First of all, I love microhistory. When I saw that one of our readings for this coming week was Tonio Andrade’s “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys; and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory” I was enthusiastic to see how transnational history could be applied to microhistory. My first foray in microhistory was working with Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre. If you haven’t read it and enjoyed reading Andrade in terms of his microhistorical approach, I would highly recommend it because it is wild, mostly in the sense that it’s so zany yet at the same time real; Natalie Zemon Davis goes into detail about how she engaged with her sources carefully in order to construct this seemingly minuscule historical narrative. For me this is the appeal to microhistory. Unfortunately, I don’t know that I can say The Return of Martin Guerre qualifies as a piece of transnational history (I’m inclined to say it doesn’t). But who doesn’t want to read about [spoiler alert] that one time in a French village where some guy ditched his family and then some other guy showed up and pretended to be him until the first guy comes back and they all go to court but also how did the wife not know the other guy was an imposter? #Drama. Here’s to the history gods for that court record.
What I would have been curious about is to see similarities between how Andrade and Davis do microhistory. As far as I can tell, the primary similarity between these two narratives is really a small number of fairly obscure sources. I would have loved to learn more about how Andrade found and worked with his sources, though this comes from an inherent interest in the crazy little-known stories from history like Sait’s or Martin Guerre’s. The ones that historians like Andrade can manage get their hands on and reconstruct for us. To me, the practice and process of doing microhistory is fascinating, especially the part that (as Andrade points out) requires some historical imagination.
Admittedly, I don’t know that I have the tightest grasp on what it means to do history (a discipline which, as far as I can tell, is very fact-based) and use your imagination, but still produce something credible. However, you can see how imagination played a pivotal role in showing us the Chinese farmer’s world. And it obviously took a little imagination to connect this story to the broader transnational theme Andrade is getting at between this exchange between the Chinese and Dutch. This didn’t make it less believable to me, it just made it more enjoyable to read. I suppose the merits of using some imagination are endless, no matter what you study.