Micro History and the Dangers of Extrapolating Trends

As much as I always enjoy micro histories, with regards to transnational histories, I have had some hesitations regarding the compatibility of these two historical perspectives. I worry that to apply transnational perspectives to local people and events puts the historian at risk for jumping the gun, as it were; I fear it is perhaps too easy to analyze the experience of one person or people or place and to proceed to extrapolate that reality into a trend across other similar phenomena. For example, we would never accept the supposition that because 13^th century Italian women ate off of special plates after giving birth this was a piece medieval birthing rituals across all of Europe. However, that is the precise danger of looking at the micro through a macro lens; conclusions must necessarily err on the side of micro significance or risk a loss of accuracy. However, the readings for this week allayed most of my misgivings about this process.

I loved Tonio Andrade’s article; I could read him for days. His writing is much more poetic and artistic than most of the authors that we’ve read; the beautiful narrative paints a vivid picture of the texture and reality of the Chinese farmer’s life, much more akin to short story fiction than the primarily technical and theoretical articles we have been studying thus far. Through the retelling of Sait’s experiences, his ‘short encounter with history’, the reader’s understanding of the conflict between the Dutch and the Chinese becomes highly personalized (p. 590). When he dies, the reader feels the loss, and as Andrade offers possible explanations, a comparison of both the Dutch and Koxinga’s forces reveals the similarities in their methods to a frustrated audience: suspicion, hastiness, and willingness to turn on their own allies. Andrade uses Sait’s experience as a prism through which to view the behavior and tactics of both sides of the conflict, a single life reflecting the complexities of a much larger war. I personally believe that this personalization is a great strength of histories of this kind, but others disagree; if one prizes objectivism over emotional engagement, then one would probably see Andrade’s writing as needlessly artistic and insufficiently analytical.

His question of ‘How does one write on the scale of individuals from a global perspective?’ is delightfully provocative, and it is one that I feel will be pertinent to my personal project this semester (p. 574).  I think that the idea of the individual as an intersection of multiple transnational influences is the best method of analyzing micro histories in transnational contexts, as Andrade does with his ‘individual lives in global contexts’ (p. 274). Clavin discussed a similar approach in her example of Julius Bonn in ‘Defining Transnationalism’. Struck, Ferris and Revel’s article deals more with the ‘transmicro’ methodology, and the application of certain perspectives and techniques to these smaller tales. I feel that this will be of particular use to me, as I hope to do my research this semester on religious syncretism and identity in the Caribbean islands during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Examining a single life in an effort to understand how international influences melded together would be highly effective in proving the significance of religion to these oppressed peoples, and I think this might well be the approach I choose to take. However, I would certainly hope that my classmates and tutors will be willing to critique my work, and brutally, as I do not want to fall into the trap of extrapolation outlined above.

Andrade, Tonio, ‘A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory’, Journal of World History 21, 4 (2010), pp. 573-591.

Clavin, Patricia, ‘Defining Transnationalism’, Contemporary European History 14, 4 (2005), pp. 421-439.

Struck, Bernhard, Kate Ferris & Jacques Revel, ‘Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History’, The International History Review, 33:4 (2011), pp. 573-584.