As we watch Sait paddle away from the Dutch, we reflect on how his life became entangled with the large-scale structures and themes historians enjoy analysing. His life and, eventually, his (spoiler!) untimely death all occur within the context of Dutch colonialism and a war between the Dutch and the Chinese. Overall, his experiences and interactions with colonialism and war undoubtedly shaped his worldview, his reasoning, and his actions up until his very last breath. Altogether, this story serves as an exemplar for the ‘global microhistory’ that Tonio Andrade believes historians should focus on. I came away from this week’s readings with the impression that ‘global microhistory’ is a way of practicing and doing transnational history that grounds abstract concepts, like ‘war’ and ‘capitalism’, in the experiences of ordinary individuals. Because of this grounding, global microhistory becomes relevant and personal to us, and this is what makes it engaging. Reading twenty-odd pages seems like a chore to most students, myself included, but I tore through Andrade’s article like it was nothing. I wanted to know what happened to Sait, and I found it so cool to think that his experiences had greater significance and meaning than what we see at a first glance.
But ‘coolness’ isn’t a good enough reason, on its own, to pursue global microhistory. Sure, a global microhistorical approach is relevant and personal to the reader, but so what? Why does it matter?
Without microhistory, global history is essentialising. In arguing that the world is tied together with universal experiences of It does not account for local specificities, and for In order to answer this question, I turn to Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. De Sousa Santos argues that knowledge in the world is dominated by a ‘Western hegemony’. This Western hegemony presupposes that there is only one way of knowing and perceiving the world. Instead, de Sousa Santos argues that there are ‘ecologies of knowledge’, or more than one way of knowing and perceiving the world. This is because knowledge is not a Platonic form that simply exists, or an objective ideal that we strive to achieve and accumulate an infinite amount of. Knowledge is ‘situated in the world’, and is an ‘intervention-in-reality’; a way of seeing, in a nutshell, that is determined by our cultural context and our own experiences. And, because our ability to know is defined by our individual experiences which, in turn, maps onto the way we interpret and see things, the amount that we can know within our own way of knowing is limited. We can only begin to see ‘beyond’ our framework is by understanding other ways of knowing. Then, by comparing a multitude of different frameworks with each other, we can acquire a broader, more reflective knowledge that doesn’t just understand the world, but also understands the limitations of human knowledge overall. Overall, de Sousa Santos argues that we need to think of the world as consisting of different ‘epistemologies’, or modes of thought. This framework allows us to account for subaltern epistemologies: other conceptions of the world that conflict and differ from Western ones.
Ultimately, de Sousa Santos’s work answers the ‘so what’ question and gives us a reason to support global microhistory. In assuming that experiences of ‘capitalism’, for instance, are universal, global history isn’t just essentialising. It is also promoting a singular, Eurocentric way of thinking about the world. If multiple ecologies of knowledge, and thus multiple ways of seeing the world exist, then this means that there is no one kind of structure and theme that ties the world together – no one ‘capitalism’, ‘socialism’, ‘neoliberalism’, or ‘war’. Thinking that there is only one kind of structure is deeply-essentialising and Eurocentric. As such, it would be wrong for a global historian to employ a wide-scale approach and make sweeping generalisations about the world. It is not good enough to say that ‘x was affected by capitalism’. Instead, de Sousa Santos tells us we must examine the way capitalism was imagined in the minds of individuals, and how these affected their perception and experience of history overall. We also ought to compare the way in which capitalism conflicts with and fits into each locality’s unique epistemology.
Overall, global microhistory can help us respond to de Sousa Santos’ criteria. By employing global microhistory as a methodology, the historian is given a way to address big structures in relation to the epistemologies and experiences of localities. Of course, someone might object to this and say that this methodology is too demanding and, thus, too idealised. Sure, it’s natural to want to write history without making sweeping generalisations. But asking the historian to alter their own mode of thought to understand someone else’s epistemology? That’s a big ask. Nevertheless, I think that global microhistory paves the way to writing a history that analyses the world from different perspectives and modes of thought.