It is too easy to forget that history is essentially the study of people who once lived. I use the term “people” instead of “actor” or “subject” or “figure” because that’s who they were: people. As important as thinking about our subject is in terms of its theory, its approaches, its varying scales of practice, etc., I find that it’s important to remind ourselves that when we study history, we need to remember that historical people were people. Just like us, they had their own loves, fears, desires, ambitions, and possessed all the other myriad qualities that made them, and make us, human.
Microhistory, and as I’ve learned of this past week, global microhistory, are highly valuable approaches to our subject. When written properly, such histories are able to write from the perspective of the “local” to answer big historical questions, answer the “so what” question, and perhaps most importantly, engage with the essential humanity of the peoples of the past they address. In past seminars, I’ve voiced my concern with how history runs the risk of becoming too detached from a public readership, as well as how the subject needs to be able to relate its studies on more personal, intimate levels. Microhistory and its global counterpart do just that.
Like Charmaine, I was very much taken by the Andrade piece; it’s been quite a while since I was so engaged with a piece of historical writing. Unlike much of the academic writing I read, it was written in the form of a narrative, one written with a stylized prose that made its text feel exciting and fresh. Take for example this passage, which I feel really showcased the “human factor” of Koxinga’s war with the Dutch:
A secretary dipped pen in ink. Who was he, they asked, and why had he come? He said his name was Sait and he’d come because he couldn’t stand it any more, the way Koxinga and his soldiers mistreated him and the other Chinese farmers. Koxinga’s soldiers pressed them constantly for money. They forced them to chop bamboo and bring it to his headquarters. They demanded all the stockpiles of rice and sugar without paying anything and even made them bring it themselves and load it on Koxinga’s ships. He and the other farmers had given up working their fields, knowing that whatever they harvested this year would be stolen from them. Now the worms ate through the rice stalks even as Koxinga’s soldiers and the poorer Chinese were dying from hunger. This year’s harvest would be terrible, he said, the worst he’d ever seen.
Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory,” Journal of World History 21, No. 4 (December 2010), 578-579.
This is an exciting history: one that is both narratively engaging whilst also able to answer academic questions and open up new lines of inquiry. I must admit that I am rather biased in my admiration of this approach: my ideal historical work is one that combines the best aspects of academic and popular history. In my view, the best historical works are those that can both appeal to a general public and push the field forward. The works of Jill Lepore, H.W. Brands, and Gerard DeGroot are some of my favorite historians because they take such an approach to their work. (Lepore herself wrote a very nice article on microhistory that I will link here.) The very methodology and writing of microhistory seem like they are uniquely geared to produce the type of history I love and admire most.
The pieces authored by our very own Bernhard Struck et al. and Ghobrial are also worth mention; if the Andrade article demonstrated the ambitions and end result of transnational historical practice, Struck and Ghobrial provide the framework and methodology necessary for the writing of such works. I’m particularly intrigued by the fusion of microhistorical method with transnational history’s scale and perspective, and what kinds of history may be produced by such a union. As noted by Ghobrial, global microhistory allows the historian to engage with detail and root their work in the local and personal in order to better conceptualize the global. If such an approach doesn’t provide new, ambitious insights unto already well-known pasts, I don’t know what will.
Nevertheless, I was very happy to have been able to read histories over the past two weeks that emphasize humanity in their approaches (I very much enjoyed last week’s readings on Transnational Lives). I myself often forget that the historical forces we study had tangible, serious impacts on the peoples of the past. We must honor them by writing histories that better understand them and their times, that realize connections and concepts they may have never conceived of. We must write history that is meaningful to the past and our present.