Microhistory: In General

Routledge, 2013

Past and Present, 2019

This is the introduction to a collection of essays edited under the title Global History and Microhistory, which was published as a supplement volume of Past & Present in November 2019. The whole volume is available open access at the following link: https://academic.oup.com/past/issue/242/Supplement_14

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2017

Thomas Robisheaux and I brought out) “Microhistory and the Historical Imagination: New Frontiers,” a special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Vol 47, No. 1 (Jan 2017) My own essay there is “The Macrohistory of Microhistory”): 53-73. Note that, if you go see the issue, that it contains a very lively round-table featuring all the authors and their audience at the original Duke workshop. I cannot post the round-table without the permission of the participants, so I recommend that, if possible, you go find it. By agreement with Robisheaux, our organizer, this essay, circulated in advance, aimed to provoke discussion. That is why it makes strong, even rash, claims for the utility of microhistory.

In my previous work I have established a theoretical framework called ‘the Singularization of History’by criticizing the way social, cultural and microhistorians have practiced their scholarship in the last two or three decades. I have paid particular attention to one element common to the theoretical orientations of all microhistorians, viz. the connections between micro and macro. Microhistorians of all persuasions emphasize the importance of placing small units of research within larger contexts. I refute this principle and demonstrate its inherent contradictions. I encourage historians to cut the umbilical cord that ties them to what has been called ‘a great historical question’. The challenge of my paper will be to consider whether this research focus excludes the global perspective from historical inquiry. If that is not the case, what is the best possible approach to gain that vision?

Cultural and Social History 7 (2010): 387-97. , 2010

The persistent debate about microhistory is testimony to the impact of its contribution to the wider revolution that, over the last two generations, has radically and irretrievably transformed the way in which we write, and think, about the past. At the heart of the microhistorical method is a commitment to the close study of individuals, localities and events in their precise historical context, as an antidote to the teleology and elitism of traditional political history, on the one hand, and as an alternative to the reductive determinism of social history as it was practised in the 1950s and 1960s on the other. Microhistory has to do with choice and use of sources: the substitution of the serial with the precisely contextualized. The bold vocation of this method, especially of its most inspired practitioners, has always been to combine erudite pleasure with vision, so as to address large historical problems and to correct grand historical narratives, from the notion of mentality to that of the state, from changing conceptions of the body to the family and social relations. Indeed, to identify microhistory with the size of its object is a common misconception -not least because describing individuals, places or events as 'small' is absurd as well as patronizing. If anything, as John Brewer's excellent recent article shows, what is small is the metaphorical distance between subject and object arising from close observation. 1 In fact, strictly speaking, since there is an inverse proportionality between the size of an object and the scale of the map used to represent it, microhistory is history on the large, not the small, scale. Microhistory largely imposed itself as a tag, yet this has resulted in a certain number of inaccuracies in the literature. Both facts are true, incidentally, of the so-called Annales 'school' too, which is not all longue durée and quantification (think of Lucien Febvre's work, for example). However, generalizations are most paradoxical when they refer to works based on the notion that 'God is in the detail'. As Brewer and others have DE VIVO Prospect or Refuge? Microhistory, History on the Large Scale

2022

Despite multitudinous efforts from historians, an agreed-upon definition of microhistory has remained elusive. Indeed, since the field’s inception in Italy in the 1970s, microhistory has evolved and meant different things to different constituencies within and beyond the academy

2010

Social Evolution & History, 2018

The following paper is a michrohistorical intervention in one aspect of David Graeber's meta-narrative in Debt: the First 5,000 years. Graeber posits four overarching cycles of world history based on the alternation of the systematic use of coinage and virtual credit money. This grand narrative is set explicitly in the context of world-systems analysis and has received surprisingly little attention from scholars. In this intervention, I define what microhistorical practice is, I situate microhistory in the intellectual context of intervening in large grand narratives-either to shed light on them, problematize them, raise new questions about them, or perhaps even in some cases overturn them. Microhistorians do not avoid narrative, but they seek a return to narrative through a close analysis of small events situated within larger frameworks. Finally, I explore preliminary and approximate applications of microhistory to the Axial Age bullion cycle, one cycle in the great alternations between credit and coin. I focus on one specific philosopher-Plato, and create a microhistorical account of his actual relationship with Archytas, a Pythagorean philosopher, who I claim, is the living inspiration for the philosopher king's in Plato's utopian imaginary Kallipolis, the famous ideal city-state of his Republic. Microhistory is a historical practice aimed at a return to narrative through detailed analysis of primary documents. Microhistorians are generally concerned with overlooked persons, and marginalized voices. They wish to gain understanding and insight into the properties of large-scale global processes and events by looking at the finely textured details of everyday life during the chosen time period under study. Ideally, a microhistory will not simply be a biography, nor will it be primarily the analysis of a small village, although a person's life or village can serve as a site of analysis. Instead, microhistorical practice is about developing an observational lens, or a point of view, onto larger landscapes and structures of history.