History is made up of microhistories. If you stand a distance from the tapestry, it might appear that the individual threads make up sweeping stripes \u2013grand movements; irresistible forces\u2014 but upon closer inspection, it is apparent that each \u2018thread\u2019 has a story tangled with the stories of others. \u2018Grand narrative\u2019 is ultimately composed of a vast number of \u2018small narratives\u2019: history comprises the lives of individuals, their choices, their desires, their influences, their backgrounds, and nothing can remove that fact. To weave those threads together in such a way that the work produced by the historian matches the tapestry \u2013of infinite complexity\u2014 of the past as it actually happened is the job of they who set out to historicise; it is an impossible task, but one whose original intent must not be forgotten. To lose sight of the micro is to ultimately find that one has a macro that is not history, but fantasy: it will inevitably be inaccurate.<\/p>\n
Andrade, in his brief and very enjoyable microhistory of Dutch-Taiwanese espionage, concludes with the exhortation to his peers to \u2018be mediums, to bring alive, just for a few pages, some of the people who inhabited [the past\u2019s] structures and lived through those [historicised] processes\u2019: \u2018let\u2019s bring the history of our interconnected world to life, one story at a time.\u2019[1]<\/a> Such an approach brings the past to life<\/em>, but also to truth<\/em>. The imagination that he acclaims and evinces in his work certainly injects into such a history a very winsome emotion, bringing it to life in the mind of the reader; the focus on the individual, and the attempt to reconstruct their pressures, responses, doubts and convictions, places back at the heart of history that of which it is ultimately comprised: actors. History historicises humanity; we must not forget that humanity is, after all, made up of humans. \u2018A week is a long time in politics\u2019, as the saying goes: equally, though, it can be \u2018a long time\u2019 for anybody, anywhere. The historian must recognise this\u2014 that actors are not ciphers.<\/p>\n Equally, however, its actors are not \u2013are never\u2014 set apart from history. They are not subject to determinism\u2014 but they also make choices that are contingent: we must recognise that each actor has their reasons for choosing whatever it is that they do<\/em> choose in any given instance. Walter Benjamin, Matti Peltonen comments, argued that a monad \u2013that which, following Leibniz\u2019s 1714 work, is a \u2018living mirror of the universe\u2019\u2014 can visibly fulfil such a function only when they have been \u2018blasted out of the continuity of history\u2019, at which point \u2018their structure becomes obvious\u2019.[2]<\/a> I have to admit that I am not quite certain what Peltonen means by this. Leibniz, firstly, argued that a monad was the uniquely self-composed element of existence, such that its structure could never \u2018become obvious\u2019 due to the fact that it had<\/em> no structure. Benjamin, meanwhile, would surely have been wrong to argue for something having been \u2018blasted out of the continuity of history\u2019; as outlined above, history is simultaneously a) composed of the \u2018discontinuity\u2019 consequent to multiple agencies (acting, I would however argue, according to the Hobbesian axiom of convenience), and b) the result of choices always contingent upon other occurrences: to look for elements discontinuous to a holistic historiography will result in either futile search or ahistorical fiction. This continuity\/discontinuity tension is, so far as I understand it, the ‘double bind’ observed by Peltonen in his conclusion.<\/p>\n Whither, and indeed wherefore, microhistory, in that case? Peltonen, briefly surveying numerous practitioners of microhistory, comes to suggest that \u2018the new microhistory\u2019 could be \u2018described as the study of the typical exception<\/em>.\u2019[3]<\/a> If one is finding \u2018typical exceptions\u2019, I would suggest, one\u2019s theory leaves something to be desired: it is either excessively specific and in its specificity inaccurate, or it does not pay sufficiently close attention to detail and thus leaves room for anomaly. There is, in other words, no such thing as a \u2018typical exception\u2019; or alternatively, everything<\/em> is typically exceptional, recognising that there is also no such thing as either an \u2018average individual\u2019 from whom a microhistory can extrapolate grand conclusions on the macro level, or an \u2018extraordinary individual\u2019 \u2018blasted\u2019 from the contingencies of historical location. As a result, the sole \u2018monad\u2019 is, as Leibniz originally intended it, the individual actor.[4]<\/a> Societies, and the other conceptual macro-constructs to which it is argued that microhistory ought (and is perhaps unable) to extrapolate, are made up of actors: actors are the strands of which the historical tapestry is comprised, and the anthropological flow of ideas, goods and all else would not exist without actors. Economists, Matti Peltonen notes, have the concept of the \u2018microfoundations of macrotheory\u2019.[5]<\/a> So too must be the case for history. It is not easy \u2013it may even be impossible\u2014 to weave together the necessary multiplicity of individual lives and choices to yield a full understanding of the near-infinite global flows omnipresent across humanity. Conceptually, however, it can be recognised to be at the very least highly advisable.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Tonio Andrade, \u201cA Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory\u201d, Journal of World History<\/em>, Vol. 21, No. 4 (December 2010), pp. 573-591, p. 591<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Matti Peltonen, \u201cClues, Margins, and Monads: the Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research\u201d, History and Theory<\/em>, No. 40, October 2001, pp. 347-359, p. 356<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology<\/em><\/a>, \u00a7 63<\/p>\n