Tonio Andrade\u2019s \u201cA Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys; and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I found that this style and approach contrasted with Heather Streets-Salter\u2019s \u201cThe Local Was Global: The Singapore Mutiny of 1915.\u201d Streets-Salter uses both micro and macro levels of analysis in what is a far more technical approach to writing global\/transnational history. \u00a0She 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 <\/em>and all the way to Kaiser Germany\u2019s First World War propaganda machine. While the reach of the Singapore Mutiny\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. Tonio Andrade\u2019s \u201cA Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys; and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory\u201d 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-jv","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1210,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions\/1210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"