What is the difference between macrohistory and microhistory?

The difference between the macro and micro is, of course, one of scale in how we analyse and think about history. I don’t know what books you’ve been reading so far (and I’d love to hear what you have!) but my suspicion is that many popular and accessible works of history now take quite an explicitly macro scale. Yuval Noah Harari’s books deal with a (brief!) “history of humankind”, Mary Beard’s S.P.Q.R cover that of “Ancient Rome”, while others span the entirety of wars, or national histories. They broadly engage with vast periods of time, big themes, or clear ‘events’. Another significant development in history is that of global and transnational history, which considers how particular concepts like migration, the environment, communism etc. are not neatly bounded in ways we’ve assumed things to be. These have their great strengths, and many of the books here are immensely enjoyable reads, being able to draw on a vast range of anecdotes. The sense of time and scale these macrohistories have allows us to appreciate causality and various historical consequences, both intended and unintended, that unfurl. (It helps that many of them are fantastic writers, not just historians, too). Personally, I’m engaged a lot by narratives in history- what got me interested in the discipline are the fascinating stories it can tell. And macrohistories can offer that kind of grander, even epic narrative. At the same time, reading these books have given me room for thought, and in a kind of analogue to the Wikipedia rabbit-hole, some leads to zoom in when certain parts interest me.

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By focusing smaller units of analysis – one village, a lone restaurant, a single forest – are we needlessly” muddying our boots in the bogs of “micro-history” (Sanjay Subrahmanyam) while explanations of bigger trends and developments elude us? To simplify, the methods of microhistory often entail reducing “the focus of analysis, often to an individual or small group, a place or locality and, usually, a brief time period”. (de Vries) The advantage this offers is being able to carefully reconstruct certain events, relationships, networks, even individuals, that microhistory might otherwise sweep over or generalize. Often, they examine historical processes from the ‘bottom up’, given that interest in microhistory was intertwined partly with a ‘cultural turn’ in history (dating /very roughly!/ back to the 80s). One example is Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre, which also employed some anthropological concepts to understand interactions within a single workshop in its titular chapter.

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Take one of my favourite books of history: Emmanuel La Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou (1975), a careful, intimate, reconstruction of a village in the south of France – deemed heretical for being supposedly plagued with the blight of Catharism. He only writes on a 30-year period (1294-1324), and perhaps most interestingly, uses as his archival source the records of the church’s inquisitions to vividly depict everyday life in the village. Consider this snippet –

> Pierre Maury was a mountain shepherd, and that it was just these ‘great shepherds of the high mountains’ who, before the Renaissance, gave in their calendars the most complete version of the relationships uniting macrocosm and microcosm. Astrology, through the twelve signs of the zodiac, ruled the twelve months of the agricultural year and the twelve periods – seventy-two years in all – into which the life of a man was divided. We should also note that Pierre Maury’s sense of destiny had no connection with absurd superstition. One day Guillaume Bélibaste was anxious because he had seen a magpie cross his path three times. (He might well have been anxious – for him the stake was not far off.) Pierre laughed at him: ‘Guillaume, take no notice of signs of birds and other auguries of that kind. Only old women bother about such things.’ […] Maury had few possessions, but he was not destitute. And when he lost those few possessions he lost them with a smile, for he knew that by working he could easily get them back again. Well shod for his long journeys in a pair of good shoes of Spanish leather – the only luxury he allowed himself (i.20) – detached from the goods of this world, careless of the almost inevitable certainty of being arrested at some time by the Inquisition, leading a life that was both passionate and passionately interesting, Pierre Maury was a happy shepherd. (p148-151)

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This consistent penetration into a single person’s worldview and cosmology, and the enduring fascination with these personalities, is best appreciated not just in a short excerpt, but in reading the full chapter. Still, the way Le Roy Ladurie illuminates the life of , is something you would be hard-pressed to find in a highly macrohistorical book. This detailed study also a reminder of the particularity of each society, culture, and context, and drive home how historical moments are a product of these complex interactions. (Also: I’ve dug up an old review I wrote on it sometime, to reupload on my blog for this comment– link here, if you’re interested!)

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Microhistorical and macrohistorical approaches are engaged in quite a fruitful dialogue with each other, and when thinking historically it helps to move between these different scales. However, I’d like to stress one aspiration of microhistory: an emphasis on obscured perspectives. Macrohistories often reflect quite dominant narratives, and in their construction, things invariably get excluded in looking for a historical ‘whole’. However, various voices end up being deprioritized, and microhistory seeks to explore and do history through, not at the expense of, these obscure(d), marginalized actors. Other fields that have benefitted a lot from the microhistorical have been environmental histories (what can individual islands, even trees tell us?) and material culture (the history of objects – I’ve just read C.J Chiver’s The Gun, discussing the AK-47).

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Ultimately, neither approach has a monopoly over doing history well. Meticulousness in source-reading, good storytelling, drawing insightful connections between developments, fostering empathy. Competent works of history will encompass all of these things. Global, microhistory does not blithely drown out other perspectives, and often pay careful attention to largely-overlooked actors too. (I’ve enjoyed Goebel’s recent book Anti-Imperial Metropolis, which looks at interwar Paris to uncover networks of revolutionary actors, and the often mundane, bodily nature of their experience. It is firmly internationalist, yet humanizing). The contours of global history – just one way macrohistory can be done, but a rather influential approach – are still forming, but there’s been many calls to respect the methods of microhistory and its close, contextual analysis. (see Ghobrial) I’m excited to see the attitudes and concepts of microhistory being incorporated in such a way, even if the scope of such inquiry is still quite macro.

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Which one is used might then boil down to:

What kind of stories do we want to tell? Do you want to hear? What do we want to learn? Bearing in mind that we can’t just add up many microhistories to get a ‘macro’ picture, it’s important to consider the historical question(s) first.

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Why has microhistory not been widely used?

I hope to have shown that microhistory has indeed been widely used. There are plenty of interesting books, journals, documentaries that employ this microhistorical approach. If anything, the microhistory thrives in the everyday too: think of the identities of the food you had for breakfast, how the plot of land where you’ve come to live has shifted in use over time, or what a deep dive into your family’s own history might produce. Small units of analysis, indeed. Ponder not just the great works of microhistory, but life in its minute interactions.

References:

de Vries, Jan. “Playing with Scales: The Global and the Micro, the Macro and the Nano.” Past & Present, vol. 242, no. Supplement_14, Oxford Academic, Nov. 2019, pp. 23–36. academic.oup.com, doi:10.1093/pastj/gtz043. (open access!) https://academic.oup.com/past/article/242/Supplement_14/1/5637699

Ghobrial, John-Paul A. “Introduction: Seeing the World like a Microhistorian.” Past & Present, vol. 242, no. Supplement_14, Oxford Academic, Nov. 2019, pp. 1–22. academic.oup.com, doi:10.1093/pastj/gtz046. (where the Subrahmanyam quote comes from) https://academic.oup.com/past/article/242/Supplement_14/23/5637695