohio State University gave an all-day workshop on global history for graduate students and junior and senior scholars of the Universities of Dundee and St. Andrews in Scotland. The workshop consisted of three discussion sessions, each with a different theme, namely the conceptualization(s), parameters, and possible future(s) of global history. The central question was to what extent this fastchanging field required adjustments of “normal” historiographical methodologies and epistemologies. The workshop participants agreed that global history focuses in particular on connections across large spaces or long timespans, or both. Yet reconstructing these webs of connections should not obscure global inequalities. In the case of empires, many of the exchanges across space and time have been ordered in a hierarchical fashion—metropoles profiting from peripheral spaces, for example —and imposed by certain groups of people on others, resulting in, for example, the enslavement or extermination of indigenous peoples. As historians, we should also ask ourselves what we do about peoples or areas that were or remain unconnected, local, and remote. Where does globalization end?
2012
On September 11th 1973, the Chilean military, led by General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew the democratically elected Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende, bringing forty years of democracy to an end in Chile. As troops blasted buildings and helicopters sprayed bullets into the top floors of the British Embassy, the Presidential Palace was ablaze following a direct-hit from an aerial strike. The country was in the final throws of ‘self-managed socialism’ and Salvador Allende in the midst of the epilogue of his reign. The Marxist experiment, or as some have labelled it, the initiation and implementation of radical and social reforms, crashed to a violent and bloody end. In a single day, a lifetime of work and dreams was torn asunder in a campaign of random violence and terror. This thesis reconstructs a history of life in Santiago, Chile in the aftremath of Allende's death by analysis the street murals of the Brigada Ramona Parra and the poetry of Raul Zurita through a microhistorical and subaletrn methodological framework. In doing so, aspects of personal and group suffering emegre as well as a sense of collective action in the face of unrelenting subjugation at the hands of the Pinochet regime.
2008, Journal of Microhistory
2014, Theoretical Discussions o Biography. Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing
2014, Theoretical Discussions of Biography
2016, Immigrant Entrepreneurship: The German-American Experience since 1700, eds. Hartmut Berghoff, Uwe Spiekermann, p. 19-36
Writing scientific biographies evokes the problem of representativeness or of integrating the single case into more general questions of scholarly interest. The establishment of a link between micro and macrolevels inspired the present paper, which attempts to conceptualize the link between the individual biographical case and more general questions via the concept of microhistory. Microhistory does not present an easy solution to this problem, but it can generate sensitivity for the epistemological problems and narrative pitfalls of the biographical genre After presenting a brief overview of the methodological foundations of microhistory, I evaluate publications on German sweets manufacturer Gebrüder Stollwerck AG as examples of microhistories of globalization and of kinship in entrepreneurial families. In a third step, I examine the specifics of entrepreneur biographies, paying particular attention to their narrative structure, as they tend to explain developments from within the black box of the entrepreneur or his family. There exists a broad spectrum of research questions that may go way beyond the chronological sequence of a biographical subject’s life course. I suggest avoiding the pitfalls of the biographical method by linking the life of the subject to a reference value, to a research question that, in the best case, provides an experimental cardinal point outside of the object of study. In this sense, biographies — as well as case studies on companies — can be understood as microhistories of X.
2015, Journal of Social History
Debates around microhistory tend to result in offering solutions to the representativity issue, that is, to the question of the micro-marco relationship. Although he respective offers of Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson and Istvan Szijarto – the authors of What is Microhistory? – are as different as you can get, they seem to share a deep agreement over what constitutes microhistory: its cognitive claim. Regardless of whether it is close to or far from their intentions, in arguing for microhistory they both argue for a method understood in epistemological terms, and their ultimate answer to the question that their book bears as a title is that microhistory is the method, and probably the right one, to gain reliable knowledge of the past. In this review essay, after introducing and discussing the general views of the authors, I go on to outline an even more general view of microhistory. This view, I think, is the shared perspective that underlies all the particular methodological views. What unites different versions of microhistory, what gives birth to the pluralism of methods and the layers of microhistory, is what it presupposes of human behavior, human capabilities, or human existence in general. And this might be the view that can be retained even in a new era of long term historical thinking.
2019, Modern Asian Studies
“Telescope and Microscope. A Micro-Historical Approach to Global China in the Eighteenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies, December 2019, pp. 1-30. [online]; PRINT VERSION in Modern Asian Studies 54:4 (July 2020), pp. 1315-1344 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X18000604]. One of the challenges of global history is to bridge the particularities of individual lives and trajectories with the macro-historical patterns that develop over space and time. Italian micro-history, particularly popular in the 1980s-90s, has excavated the lives of small communities or individuals to test the findings of serial history and macro-historical approaches. Micro-history in the Anglophone world has instead focused more on narrative itself, and has shown, with some exceptions, less interest for ampler historiographical conclusions. Sino-Western interactions in the early modern period offer a particularly fruitful field of investigation, ripe for a synthesis of the global and the micro-historical. Cultural, social, and economic phenomena can be traced in economic and statistical series, unpublished correspondence, and other non-institutional sources, in part thanks to the survival of detailed records of the activities of East India companies and missionary agencies in China. Recent scholarship has started to offer new conclusions, based on such Western records and matching records in theChinese historical archive.In this article, I offer a methodological reflection on global micro-history, followed by four micro-historical vignettes that focus on the economic and socio-religious activities of the Roman Catholic mission in Beijing in the long eighteenth century. These fragments uncover unexplored facets of Chinese life in global contexts from the point of view of European missionaries and Chinese Christians in the Qing capital end users of the local and global networks of commerce and religion bridging Europe, Asia, Africa, and South and Central America. [This article is part of my current book project on the life and networks of Europeans in Beijing in the long eighteenth century.]
2019, Esboços - histórias em contextos globais
"Sovereignty, Property and Empire" is everything that "Rage for Order" is not. The two books on the same issue – empire and international law – could not be more contrasting in approach and conclusions.
Woe to thee, o land, when thy king is a child and thy princes feast in the morning. Ecclesiastes 10:16 As it developed in its English-speaking version over the course of the last three decades, global history has mostly been the story of a world peopled by large-scale and relatively resilient entities (such as cultures, civilizations, religions). One specific entity, namely 'imperial polities', has been granted a prominent place in the grand narrative of how the world became more and more densely interconnected. 1 Whether one was tracking down diasporic trading networks operating across oceans, religious institutions deploying themselves on a pluri-continental stage, or vagrant individuals defying borders and ascribed identities, empires always loomed large in the picture, as if they were the sturdy contextual bedrock of all individual and institutional histories. Though not easily stored in the same category, huge polities like Ming China and Philip II's kingdom were actually recognized by professional travellers whether they be pilgrims, scholars, merchants or ambassadors-as both constraining structures and fields of opportunity. 2 The aura of might and prestige that imperial elites crafted and projected was often willingly endorsed by those that had to deal with the legal and moral norms dictated by these empires. 3 But the fact that empires really mattered does not mean that one has to surrender submissively to their mythologies and propaganda. By all
2019, The Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies
The following is an edited transcript of a roundtable that took place at the University of Glasgow in September 2018. The roundtable was organized by Dr. Julia McClure in conjunction with the Poverty Research Network’s conference - Beyond Development: The Local Visions of Global Poverty. That conference brought into focus the ways in which the global and local levels meet at the site of poverty and highlighted the different conceptions on the global are generated from the perspective of poverty. The roundtable brought together leading scholars from Europe, Africa, Asia and North and South America to take stock of global history as a field, to consider the role of existing centres of knowledge production, and to assess new directions for the field.
2018, The American Historical Review
The Central Asian city of Shahrisabz has long been a historical footnote, widely regarded as an unruly “province in rebellion” plaguing its more powerful overlords in Bukhara during the seventeenth through late nineteenth centuries. In fact, it was an autonomous city-state in its own right, and the mechanisms through which it has been written into submission in the historiography reveal much about historical methodology and premodern logics of sovereignty. To recover Shahrisabz’s story, this article pursues a non-hegemonic reading of hegemonic Persian writing (a strategy more frequently applied to colonial sources) and pieces together scattered textual fragments composed in the city itself. In doing so, it illustrates the ways in which variegated forms of symbolic submission and coercive power intersected to create complexes not easily mappable to modern binaries. Seemingly contradictory forms of sovereignty routinely coexisted within a single polity, and greater specificity is necessary to capture a kaleidoscope of permutations. Thus source methodology and sovereignty stand as two conceptual domains intrinsically intertwined, with insights into the latter possible only with careful attention to the former.