Tonio Andrade’s “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys; and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory” was one of the most entertaining historical pieces I have ever read. I found its flowing narrative to be refreshing as it contained vivid imagery not often seen in academic articles. In his micro-historical approach, Andrade grounds his writing in a linear narrative and rarely digresses from the storyline, allowing himself more leeway for description and greater entertainment value. Within the story, we are able to get a sense of the character and agency of a number of individuals, including the Taiwanese farmer called Sait, the warlord Koxinga and two Dutch naval officers named Caux and Coyet. The decisions and struggles of these characters in addition to the interactions they have with each other, make the story readable as well as believable. Rather than focusing on broader questions of intersectionality and transnational networking, Andrade chooses to focus on individuals and their interactions during an instance of confluence between nations.
I found that this style and approach contrasted with Heather Streets-Salter’s “The Local Was Global: The Singapore Mutiny of 1915.” Streets-Salter uses both micro and macro levels of analysis in what is a far more technical approach to writing global/transnational history. She begins by describing the events as they happened categorically, laying the groundwork for the rest of the essay when she looks at the causes, ramifications and vast global networks involved in the mutiny. The combination of micro and macro elements requires densely packed information as it includes a discussion of wider historical movements that may have contributed to the event. The article starts with a group of Indian sepoys being tried and executed for staging a mutiny in British-controlled Singapore and the network steadily expands to another, Indian nationalist military group called the Malay States Guides to a Japanese ship in Vancouver called the Komagata Maru and all the way to Kaiser Germany’s First World War propaganda machine. While the reach of the Singapore Mutiny’s transnational network is certainly astounding, I found myself lost in the complicated and at times tenuous connections between the Mutiny itself and its far-reaching global connections. This may be the result of my preference for concise, anecdotal writing, but I think there is something to be said of Andrade’s ability to create an informative story with an abundance of drama out of a little known 17th century struggle between a Chinese warlord and some Dutch sailors.
Andrade’s article showed that transnational history could take place through a series of personal interactions. As I solidify a topic for my project, I hope to follow his example and find a situation in which I can tell a story of transnational interaction taking place between individual people and cultures, not necessarily institutions or government apparatuses.
First off, I would like to say how much I also enjoyed Tonio Andrade’s account, where by the end of my reading of it I truly did come to appreciate what he meant by the ‘human dramas that make
history come alive’. Yet my comment here aims in part to question and problematize the approach of a ‘global micro-history’, and to advocate for a history which retains a sense of drama and entertainment, whilst also alluding to the wider contextual significance of historical events, as difficult as this can be.
In the comparison of Andrade and Streets-Salter’s articles, you make the point that the latter article adopts a more ‘technical’ and structured approach to transnational history which can get confusing and sometimes casts too wide a net on the transnational connections which drove the Indian sepoys to mutiny against the British. However, I would argue that we should aim to account for these larger ‘inter-colonial and global connections’ when doing transnational history despite their complexity, otherwise we can lose sense of the wider significance of the event, the nature of which can be affected in different ways across units of space and scale. Streets-Salter’s emphasis on explicitly analysing those varying sites of connections in the context of the Mutiny, like the dissent amongst the Malay states guides and the publicisation of the Komagata Maru incident through the Indian Ghadar movement, is valuable and insightful historical analysis in this regard.
After reading Andrade’s account, though thoroughly entertained, I began asking myself, ‘Where exactly was the transnational significance in Sait’s actions?’. Though Andrade accounts for the role of actors across different nationalities and groups well, he remains somewhat restricted to interactions in this space between the Eastern Capital and the Netherlanders’ Island fortress. Thus, it may have been beneficial to add more detail on how the civil war going on in China at the time may have influenced Koxinga’s tactics in Taiwan, for example.
Thinking back, I was at times engrossed in the descriptive elements of Streets-Salter’s article, like the sending of Ghadar agents from North America. Though this is certainly drama done differently than in Andrade’s work. In many ways it was not as entertaining but in other ways it offered up an engaging historical analysis that was thoroughly transnational in scope. As I alluded to before, I think it is worth attempting to merge both narrative drama and a wide-ranging understanding of the facts in doing transnational history.