Microhistory: The Debate

Micro history gained prominence as a school of historical thought during the 1960s and 70s. It essentially seeks to attribute worldwide historical events to smaller, seemingly insignificant occurrences on a micro level. There is a great debate surrounding the effectiveness of this approach, and whether it offers a new insight into transnational history, or whether it is simply a lottery in deciding whether factors are actually important.

However, there is a tendency to believe that macro and micro history work against one another, instead of towards the same goal. Both seek to understand global events but so from a different lense. Indeed, as was discussed in today’s tutorial ‘how much use is a small map without the context of a large map?’. This question is particularly poignant was analyzing the usefulness of micro and macro historical approaches. Rather than working against one another, they work in conjunction and the evidence gained from both schools can be combined to formulate a sophisticated analysis of global events.

Heather Streets-Salter analyses the Singapore Mutiny of 1915 and suggests that its apparent irrelevance on the historic stage has arisen from the historical context of the time. The First World War, argued by Streets-Salter, has overshadowed the Sepoy Mutiny and consequently only a handful of historians have further inquired into the causes and consequences of the Singapore Mutiny. My problem with micro history is therefore this, that if historians take into account small details and extrapolate them into the context of larger world debates, then surely, they run the risk of imagining, or over exaggerating the significance of said event. Peltonens argument does well to recognize that ‘individuals or small places are automatically assumed to represent a microelement’. The danger therefore is that micro historians selectively pick areas that correlate to their argument, and use evidence that supports their argument while ignoring the wider picture.

Furthermore, another issue arising from today’s seminar, which is true again when defining transnational history, is the parameters within which micro history operates. Initially, the definition seems rather narrow, microhistory analyses history from a local perspective. However, what are the geographical limits of this angle? When does micro history become macro? Arguably large cities, such as London, are micro in the context of Europe, opposing, towns are macro in the context of the individual. Perhaps then, microhistory is relative and dependent on the ‘lense’ through which is it seen.