AHR conversation how size matters: The question of scale in history

American Historical Review

Volumn 118, Issue 5, 2013, Pages 1431-1472

  Aslanian, Sebouh David ^a   Chaplin, Joyce E ^b   McGrath, Ann ^c   Mann, Kristin ^d  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^d Department of History   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84890534249     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/ahr/118.5.1431     Document Type: Review

References (247)

1. Lawrence Stone, "The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History," Past and Present 85 (November 1979): 3-24;
2. Peter Burke, "History of Events and the Revival of Narrative," in Burke, ed., New Perspectives in Historical Writing (University Park, Pa., 1995), 233-248.
3. However, an early recognition and problematization of scale appears in Jacques Revel's celebrated essay on microhistory and the Annales.
4. See Revel, "Micro-analyse et construction du social," in Revel, ed., Jeux d'échelles: La micro-analyse à l'expérience (Paris, 1996), 15-36.
5. Surprisingly, more recent reflections on scale have also been quite sparse.
6. For two investigations into the matter, see David Christian, "Scales," in Marnie Hughes-Warrington, ed., Palgrave Advances in World Histories (Basingstoke, 2005), 64-89;
7. Patrick Manning, "Scale in History: Time and Space," in Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (Basingstoke, 2003), 265-273.
8. See the marvelous assessment in Kenneth Pomeranz and Daniel A. Segal, "World History: Departures and Variations," in Douglas Northrop, ed., A Companion to World History (Chichester, 2012), 15-31.
9. Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, Calif., 2008), 7.
10. David Christian, "The Case for 'Big History,' " Journal of World History 2, no. 2 (1991): 223-238, here 223.
11. See also Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley, Calif., 2004).
12. For an overview of how larger and longer units of analysis have entered historical interpretations in the West and beyond, see Georg G. Iggers and Q. Edward Wang, with Supriya Mukherjee, A Global History of Modern Historiography (Harrow, UK, 2008), 256-261, 331-338, 364-366, 387-401.
13. See the historic methodological exhortations for big history (the first time around) in William O. Aydelotte, Allan G. Bogue, and Robert William Fogel, eds., The Dimensions of Quantitative Research in History (Princeton, N.J., 1972);
14. Val R. Lorwin and Jacob M. Price, eds., The Dimensions of the Past: Materials, Problems, and Opportunities for Quantitative Work in History (Princeton, N.J., 1972).
15. On the digital humanities, see Daniel J. Cohen et al., "Interchange: The Promise of Digital History," Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (2008): 452-491;
16. Forum on Evidence and Interpretation in the Digital Age," Victorian Studies 54, no. 1 (2011): 63-94.
17. stay tuned to the Working Group on "Historicizing Big Data" at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, http://www.mpiwg-berlin. mpg.de/en/research/projects/DeptII-Aronova-Oertzen-Sepkoski-Historicizing.
18. Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York, 1984);
19. Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens, eds., Conceptualizing Global History (Boulder, Colo., 1993);
20. Robert W. Cox, "A Perspective on Globalization," in James H. Mittelman, ed., Globalization: Critical Reflections (London, 1996), 21-30, here 21-22;
21. Bruce Mazlish, "Comparing Global History to World History," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28, no. 3 (1998): 385-395;
22. Emma Rothschild, "Globalization and the Return of History," Foreign Policy 115 (1999): 106-116;
23. A. G. Hopkins, "The History of Globalization-and the Globalization of History," in Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (London, 2002), 11-46;
24. David Armitage, "Is There a Pre-History of Globalization," in Deborah Cohen and Maura O'Connor, eds., Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York, 2004), 165-176;
25. Michael Lang, "Globalization and Its History," Journal of Modern History 78, no. 4 (2006): 899-931.
26. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge, 1986);
27. Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (London, 1991)
28. with subsequent and revised editions; Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1995);
29. Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (London, 1999);
30. J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York, 2000);
31. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York, 2001);
32. Alfred W. Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite for Energy (New York, 2006);
33. Anthony N. Penna, The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History (Chichester, 2010);
34. Joyce E. Chaplin, Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (New York, 2012);
35. Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, Conn., 2013).
36. Webster's New International Dictionary; Oxford English Dictionary; OED Online.
37. Peter Veth and Susan O'Connor, "The Last 50,000 Years: An Archaeological View," in Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, eds., The Cambridge History of Australia (Cambridge, 2013), 2 vols., vol. 1: Indigenous and Colonial Australia, 17-42;
38. John Mulvaney and Johan Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia (Washington, D.C., 1999);
39. Peter Hiscock, The Archaeology of Ancient Australia (London, 2008).
40. Keith Wailoo, Alondra Nelson, and Catherine Lee, eds., Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (New Brunswick, N.J., 2012).
41. Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley, Calif., 2011).
42. The Inaugural Conference of the Harvard Initiative for the Science of the Human Past was held at Harvard University in November 2013.
43. An interdisciplinary symposium, "Deepening Histories of Place," was held at the Australian National University in June 2013;
44. Mary-Anne Jebb and Ann McGrath, eds., Deepening Histories in Place and Time (Canberra, forthcoming 2014).
45. Christian, Maps of Time; Shryock and Smail, Deep History; Ian Morris, The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations (Princeton, N.J., 2013);
46. Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York, 2006);
47. Davis, A Passion for History: Conversations with Denis Crouzet, ed. Michael Wolfe, trans.
48. Davis and Wolfe (Kirksville, Mo., 2010);
49. Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, N.J., 2011);
50. Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass., 2012).
51. Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology (Chicago, 1965);
52. Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison, Wis., 1985);
53. Joseph C. Miller, ed., The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History (Hamden, Conn., 1980);
54. Luise White, Stephen Miescher, and David William Cohen, eds., African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington, Ind., 2001).
55. See his home page on the Harvard University History Department website, http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/smail.php.
56. Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), x-xi;
57. Steven M. Tipton, "Bellah, Robert," in Mark Juergensmeyer and Wade Clark Roof, eds., Encyclopedia of Global Religion, 2 vols. (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 2012), 1: 130.
58. For many years after its founding in 1960, the oldest and best-known serial in the field, the Journal of African History, regularly devoted the lead article to archaeological, historical linguistic, or other research that illuminated the very early African past.
59. Christopher Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (Charlottesville, Va., 2002).
60. The African case is wholly consistent with Shryock and Smail's argument that "engagement with events and societies before European expansion, before textual evidence, is often considered politically irrelevant unless such events and societies can be interpreted.. through intellectual lenses crafted during the great shift to colonial and postcolonial modernity" (8).
61. Smail, On Deep History and the Brain; Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham, N.C., 2012).
62. Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Carlton, 2004);
63. Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York, 1997).
64. Maria Nugent, Captain Cook Was Here (New York, 2009);
65. Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath, How to Write History That People Want to Read (Basingstoke, 2011).
66. Greg Dening, Performances (Carlton, 1996).
67. Jean M. O'Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, 2010).
68. Kirsty Douglas, " 'Forsaken Spot' to 'Classic Ground': Geological Heritage in Australia and the Recuperative Power of the Deep Past," Environment and History 12, no. 3 (2006): 269-296;
69. Denis Byrne, "Deep Nation: Australia's Acquisition of an Indigenous Past," Aboriginal History 20 (1996): 82-107;
70. Denis R. Byrne, "Nervous Landscapes: Race and Space in Australia," Journal of Social Archaeology 3, no. 2 (2003): 169-193;
71. Ian J. McNiven and Lynette Russell, Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology (Lanham, Md., 2005);
72. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Muddle of Modernity," American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (June 2011): 663-675;
73. Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008).
74. National Museum of the American Indian, Past, Present, and Future: Challenges of the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, D.C., 2011).
75. See also Ann Curthoys, "Does Australian History Have a Future," Australian Historical Studies 33, no. 118 (2002): 140-152, here 151-152.
76. On Aboriginal concepts of time and place, see Minoru Hokari, Gurindji Journey: A Japanese Historian in the Outback (Kensington, 2011).
77. W. E. H. Stanner coined the term "everywhen"; Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays, 1938-1973 (Canberra, 1981).
78. Message from Mungo (Ronin Films, 2014).
79. David Armitage, "What's the Big Idea Intellectual History and the Longue Durée," History of European Ideas 38, no. 4 (2012): 493-507.
80. Shryock and Smail, Deep History.
81. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, 1995);
82. Marc Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815-2000 (Seattle, 2002);
83. David Day, Antarctica: A Biography (New York, 2013).
84. Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), pursues the same kind of analysis in political rather than environmental terms.
85. historians of medicine, both academic and popular, have recently given diseases biographies, as well; see the Oxford University Press series that has produced biographies, so far, of asthma, cholera, diabetes, obesity, and thalassemia, http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/category/academic/series/medicine/bod. do.
86. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985);
87. Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Saved the World (New York, 1997);
88. Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York, 2002);
89. Tom Standage, A History of the World in Six Glasses (New York, 2005);
90. Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (New York, 2011).
91. On it-narratives, see Mark Blackwell, The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Lewisburg, Pa., 2007);
92. Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, N.J., 2012).
93. On commodities and commodification, see Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986);
94. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, Mass., 2004), especially pt. 2.
95. See the excellent treatment on the historical constitution of archives in Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002), chap. 4.
96. For the influential concept of "time-space compression," see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, 1991), chap. 15.
97. See Barbara Weinstein, "The World Is Your Archive The Challenges of World History as a Field of Research," in Douglas Northrop, ed., A Companion to World History (London, 2012), 63-78.
98. For discussion of a plan to create a world archive in 1946 at the United Nations, see Emma Rothschild, "The Archives of Universal History," Journal of World History 19, no. 3 (2008): 375-401.
99. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Intertwined Histories: Crónica and Ta-r-kh in the Sixteenth-Century Indian Ocean World," History and Theory 49, no. 4 (2010): 118-145, here 120.
100. Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris, and Jacques Revel, "Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History," Size Matters: Scales and Spaces in Transnational and Comparative History, Special Issue, International History Review 33, no. 4 (2011): 573-584, here 577.
101. Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York, 2007), 300.
102. Edward Muir, "Introduction: Observing Trifles," in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Baltimore, 1991), vii-xxviii.
103. Struck, Ferris, and Revel, "Introduction," 577.
104. For a useful attempt to weave together a collection of biographies in the early modern period, though with very little methodological self-reflection, see Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550-1800 (Cambridge, 2008).
105. Natalie Zemon Davis, "Decentering History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World," History and Theory 50, no. 2 (May 2011): 188-202, here 190.
106. Struck, Ferris, and Revel, "Introduction," 577.
107. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1991).
108. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans.
109. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 1: 17-23;
110. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992);
111. Grove, Green Imperialism; Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, Calif., 1997);
112. Martin W. Lewis, "Dividing the Ocean Sea," Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (1999): 188-214.
113. Denis E. Cosgrove, Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore, 2001);
114. Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (New York, 2008);
115. Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans.
116. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, 1984);
117. Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology (London, 1972);
118. Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (Chicago, 1992);
119. Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton, N.J., 2000);
120. Mayor, Fossil Legends of the First Americans (Princeton, N.J., 2005).
121. David Woodward, "The Image of the Spherical Earth," Perspecta 25 (1989): 3-15;
122. Christine Garwood, Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea (London, 2007);
123. Glyndwr Williams, "Tupaia: Polynesian Warrior, Navigator, High Priest-and Artist," in Felicity A. Nussbaum, ed., The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 2003), 38-51.
124. Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York, 1997).
125. See note 8 above, plus C. A. Bayly, Vijayendra Rao, Simon Szreter, and Michael Woolcock, eds., History, Historians, and Development Policy: A Necessary Dialogue (New York, 2011);
126. William Coleman and Alina Sajed, eds., Fifty Key Thinkers on Globalization (London, 2013).
127. Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh; James V. H. Melton, From Alps to Low Country: Confession, Community, and Slavery on a Colonial Southern Frontier (New York, forthcoming).
128. See, for example, João José Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil: A história do levante dos malês em 1835 (São Paulo, 2008), 485-495;
129. Lisa Earl Castillo and Luis Nicolau Parés, "Marcelina da Silva: A Nineteenth-Century Candomblé Priestess in Bahia," Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 1 (2010): 1-27;
130. Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers.
131. Legal records of different kinds have also been used to illuminate the subjectivity as well as behavior of non-literate transoceanic actors.
132. See James H. Sweet, Domingos Á lvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011);
133. Walter Hawthorne, " 'Being now, as it were, one family': Shipmate Bonding on the Slave Vessel Emilia, in Rio de Janeiro and throughout the Atlantic World," Luso-Brazilian Review 45, no. 1 (2008): 53-77.
134. David Richardson, "Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58, no. 1 (2001): 69-92.
135. Christian, Maps of Time; Shryock and Smail, Deep History.
136. Wolfgang Müller, Henry Fricke, Alex N. Halliday, Malcolm T. McCulloch, and Jo-Anne Wartho, "Origin and Migration of the Alpine Iceman," Science 302, no. 5646 (2003): 862-866;
137. W. von Groenman Waateringe, "The Iceman's Last Days: The Testimony of Ostrya carpinifolia," Antiquity 85, no. 328 (2011): 434-440.
138. Thomas R. Trautmann, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, and John C. Mitani, "Deep Kinship," in Shryock and Smail, Deep History, 160-188.
139. The title character in Dani Kouyaté's perceptive film Këta: l'Heritage du griot (AFIX Productions, 1995) chides the parents of a bright Mande schoolboy, "There are several kinds of truth.. So don't tell [the boy] any more that his ancestors are gorillas.
140. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
141. Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, Conn., 1977);
142. Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925 (New Haven, Conn., 1980);
143. Thomas C. Holt, The Problem with Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore, 1992);
144. Keletso E. Atkins, The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843-1900 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1993);
145. David Lan, Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (Berkeley, Calif., 1985);
146. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1991, 1997).
147. Stuart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana, Ill., 1996);
148. Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil; João José Reis, Domingos Sodré, um sacerdote africano: Escravida ̃o, liberdade e candomblé na Bahia do século XIX (São Paulo, 2008).
149. Gyanendra Pandey, ed., Unarchived Histories: The "Mad" and the "Trifling" (London, forthcoming).
150. For an alternative view, see Mazlish, "Comparing Global History to World History.
151. On the movement of diseases and bacilli, see William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y.1976).
152. On the circulation of Chinese dragon motifs across Eurasia, see Matthew P. Canepa, "Theorizing Cross-Cultural Interaction among Ancient and Early Medieval Visual Cultures," Ars Orientalis 38 (2010): 7-29;
153. Dickran Kouymjian, "Chinese Elements in Armenian Miniature Painting in the Mongol Period," in Armenian Studies in Memoriam Häg Berbérian (Lisbon, 1986), 415-468.
154. On Mongol textiles and their role as vehicles of cross-cultural exchange, see Thomas T. Allsen, Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles (Cambridge, 1997).
155. For silver, see the influential work of Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldes, " 'Born with a Silver Spoon': The Origin of World Trade in 1571," Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 201-221;
156. Flynn and Giráldes, "Born Again: Globalization's Sixteenth-Century Origins (Asian/Global versus European Dynamics)," Pacific Economic History Review 13, no. 3 (2008): 359-387.
157. For porcelain, see Robert Finlay, "The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History," Journal of World History 9, no. 2 (1998): 141-187;
158. Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley, Calif., 2010).
159. Jerry H. Bentley, "The New World History," in Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza, eds., A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Malden, Mass., 2002), 393-416, here 393;
160. see also Bentley, "Introduction: The Task of World History," in Bentley, ed., The Oxford Handbook of World History (Oxford, 2011), 1-18.
161. William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 125.
162. I am grateful to Arash Khazeni for conversations with me on this point.
163. For background on the critique of Annales-style historiography by microhistorians in the 1970s and 1980s, see Jacques Revel, "Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social," in Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds., Histories: French Constructions of the Past, trans.
164. Arthur Goldhammer et al. (New York, 1995), 492-502;
165. Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth University: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Middletown, Conn., 2005), chap. 9.
166. See also the influential essay by Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, "The Name of the Game: Unequal Exchange and the Historiographic Marketplace," in Muir and Ruggiero, Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, 1-10.
167. See Ogborn, Global Lives; Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh; Davis, Trickster Travels; Jonathan D. Spence, The Question of Hu (New York, 1989);
168. Mercedes Garća-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe, trans.
169. Martin Beagles (Baltimore, 2003).
170. My thoughts here are partially influenced by Tonio Andrade, "A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory," Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2011): 573-591.
171. For a sophisticated theoretical formulation, see Francesca Trivellato, "Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History," California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (2011), http://escholarship. org/uc/item/0z94n9hq#;
172. for stimulating thoughts and absorbing vignettes from the world of early modern Eurasia, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World (Waltham, Mass., 2011).
173. For an early statement of pairing up global history with microhistory, see Andrade, "A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord.
174. Andrade's intervention and original idea was a welcome breath of fresh air at a time when few people were thinking about "conjugating" microhistory with global history.
175. However, Andrade does not tackle the body of scholarship produced by Italian microhistorians and misses an opportunity to deepen his insights by moving beyond the introduction of narrative into world history and exploring the analytical advantages that accrue when one uses a multiscopic lens accommodating both the macro and the micro.
176. Simon G. Haberle and Bruno David, eds., Peopled Landscapes: Archaeological and Biogeographic Approaches to Landscapes (Canberra, 2012).
177. These are just two examples of hundreds of masterfully written works: Martha Hodes, The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2006);
178. Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (Crows Nest, N.S.W., 2009).
179. See Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philadelphia, 2006).
180. An Australian Research Council-funded project, "Deepening Histories of Place: Exploring Indigenous Landscapes of National and International Significance," developed a database and uses various multimedia to explore a time-layered approach to landscape history.
181. However, it lacks the capacity to build in this kind of interactive, experiential component.
182. Deepening Histories of Place, www.deepeninghistories.anu.edu.au.
183. For transnational approaches, see John Maynard, Fight for Liberty and Freedom: The Origins of Australian Aboriginal Activism (Canberra, 2007);
184. Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 (Lincoln, Neb., 2009).
185. The Native American and Indigenous Studies Association conferences have promoted international exchanges.
186. Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath, and Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation (1994; rev. ed., Perth, 2006), chap. 1;
187. Ann McGrath, ed., Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown (St. Leonards, 1995).
188. These works stop and start inside nationally defined chronologies and within geographical parameters.
189. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (New York, 1985).
190. Laurajane Smith, Archaeological Theory and the Politics of Cultural Heritage (New York, 2004).
191. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C., 2010);
192. Robert Paton, "Pelican Dreaming" module on www. deepeninghistories.anu.edu.au.
193. Donald L. Fixico, Call for Change: The Medicine Way of American Indian History, Ethos, and Reality (Lincoln, Neb., 2013);
194. Martin Nakata, Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Disciplines (Canberra, 2007).
195. Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, eds., Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra, 2005), 13-15.
196. In particular, I have in mind presentations by David Armitage, "Horizons of History: Space, Time and the Future of the Past," Australian National University, August 16, 2013;
197. François Hartog, "The Future of a Very Old Name," Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., October 2013.
198. David Armitage and Alison Bashford, "Introduction: The Pacific and Its Histories," in David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds., Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (Basingstoke, forthcoming 2014).
199. See also David Armitage, "The International Turn in Intellectual History," plenary lecture, New York University, August 10, 2012.
200. we tend to ignore our closest neighbors-in Australia, New Zealand history is little taught, and although I will need some verification, I have the impression that not a great deal of Canadian and Mexican history is taught in the United States.
201. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000).
202. Women and Human Rights, Social Justice and Citizenship: International Historical Perspectives," June 30-July 2, 1998, Melbourne, Australia.
203. Geography and proximity counted, but good fundraising and organization by Pat Grimshaw and Sonia Smallacombe was crucial to its success.
204. See Karen Offen, "Founding the International Federation for Research in Women's History, 1987-2007," Women's History Review 20, no. 4 (2011): 491-495.
205. Some of the most expansive feminist scholars who then ventured into a more global orientation were originally "provincialists" in the sense of specializing in the study of India and countries of the British Commonwealth.
206. They expanded these to connective imperial histories, transnational studies, oceanic travel, and mobility.
207. Some examples are Antoinette Burton (Indian history), Patricia Grimshaw (Hawaii/New Zealand/Australia), and Catherine Hall (Caribbean and British history).
208. See also Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History.
209. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
210. J. F. A. Ajayi and R. A. Austen, "Hopkins on Economic Imperialism in West Africa," Economic History Review 25, no. 2 (1972): 303-306.
211. David Eltis and Lawrence C. Jennings, "Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era," American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (October 1988): 936-959, here 958-959.
212. Kristin Mann, Marrying Well: Marriage, Status, and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos (Cambridge, 1985);
213. Caroline H. Bledsoe, Contingent Lives: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa (Chicago, 2002).
214. Martin Chanock, Law, Custom, and the Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Portsmouth, N.H., 1998);
215. Katherine Luongo, Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900-1955 (Cambridge, 2011).
216. Omolade Adunbi, "The Nation's Two Bodies: Nigeria's Oil Creeks of Violence and the City of Sin," Institute of African Studies Seminar, October 10, 2013.
217. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000);
218. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2011);
219. Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830, 2 vols. (New York, 2003, 2009).
220. On the debate these texts and others have provoked, see Joseph M. Bryant, "The West and the Rest Revisited: Debating Capitalist Origins, European Colonialism, and the Advent of Modernity," Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 31, no. 4 (2006): 403-444, plus comments by Goldstone, Elvin, and Andrade in subsequent issues of the serial.
221. Jack Goody, in Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate (Cambridge, 2004) and earlier texts, has been a pivotal figure in the debate, but despite their early interest in some of its key questions, Africanist historians have as yet hardly entered the fray.
222. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Michigan State University's History Department and Matrix (the Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online) have initiated Biographies: The Atlantic Slave Data Network, which is developing a platform for researchers to upload, analyze, and visualize data on the lives of individual slaves throughout the Atlantic world.
223. One component of the project is an interactive electronic application, designed for use in public spaces, which enables users to trace the lives of individual slaves or networks of slaves in selected locations.
224. Make History Matter" is the motto of the excellent and innovative New-York Historical Society.
225. Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis (Chicago, 2003).
226. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History: Four Theses," Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 197-222.
227. Chaplin, Round about the Earth; Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens, Ga., 1996);
228. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).
229. Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, Calif., 2011).
230. For an exemplary model of work in this genre from which my own modest book was inspired, see Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, Conn., 2010).
231. On commodity chains, see Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells, "Commodity Chains in a Global Economy," in Emily S. Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting, 1870-1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 2012), 593-812;
232. Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, "Introduction: Commodity Chains in Theory and in Latin American History," in Topik, Marichal, and Frank, eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000 (Durham, N.C., 2006), 1-24.
233. For the role of the circulation of objects and commodities in world history, see Scott C. Levi, "Objects in Motion," in Northrop, A Companion to World History, 321-338.
234. For a brief overview, see David Morgan, The Mongols, 2nd ed. (Malden, Mass., 2007), 90-94.
235. 98 "Country trade" refers to the port-to-port trade of the Indian Ocean, usually carried out by private merchants as opposed to the chartered East India Companies.
236. For an attempt to quantify the movement of East India Company ships involved in country trade on behalf of Company officials who operated in the capacity of private merchants, see Emily Erikson and Peter Bearman, "Malfeasance and the Foundations for Global Trade: The Structure of English Trade in the East Indies, 1601-1833," American Journal of Sociology 112, no. 1 (July 2006): 195-230.
237. For New World silver, see Flynn and Giráldes, "Born Again"; Flynn and Giráldes, " 'Born with a Silver Spoon.
238. Jerry Bentley, "Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis," Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1999): 215-224, here 218.
239. See Flynn and Giráldez, "Born Again"; Kevin H. O'Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, "When Did Globalization Begin," European Review of Economic History 6 (2002): 23-50;
240. O'Rourke and Williamson, "Once More: When Did Globalization Begin," European Review of Economic History 8 (2004): 109-117.
241. For a helpful discussion of the debate and an important, innovative contribution to globalization conceptualized in terms of the development of "global consciousness" or awareness of globality that first occurred in Western Europe during the eighteenth century.
242. see David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge, 2012), 36.
243. See Jan De Vries, "The Limits of Globalization in the Early Modern World," Economic History Review 63, no. 3 (2010): 710-733, here 717.
244. De Vries, "The Limits of Globalization in the Early Modern World," 717.
245. See also the cognate notion of "archaic globalization" developed by C. A. Bayly in " 'Archaic' and 'Modern' Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena, c. 1750-1850," in Hopkins, Globalization in World History, 47-73.
246. See the seminal essay by Joseph Fletcher "Integrative History: Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern Period, 1500-1800," in Fletcher, Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia, ed. Beatrice Forbes Manz (Aldershot, 1995), 1-46, here 5;
247. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Islamic Eurasia," The Eurasian Context of the Early Modern History of Mainland South East Asia, 1400-1800, Special Issue, Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (July 1997): 735-762.