History without scale: The micro-spatial perspective1

Christian G. De Vito

Abstract

Micro-spatial history brings together the analytical perspective of microhistory and the
methodology of global history. It views historical processes as the outcomes of multiple social
practices across time, and across singular, yet connected places. This article argues that a micro-
spatial approach implies the rejection of the concept of ‘scale’ and is based on the avoidance of
the standard conflation between the type of analysis (micro/macro) and its spatial scope
(local/global). Grounding social processes opens up historical studies to views that are
alternative to the local/global, the agency/structure and the short-term/long-term divides.
Moreover, it allows seeing the construction of scales as an object of historical research. An
invitation to self-reflexivity on the epistemology and methodology of history, the micro-spatial
perspective also offers new visions of the social role of the historian, foregrounds ‘usable pasts’
that subvert contemporary commonplaces and accentuates the importance of scholarly
cooperation.

1
For their insightful comments on draft versions of this essay, I would like to thank: Marco Caligari;
Andrea Caracausi; Alida Clemente, Lorenzo D’Angelo; Laura Di Fiore; Henrique Espada Lima; Dagmar Freist;
Anne Gerritsen; John-Paul Ghobrial; Patrizia Guarnieri; Sallie A. Marston; Ozan Ozavcı; Annika Raapke; Franco
Ramella and Juliane Schiel. The title intentionally echoes the one of an important contribution to the debate on
‘scale’ among geographers: S.A. Marston, J.P. Jones III and K. Woodward, ‘Human geography without scale’,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, xxx, iv (2005), 416-432.

1
I. The ‘micro’, the ‘spatial’ and the question of scale
In conferences and publications, ‘scale’ has become the standard analytical tool used to
overcome the micro/macro and the local/global divides. One example can be found in the recent
discussion on the ‘futures of global history’ between Richard Drayton and David Motadel, on the
one hand, and David A. Bell and Jeremy Adelman, on the other. Notwithstanding significant
divergences and mutual reproachings, a striking common ground emerges around the need to
write multi- and trans-scalar histories. In the view of these scholars, and for John-Paul Ghobrial
in his introduction to this special issue, an approach based on jeux d’èchelles offers the concrete
possibility to integrate the global historical focus on the large scale, connections and structures,
with the microhistorical sensitiveness for ‘small spaces’ and agency.2
Diverging from this trend, this article proposes what I have called a ‘micro-spatial’ perspective
as a way of combining microhistory and global history. This approach views scale as a social
construction and an object of historical research, rather than using the concept of scale to analyse
history. Indeed, I argue here that a scalar approach essentializes precisely the divides that the
combination of microhistory and global history should aim to overcome, and obstructs more
productive ways to think about the making of historical processes. The micro-spatial perspective
conceptualizes historical processes as resulting from multiple social practices across time and
across singular, yet connected sites. Accordingly, it offers alternatives to the usual binaries ‘the
micro’ and ‘the macro’ – local/global and agency/structure – invoked by global historians, while
also seeking to overcome the opposition between short-term and long-term analysis. At the
crossroads of these theoretical and methodological insights, I argue that the possibility also
emerges for micro-spatial history to produce ‘usable pasts’ and critical reflections on the social
role of the historian.
With the aim to present the micro-spatial perspective, this article includes short references to
the other contributions to this special issue. It is not my intention to suggest that micro-spatial
history synthesizes the essays that precede this article. Indeed, on key issues it deliberately offers
a counterpoint to the arguments made by other contributors. More generally, reflecting on their
works is one of the ways I use here to highlight the similarities and differences of my approach
with concurrent perspectives on microhistory, global history, and the combinations thereof.
Let me begin by laying out what exactly I mean by micro-spatial history, and its genealogy at
the intersection of specific strands within microhistory and global history. Micro-spatial history
brings together the epistemological perspective of microhistory and the spatially-sensitive
methodology of global history. Here I define microhistory as the analytical approach by which
scholars derive the categories, spatial units, and periodisations of their research from the
constant and explicit interaction between three levels: the social practices revealed by the
sources; the researcher’s hypotheses and methodologies; and the knowledge derived from
available scholarship. This approach stands in opposition to macro-analytical history, where
categories, spatial units and periodisations are pre-determined, for example by fitting the archival
data into fixed taxonomies or by selecting one country or region in advance as the unit of analysis.
In turn, I define global history as the mind-set that questions Eurocentrism and methodological
nationalism, and highlights a spatially-sensitive way of writing history.
Microhistory and global history operate differently. Microhistory acts at the analytical level
and proposes a vision of history that foregrounds discontinuities in space and time, and the
centrality of historical agents, their practices and their strategies. Global history is primarily a

2
Richard Drayton and David Motadel, ‘Discussion_ the futures of global history’, Journal of Global
History, xiii (2018), 1-21.

2
methodological approach, characterized by its focus on connections that overcome political and
cultural boundaries. By acknowledging the distinct spheres of operation of microhistory and
global history, micro-spatial history rejects any conflation of the type of analysis (e.g.,
micro/macro) with its spatial scope (e.g., local/global). This differs from other on-going attempts
to bring together microhistory and global history – including those of the scholars mentioned at
the beginning of this article, and the perspective suggested by Sebastian Conrad – which are based
on the assumed associations of ‘micro’ with ‘local’, and ‘macro’ with ‘global’.3
As it has been appropriately observed, ‘microhistory never was one thing’, and a growing
awareness has emerged in the last years among global historians that the same applies to their
own field.4 Indeed, not only are there multiple streams to be found in each of the two sub-
disciplines but – I would like to contend – they are often contradictory, and in some cases
mutually excluding, as the conversation between Giovanni Levi and Jan de Vries in this special
issue very vividly reveals. A micro-spatial perspective thus emerges from a selection of those
specific strands within global history and microhistory that can be combined.
Global historians have contradictory understandings of ‘the global’.5 A macro-analytical
approach to global history, for example, clearly lies behind those studies that are based on
standardised taxonomies, and research built around the comparison of pre-defined ‘factors’
across the centuries, or across fixed (and often anachronistic) spatial units in order to ‘cover the
world’.6 Less explicit macro-analytical perspectives characterize historical works which seek to
reach across the globe by comparing large spatial units and civilizations.7 Yet, their exclusive and
predefined focus on large regions produces fundamental distortions at the methodological and
interpretative levels, including hampering the study of historical agency, downplaying
differentiations around space, class, gender and ethnicity, and shifting away from in-depth study
of primary sources.
What resonates more with the micro-spatial perspective I am advocating here are those
strands of global history that view ‘the global’ through an emphasis on space and connections that
stretch across cultural boundaries. This ‘spatial history’ includes approaches as different as
borders studies, ‘new imperial histories’ and ‘connected histories’ of metissage and violence in

3
Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton and Oxford, 2016), esp. pp. 129-132.
4
Quote in John Walton, James F. Brooks and Christopher R.N. DeCorse, ‘Introduction’, in James F.
Brooks, Christopher R.N. DeCorse and John Walton (eds.), Small Worlds. Method, Meaning, and Narrative in
Microhistory (Santa Fe, 2008), 12. For critical analyses of global history: Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the
Global Era (New York and London, 2014), especially 59-68; Angelika Epple, ‘Globale Mikrogeschichte. Auf
dem Weg zu einer Geschichte der Relationen’, in Ewald Hiebl and Ernst Langthaler (eds.), Im Kleinen das Groβe
suchen. Mikrogeschichte in Theorie und Praxis (Innsbruck, 2012), 37-47; Conrad, What is Global History?; Sven
Beckert and Dominique Sachsenmaier (eds.), Global History, Globally. Research and Practice around the World
(London, 2018). See also Jeroen Duindam’s contribution to this special issue.
5
For a more detailed critical analysis of current perspectives in global history: Christian G. De Vito and
Anne Gerritsen, ‘Micro-Spatial Histories of Labour: Towards a New Global History’, in Idem (eds.)., Micro-
spatial Histories of Global Labour (London, 2018), pp. 1-28.
6
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, ‘Covering the World: Textile Workers and Globalization, 1650-2000:
Experiences and Results of a Collective Research Project’, in Marcel van der Linden and Eva Himmelstoss (eds.),
Labour History Beyond Borders: Concepts and Explorations (Linz, 2009), 111-138; Patrick Manning, Big Data
in History: A World-Historical Archive (London, 2013). See also the Global Collaboratory on the History of
Labour Relations 1500-2000: https://collab.iisg.nl/web/labourrelations/about.
7
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the
European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York and London, 1974); André Gunder Frank,
ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1998); Jürgen Osterhammel,
The Transformation of the World. A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 2014).

3
‘contact zones’.8 Taken together, it corresponds to the view of global history referred to by
Angelika Epple as a ‘history of relations’, which starts its analysis ‘with a concrete place and a
concrete actor’ (and a concrete object), and points to the role of the spatial dimension in the
construction of history.9 This special issue includes excellent examples of empirical research
framed according to this principle (among others: Berg, Easterby-Smith, Gommans/de Hond, and
Riello).
There exist multiple and conflicting interpretations within microhistory too, and not all of
them are open to an encounter with spatial history.10 Some types of microhistory are based on
the exclusive association between ‘the micro’ and ‘the local’.11 Here, ‘scale reduction’ is taken to
convey the idea that specific sites are ‘fragments’ through which ‘universal’ processes can be
observed, similarly to the way social sciences approach case-studies as mere exemplifications of
predefined theories.12 A radicalized form of this perspective can be observed in the post-modern
interpretation of microhistory recently suggested by Sigurđur Gylfi Magnússon, which
essentializes the uniqueness of each place to the extent that it denies the very possibility of any
historical narrative of exchanges and connections.13 Similarly based on the association of the

8
On spatial history: Felix Driver and Raphael Samuel, ‘Spatial History: Re-thinking the Idea of Place’,
History Workshop Journal, xxxix (1995), v-vii; Richard White, ‘What is Spatial History?’, Stanford University
Spatial History Lab, 1 February 2010. On border studies: Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders:
Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford and New York, 1999); Raymond B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico.
A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham and London, 2004); Paul Readman, Cynthia
Radding and Chad Bryant (eds.), Borderlands in World History, 1700-1914 (Houndmills and New York, 2014).
On New Imperial Histories: Alan Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’,
History Compass, iv, i (2006); Stephen Howe (ed.), The New Imperial Histories Reader (London, 2009). For
connected histories related to the European expansion: Serge Gruzinski, Les quatre parties du monde. Histoire
d’une mondialisation (Paris, 2004); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, From the Tagus to the Ganges (Oxford, 2005);
Romain Bertrand, L’histoire à parts égales. Récits d’une rencontre Orient-Occident (XVIe-XVIIe siècle) (Paris,
2011); Christian J. Koot, Empire at the Periphery. British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of
the British Atlantic, 1621-1713 (New York and London, 2011); Rainer F. Buschmann, Iberian Visions of the
Pacific Ocean, 1507-1899 (New York, 2014).
9
Epple, ‘Globale Mikrogeschichte’, 42.
10
I have made this point also in: C.G. De Vito, ‘Verso una microstoria translocale (micro-spatial
history)’, Quaderni Storici, cl, iii (2015), 815-833. On the different strands within the Italian microstoria:
Henrique Espada Lima, A micro-história italiana. Escalas, indícios e singularidades (Rio de Janeiro, 2006).
11
István M. Szijartó, ‘Puzzle, fractal, mosaic. Thoughts on microhistory’ –
http://www.academia.edu/389075/Puzzle_fractal_mosaic._Thoughts_on_microhistory [all digital links consulted
on 17 April 2018]; Sigurđur Gylfi Magnússon and István M. Szijártó, What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice
(Abington, 2013), second part. Partly coinciding with this approach: Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris and Jacques
Revel, ‘Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History’, The International History Review, 33, 4 (2011),
573-84; Anne Gerritsen, ‘Scales of a Local: The Place of Locality in a Globalizing World’, in Douglas Northrop
(ed.), A Companion to World History (2012); ‘AHR Conversation: How Size Matters: The Question of Scale in
History’, American Historical Review, cxviii, iii (2013), 1431-72. For the microhistorians’ debate on the question
of scale: Revel, Giochi di scala. For empirical studies mostly based on this assumption: Brooks, DeCorse and
Walton (eds.), Small Worlds; Hiebl and Langthaler (eds.), Im Kleinen das Groβe suchen.
12
See John-Paul Ghobrial’s introduction to this issue. For a critique of the standard idea of ‘case-studies’
in the social sciences: T.M.S. Evens and Don Handelman (eds.), The Manchester School. Practice and
Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology (New York and Oxford, 2006); Michael Burawoy et al., Global
Ethnography (Berkeley, 2000); Michael Burawoy, The Extended Case Method. Four Countries, Four Decades,
Four Great Transformations, and One Theoretical Tradition (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2009). For an
interpretation of the Manchester School’s ‘extended-case study method’ that explicitly connects it to microhistory:
Don Handelman: ‘Microhistorical Anthropology. Toward a Prospective Perspective’, in Don Kalb and Herman
Tak, eds., Critical Junctions. Anthropology and History Beyond the Cultural Turn (New York and Oxford, 2005),
29-52; Idem, ‘The Extended Case. Interactional Foundations and Prospective Dimensions’, in Evens and
Handelman (eds.), The Manchester School, esp. 107-110.
13
Sigurđur Gylfi Magnússon, ‘“The singularization of history”: Social history and microhistory within
the postmodern state of knowledge’, Journal of Social History, 36, 3 (2003), 701-35; Idem, ‘Social History as

4
‘micro’ with the ‘local’ is Jacques Revel’s proposal to foreground the jeux d’échelles, or scale games,
between the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’.14 The key idea is that, by alternatively ‘zooming in’ and
‘zooming out’, different aspects become visible; thus, contrary to the micro-spatial perspective,
this approach conflates the type of analysis (micro/macro) and its spatial scope (local/global),
and assigns different heuristic potentials to the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’, in a way that prevents the
study of the relationships among sites across space.
Instead, a micro-spatial perspective draws from the more sophisticated conceptualization of
scale presented in two standard texts of microhistory: Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms
and Levi’s Inheriting Power.15 Here reference is made to the ‘reduction of scale’ to convey the idea
that, by using the ‘microscope’, aspects of a large historical process can be observed that would
remain invisible under the homogeneous categories of macro-history. As Levi has repeatedly
highlighted, this specific view of the ‘reduction of scale’ has nothing to do either with the ‘small’
dimension of the research object or with the limitation of the spatial setting.16 In fact, even if Levi’s
and Ginzburg’s pioneering monographs addressed specific villages, recent works reinforce the
notion that this form of micro-analytical observation need not necessarily be bound spatially.17
In this collection of essays, Guillaume Calafat’s account of the Pietro vs Franchi ‘itinerant dispute’,
John-Paul Ghobrial’s analysis of Joseph Georgirenes’ peregrinations, and Filippo de Vivo’s
‘microhistories of long-distance information’ provide particularly convincing additional
evidences. Moreover, this spatialization of microhistory can build on the approach of those Italian
microhistorians who have stressed the socially and historically constructed nature of places and
highlighted the need to investigate the connections among sites.18 This move is further reinforced
by the substitution of the ‘centre’/‘periphery’ pair with the concepts of ‘centrality’ and ‘de-

‘sites of memory’? The institutionalization of history: microhistory and the grand narrative’, Journal of Social
History, 39 (2006), 891-913; Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory?, second part; Sigurđur Gylfi
Magnússon, ‘Far-reaching microhistory: The use of microhistorical perspective in a globalized world’, Rethinking
History (2016), 1-30.
14
Jacques Revel, ‘Microanalisi e costruzione sociale’, in Idem (ed.), Giochi di scala. La microstoria alla
prova dell’esperienza (Roma, 2006), 18-44. For a similar approach: Juliane Schiel, ‘Zwichen Panoramablick und
Nahaufnahme. Wie viel Mikroanalyse brauch die Globalgeschichte?’ in Lohse Tillmann and Benjamin Scheeler
(eds.), Europa in der Welt des Mittelalters. Ein Kolloquium für und mit Michael Borgolte (Berlin, 2014), 119-
140. For a critical interpretation: Maurizio Gribaudi, ‘Scala, pertinenza, configurazione’, in Revel, Giochi di scala,
especially 121-2; Angelo Torre, ‘I luoghi dell’azione’, in Revel, Giochi di scala, 301-17..
15
Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist (Chicago 1988); Carlo Ginzburg, The
Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, 1992). For theoretical insights on
microhistory inspired by this approach: Giovanni Levi, ‘Un problema di scala’, in Sergio Bologna et al. (eds.)
Dieci interventi sulla storia orale (Torino, 1981), 75-82; Giovanni Levi, ‘Il piccolo, il grande e il piccolo.
Intervista a Giovanni Levi’, Meridiana, 10 (1990), especially 223-7; Idem, ‘On Microhistory’, in Peter Burke
(ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park, 1992), 93-113; Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory:
Two or Three Things That I know about It’, Critical Inquiry, 10, 1 (1993), 10-35.
16
See especially, Levi: ‘Il piccolo, il grande, il piccolo’ and ‘On microhistory’.
17
C. Ginzburg: ‘Latitude, Slaves, and Bible: An Experiment in Microhistory’, Critical Inquiry, xxxi
(2005), 665-683; ‘Microhistory and world history’, in The Cambridge World History, vol, 6, part 2 (Cambridge,
2017), 446-473. For similar arguments: F. de Vivo, ‘Prospect or refuge? Microhistory, history on the large scale.
A response’, Cultural and Social History, vii, iii (2010), 387-397; L. Putnam, ‘To Study the Fragments/Whole:
Microhistory and the Atlantic World’, Journal of Social History, xxxix, iii (2006), 615-630.
18
Maurizio Gribaudi, ‘Des micro-méchanismes aux configurations globales: Causalité et temporalité
historiques dans les formes d’évolution et de l’administration française au XIX siècle’, in Jürgen Schlumbohm
(ed.), Mikrogeschichte Makrogeschichte : Complementär oder inkommensurabel? (Göttingen, 1998), 83-128;
Angelo Torre (ed.), Per vie di terra. Movimenti di uomini e di cose nelle società di antico regime (Roma, 2007);
Idem, Luoghi. La produzione di localitá in etá moderna e contemporanea (Roma, 2011); Franco Ramella, ‘Reti
sociali, famiglie e strategie migratorie’, in Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina De Clementi and Emilio Franzina (eds.),
Storia dell’emigrazione italiana (Roma, 2001), vol. I, 143-160; Antonella Romano e Sabina Brevaglieri (eds.),
‘Produzione di saperi, costruzione di spazi’, Quaderni Storici, i (2013), special issue.

5
centrality’, which highlight the relativity of the position of each site within complex and ever-
changing networks.19
In contrast to prevalent approaches to global microhistory, the micro-spatial perspective
advocated here does not employ the concept of scale. On a basic level, the invocation of ‘scale’ is
problematic because of its potential for carrying multiple meanings and, therefore, generating
continuous miscommunication. Indeed, scholars have used ‘scale’ to point to contradictory issues
such as the supposed geographical extension of the historical processes under study, the spatial
scope of their own research and their lenses of observation.20 More importantly, the use of the
concept of scale remains misguided because, both in common sense and in most of its academic
uses, ‘scale’ regularly conveys the idea that historical processes are located at certain ‘levels’ of
the social or that distinct ‘levels’ of observation can reveal different aspects.21 Thus, many
historians write about the ‘macro’, the ‘global’ or ‘large’ scale to mean an approach centred on the
‘structural’, the ‘abstract’ and the ‘orderliness’; while the ‘micro’, ‘local’ or ‘small’ scale would
imply a perspective that is ‘agency’-based, ‘concrete’, ‘complex’ or ‘contingent’.22 Even when
scales are not placed in a top-down hierarchy – the macro/global/large scale being usually
thought as ‘higher’ than the micro/local/small one – this conceptual view attributes fixed
characteristics and possibilities of knowledge to each historical ‘level’ and to each ‘level’ of
observation. In this way, a scalar perspective reinforces precisely those divides between the
‘local’ and the ‘global’ and between ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ that an approach informed
simultaneously by microhistory and global history should seek to overcome. Indeed, speaking in
terms of ‘scale’ precludes more productive ways of thinking about how historical processes are
generated. For this reason, scholars across several different disciplines have called for the
avoidance of any ontological reference to ‘scale’ as a necessary step towards developing more
comprehensive understandings of social reality.23
Micro-spatial history embraces this analytical vision. Whereas ontological conceptualizations
of scale locate historical phenomena along a layered order, micro-spatial history embeds them
within social practices across singular, yet connected places. In the following sections, I present
this approach in some detail. I start by addressing the dialectics between the distinctiveness and
connectedness of places as an alternative to the local/global divide; then I complement this
spatial view by foregrounding the importance of the study of social practices in order to
deconstruct the agency/structure divide; furthermore, I point to the role of time in the making of
places, connections and social practices as an alternative to the short-term/long-term divide. The

19
Anne Radeff, ‘Centres et périphéries ou centralités et décentralités?’, in Torre, Per vie di terra, 21-32.
20
For an interesting overview, and the related selection of articles: Courney J. Campbell, ‘Space, Place
and Scale: Human Geography and Spatial History in Past & Present’, Past & Present, gtw006 (2014),
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtw006. For a similar critique: Doreen Massey, ‘The Political Place of Locality
Studies’, in Idem, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis, 1994), esp. 129-34. Levi has also admitted that his use
of the concept of ‘scale reduction’ has been ‘a source of misunderstanding for many people in discussion of
microhistory’, especially regarding the question of the spatial unit of microhistorical research: Levi, ‘On
microhistory’, p. 100.
21
For a similar argument: Putnam, ‘To Study the Fragments/Whole’, 616.
22
Marston, Jones III and Woodward, ‘Human geography without scale’, 421. See also: Zsuzsa Gille,
‘Global Ethnography 2.0. From Methodological Nationalism to Methodological Materialism’, in Anna Amelina,
Devrimsel D. Nergiz, Thomas Faist and Nina Glick Schiller (eds.), Beyond Methodological Nationalism. Research
Methodologies for Cross-Border Studies (New York and London, 2012), 98-101.
23
Gribaudi, ‘Scala, pertinenza, configurazione’, 121-122; Marston, Jones III and Woodward, ‘Human
geography without scale’, 417; Theodore R. Schatzki, ‘Praxistheorie als flache Ontologie’, in Hilmar Schäfer
(ed.), Praxistheorie. Ein soziologisches Forschungsprogramm (Bielefeld, 2016), 29-43; David Featherstone,
Resistance, Space and Political Identities. The Making of Counter-Global Networks (Malden and Oxford, 2008),
43.

6
concluding section addresses the ways un-thinking scale offers tools to reconsider contemporary
issues and the social role of historians.

II. Beyond the local/global divide: Connected singularities

Micro-spatial history grounds historical processes spatially, rather than situating them at the
‘local’ and ‘global’ levels. Thus, for example, it does not make a separation between a bird-eye
(‘global’) view of slavery and a detailed analysis of its specific (‘local’) features. Instead, it looks
behind the concept of ‘slavery’, and addresses the diverse practices by which men, women and
children were turned into ‘slaves’; it asks what ’slavery’ meant to different individuals and groups
within specific localities; and it studies how and why the legal status and subjective perceptions
of ‘slavery’ changed across time. From this perspective, we may say that micro-spatial history
deconstructs universalistic concepts and re-constructs the histories, meanings and
representations that are submerged within them.24
Even concepts that seem to describe ‘universal’ historical processes are in fact informed by
the study of singular configurations. The experiences of enslaved workers in the nineteenth-
century Atlantic world – say in a sugar plantations of Western Cuba, a coffee plantation in the
region of Sâo Paulo, or a household in New Orleans – differed greatly from each other, and indeed
within each of these locations, which means that ‘slavery’ is best understood as a ‘context-specific
social relationship’.25 At the same time, the distinctiveness of each site does not stem from its
isolation, but rather from the specificity of the connections that animate it. The reader might recall
that Maxine Berg in her contribution to this issue describes even the ‘small obscure and “far-away
place”’ of Nootka Sound as ‘a single locality within the broad framework of global trade flows’.
Similarly, two sugar plantations on Western Cuba in the nineteenth-century might differ
considerably because the workforce of the former was entirely constituted by enslaved Africans,
while Chinese ‘coolies’ and convicts from the outskirts of Havana were employed in the latter
together with the African slaves. Indeed, each place is made by the crossing of multiple social
networks.26 Moreover, because places are contact zones, connections unite multiple sites.27 The
traces of individuals, groups, objects, ideas and representations can therefore be followed across
space. We can focus on the global biographies of the enslaved people, of their coerced and

24
This methodology resonates with Michel Foucault’s suggestion ‘not to address the universals by using
history as critical method, but rather start from the assumption of the inexistence of the universals and ask which
history is possible’: Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France. 1978-1979
(Paris, 2004), 5. For a similar approach: Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History. A Global Approach
(New Haven and London, 2012); Juliane Schiel and Stefan Hanß, ‘Semantics, Practices and Transcultural
Perspectives on Mediterranean Slavery’, in idem (eds.), Mediterranean Slavery Revisited (500-1800). Neue
Perspektiven auf Mediterrane Sklaverei (500-1800) (Zürich, 2014), 11-23. See also: Christian G. De Vito,
‘Connected singularities. Convict labour in late colonial Spanish America (1760s-1800), in De Vito and Gerritsen,
Micro-spatial Histories of Global Labour; 171-202.
25
Schiel and Hanß, ‘Semantics, Practices and Transcultural Perspectives’, 15.
26
See esp. Massey: Space, Place, and Gender; For Space (Los Angeles, London and New Delhi, 2005).
For similar reflections in the field of anthropology: Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, ‘Culture, Power, Place:
Ethnography at the End of an Era’, in Idem (eds), Culture, Power, Place. Explorations in Critical Anthropology
(Duham and London, 1997). 1-29.
27
This point echoes long-standing ‘multi-sited’ approaches to ethnography and more recent attempts to
spatialize archaeology: G.E. Marcus in: ‘Ethnography in/of the world system: The Emergence of Multi-Sited
Ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, xxiv (1995), esp. 105-10; K. Ryzewski, ‘Multiply Situated
Strategies? Multi-Sited Ethnography and Archeology’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, xix, ii
(June 2012), 241-68; Mary C. Beaudry and Travis G. Parno (eds.), Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement (New
York, 2013); Jim Leary (ed.), Past Mobilities. Archaeological Approaches to Movement and Mobility (London,
2016).

7
voluntary working mates and of those who were in charge of their supervision; we can address
the chains of the commodities that the enslaved workers produced, and those that were necessary
to cloth and feed them; and we can study the circulation of ideas on slavery and on the
management of forced labour across several sites, both in the colonies and the metropoles. In the
investigation of connected singularities, the concept of ‘translocality’ proves particularly useful,
as it draws attention to the specificity of each site and each connection, and foregrounds the need
for integrated studies of connections within and beyond political, administrative, linguistic and
cultural boundaries.28
Moving beyond the local/global divide and studying connected singularities invite a
rethinking of comparison. Macro-analytical comparisons are usually based on predefined
parameters applied across spatial units considered as internally homogeneous and mutually
isolated. For example, ‘slave systems’ in the early modern Atlantic world, the Mediterranean and
Central Asia are compared by looking at the modes of acquisition of slaves, legal regimes and
patterns of manumissions.29 Instead, from a micro-spatial perspective, as the borders of each
place become porous under the action of multiple exchanges, direct and indirect entanglements
between the units that are being compared need to be taken into consideration. 30 Thus, we need
to acknowledge that discourses and practices of captivity and ransom in various localities across
the Mediterranean influenced the politics of slaving of African and indigenous individuals in the
Americas; and that flows of enslaved men and women from Central Asia played a key role in
shaping various configurations of slavery in the Mediterranean world. There is a convergence
here with methodologies that have been elaborated recently in order to bring together
comparison and connections. Some of them are particularly relevant to the micro-spatial
perspective. Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s connected histories highlight how historical processes
develop at the cross-roads of multiple local and regional interactions that emerge in various parts
of the world.31 Sandra Curtis Comstock’s incorporating comparisons provide another option,
emerging from the reflexivity on the fluid and historically defined character of categories and
spatial borders.32 Finally, through the concept of ‘politics of comparison’ especially Ann Laura
Stoler and Clare Anderson have insisted on the importance of the comparisons established by

28
The concept of translocality has been introduced in historical studies in Ulrike Freitag and Achim von
Oppen (eds), Translocality: The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective (Leiden and Boston,
2010). For its use in other disciplines: Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta (eds.), Translocal Geographies.
Spaces, Places, Connections (Farnham, 2009); Mark-Anthony Falzon, Multi-sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis
and Locality in Contemporary Research (Farnham, 2009); Simon Coleman and Pauline von Helleran (eds.), Multi-
Sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods (New York, 2011).
29
For example: Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death. A Comparative Study (Cambridge and
London, 1982); Enrico Dal Lago and Constantina Katsari (eds.), Slave Systems. Ancient and Modern (Cambridge,
2008); Jean Allain (ed.), The Legal Understanding of Slavery. From the Historical to the Contemporary (Oxford,
2012).
30
For broader changes in the field of comparative history: Jürgen Kocka and Heinz Gerhard Haupt,
‘Comparison and Beyond. Traditions, Scope, and Perspectives of Comparative History’, in Idem (eds.),
Comparative and Transnational History. Central European Approaches and New Perspectives (New York and
Oxford 2009), 1-30. For empirical studies including explicit reflection on alternative approaches to comparison:
Dale Tomich and Michael Zeuske, ‘Introduction: The Second Slavery. Mass Slavery, World-Economy, and
Comparative Microhistories’, Review (Fernand Braudel Centre), 31, 2, Part I (2008), 91-100; Isabelle Grangaud
and Simona Cerutti, ‘Comparer par cas. Esquisse d’un projet comparatiste’, in Antoine Lilti et al. (eds.),
L’expérience historiografique. Autour de Jacques Revel (Paris, 2016), 151-162.
31
S. Subrahmanyam, ‘Beyond Incommensurability: Understanding Inter-Imperial Dynamics’, Revue
d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, liv-ivbis, v (2007), 34-53.
32
Sandra Curtis Comstock: ‘Incorporating Comparisons in the Rift. Making Use of Cross-Place Events
and Histories in Moments of World Historical Change’, in Amelina et al., Beyond Methodological Nationalism,
176-197.

8
historical actors themselves across places and processes.33 Taken as a whole, these approaches
make us rethink comparison as the analysis of the dialectics between the specificity and
connectivity of each place, and as the ethnographic study of the impact of multifaceted
connections on different sites. They allow the study of the way discourses and practices, for
example those related to slavery, were produced by the translocal circulation of ideas, individuals
and techniques, and in turn how they differently influenced the experiences of individuals
imbricated in other sites.

III. Beyond the agency/structure divide: Social practices, power and the construction
of scales
Not only does micro-spatial history avoid the problems arising from conflating micro/local
and macro/global, but the perspective also enables us to go beyond traditional approaches to
‘micro’ and ‘macro’ as synonyms of levels where ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ are respectively
located.34 It acknowledges that what are usually referred to as agency and structures are in fact
embedded in concrete historical practices. This assumption is based on a view of human agency
which, rather than taking it as a pure manifestation of free will, sees it as torn between individual
choices, household and group strategies, and institutional constraints, and therefore mediated by
social relations, power regimes and material limitations. Individuals are neither totally free to act
at will, nor passive spectators of ‘necessary’ circumstances. Indeed, precisely their awareness of
having a ‘limited rationality’ and a limited access to relevant information triggers practices and
strategies aimed to better their situations, or at least reduce their incertitude.35 At the same time,
‘structures’ are not abstract entities, but rather constructed by the social practices of located and
connected individuals and groups.36 Furthermore, they are embedded in specific social rules, legal

33
A.L. Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post)
Colonial Studies’, The Journal of American History, lxxxviii, iii (Dec. 2001), 829-65; Clare Anderson, ‘After
Emancipation: Empires and Imperial Formations’, in Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland (eds.),
Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World (Manchester, 2014), 113-127.
34
For an extensive debate among sociologists based on these premises: Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard
Giesen, Richard Münch and Neil J. Smelser (eds.), The Micro-Macro Link (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London,
1987).
35
Levi, Inheriting Power, 43-44. For a critique of the standard use of ‘agency’ in the scholarship: W.
Johnson, ‘On Agency’, journal of social history, xxxvii, i (Fall 2003), 113-24. See also: Juliane Schiel, Isabelle
Schürch and Aline Steinbrecher, ‘Von Sklaven, Pferden und Hunden. Trialog über den Nutzen aktueller Agency-
Debatten für die Sozialgeschichte’, in Caroline Arni, Matthieu Leimgruber, Simon Teutscher (eds.), Neue
Beiträge zur Sozialgeschichte / Nouvelles contributions à l’histoire sociale (Zürich, 2017), 17-48; Alida Clemente,
‘Micro e macro tra narrativismo postmoderno e scelta razionale: il problema della agency e la storia economica
come scienza sociale’, in Daniele Andreozzi (ed.), Quantitá/qualitá: La storia tra sguardi micro e
generalizzazioni (Palermo, 2017), 35-56.
36
For important insights from microhistory, Alltagsgeschichte and historical prexaeology: Ginzburg,
‘Microhistory’: Levi, Inheriting Power; Gribaudi, ‘Scala, pertinenza, configurazione’; Hans Medick,
‘“Missionaries in the rowboat”? Ethnological ways of knowing as a challenge to social history’, in Alf Lüdtke
(ed.), The History of Everyday Life. Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, 1995);
Dagmar Freist, ‘Historische Praxeologie als Micro-Historie’, in Arndt Brendecke (ed.), Praktiken der frühen
Neuzeit. Akteure – Handlungen – Artefakte (Köln, Weimar, Wien, 2015), 62-77; idem, ‘A global microhistory of
the early modern period. Social sites and the interconnectedness of human lives’, Quaderni Storici, 52, 155, 2
(August 2017), 537-555; Eleonora Canepari, ‘Keeping in Touch: Migrant Workers’ Trans-Local Ties in Early
Modern Italy’, in De Vito and Gerritsen (eds.), Micro-Spatial Histories, 203-27. For key contributions in social
practice theory: Pierre Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (Paris, 1980); Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984); Theodore R. Schatzki, Social Practices. A Wittgensteinian Approach to
Human Activity and the Social (Cambridge, 1996); idem. The Site of the Social. A Philosophical Account of the
Constitution of Social Life and Change (Pennsylvania, 2002). For a discussion on the potential and boundaries of
historical praxeology: ‘Was ist und was kann die historische Praxeologie? Ein runder Tisch’, in Lucas Haasis and

9
systems, institutions and customs, which seek to channel the practices and strategies of multiple
actors according to various, and contradicting, interests and visions.
The continuous entanglement and conflict between individual and collective strategies, on the
one hand, and the constraints imposed on them by embedded ‘structures’ produce regularities
(as well as ‘deviances’). These regularities can be studied by historians, who can therefore
construct ‘generative’ models with the aim to order and analyse their empirical data.37 To this
end, in proposing concepts built at the crossroads of empirical data, secondary literature and
theoretical insights, scholars can also employ ‘the categories used, in the sources, by the
protagonists of the practices illustrated by the sources themselves’.38
Addressing practices and strategies of historical actors is crucial to identify the ‘pertinent
contexts’ of any large historical processes.39 Recall, for example, Diego de Avila’s affair presented
by Romain Bertrand earlier in this special issue: its context is not Manila or Santisimo Nombre de
Jesus, but the bundle of multi-sited social practices in which the prominent characters’ ‘conflicting
moral worlds’ were grounded. This view resonates with John-Paul Ghobrial’s insistence on
plurality in his search for an appropriate contextualization of “Eastern Christianity” through the
diverse and multi-sited lives of Joseph Georgirenes, Elias of Babylon and many others. Here, the
point is not to see each place as one “context”, but rather to acknowledge that the context of a
social process lies in multiple localities, individuals, objects and knowledges. Seen from the
perspective of the researcher, this means that the relevant unit of analysis does not coincide with
one single place, connection or individual, but with the whole of the networks created by their
interactions related to the specific historical object that is being observed. For this reason, the
spatial scope of an object of research cannot be pre-determined (e.g., global, national, local) and
does not imply the need to cover whole regions, or the planet. It rather requires the choice of
specific processes, flows, individuals, groups and sites. This co-existence between spatial
expansion and in-depth analysis of selected aspects makes micro-spatial history challenging, but
feasible: following social practices compels to address multiple spaces (and archives), but
simultaneously provides a clear guide for such exploration.
Acknowledging the bottom-up and entangled construction of historical processes offers
procedures of generalization. Indeed, contrary to what Jan de Vries argues in this special issue, I
would like to contend that microhistories can ‘aggregate to macro-level and global histories’ (to
use his own wording), although neither by resorting to the abstract models of the social sciences
nor simply by juxtaposing empirical case studies. As Osvaldo Raggio and Angelo Torre have
observed, in microhistory ‘the rules that action gives itself in its development’ are the primary
tool to generalize historical knowledge.40 Far from being an empiricist claim, this connects to the

Constantin Rieske (eds.), Historische Praxeologie. Dimensionen vergangenen Handels (Paderborn, 2015), 199-
236.
37
On the concept of ‘generative model’: Fredrik Barth, Processes and Form in Social Life. Selected
essays of Fredrik Barth, vol. 1 (London, Boston and Henley, 1981), esp. chapters 2 and 5. On the influence of
Barth’s interpretation on microhistory: Paul-André Rosental, ‘Costruire il “macro” attraverso il “micro”: Fredrik
Barth e la microstoria’, in Revel, ed., Giochi di scala, 147-165. See also Levi’s article in this collection.
38
Torre, Introduzione, 13. On the relationship between norms and practices: Simona Cerutti, ‘Normes et
pratiques, ou de la légitimité de leur opposition’, in Bernard Lepetit (ed.), Les formes de l’expérience. Une autre
histoire sociale (Paris, 2013), 175-203. On the actors’ ‘competences’: Luc Boltanski, L’amour et la justice comme
compétences. Trois essais de sociologie de l’action (Paris, 1990).
39
On ‘pertinent context’ see for example: Luciano Allegra, ‘Ancora a proposito di micro-macro’, in
Paola Lanaro (ed.), Microstoria. A venticinque anni da L’eredità immateriale (Milano, 2011), 59-68. For
resonating concepts: Barth, Process and Form in Social Life; Schatzki, The Site of the Social, 60-65 and 146.
40
Osvaldo Raggio and Angelo Torre, ‘Prefazione’, in Edoardo Grendi, In altri termini. Etnografia e
storia di una società di antico regime (Milano, 2004), 33. For this understanding of generalization: Levi, ‘On

10
insistence of many microhistorians on the need to integrate systematically empirical study and
conceptual interpretation throughout the whole research process. Indeed, micro-analytical
procedures of generalization are essentially methodological, rather than content-based: what is
generalizable is not the peculiar findings about a historical process in a given place or period, but
rather the way the context is selected and the problem addressed, and what the research reveals
about the complexity of a given historical process. This approach allows focusing on large
historical questions in highly contextualized studies, whereas the allegedly universal concepts
and taxonomies of macro-analytical history explicitly (over)simplify the historical processes. For
this reason, ‘exceptional’ documents can play a key role in microhistorical research: not because
they describe circumstances of universal value, but precisely because they highlight the ‘normal’
discontinuities, contradictions and fragmentations of the historical fabric. This heuristic potential
has been captured by Grendi’s oxymoron: the ‘exceptional normal’.41 At the same time, problem-
based and bottom-up generalizations offer the possibility to develop the kind of cross-cultural
comparisons suggested by Jeroen Duindam in his contribution. That is to say, besides promoting
the connected comparisons I referred to in the previous section, the micro-spatial approach can
stimulate comparisons between pertinent contexts (in the sense specified above) that are
chronologically or spatially unconnected, but unified by common research questions (rather than
by predefined models and taxonomies).
Deconstructing macro-analytical concepts, grounding historical processes and foregrounding
social practices do not amount to embracing the rhetoric of ubiquitous and undifferentiated
connections, circulations, exchanges and flows that haunts the corridors of global history.42 The
study of the social and historical construction of ‘vertical’ ideas and practices is a fundamental
part of the micro-spatial endeavour. Categories related to gender, class, race, ethnicity and
nationality are socially constructed, yet they have a real impact on the lives of groups and
individuals, and on the legitimation of institutions. Thus, we need to address ‘the way power has
clustered around certain categories and is exercised against others’, or how multilateral
processes of categorization are connected with processes of subordination.43 The micro-
analytical approach is especially sensitive to discontinuities and inequalities and to their links
with the uneven distribution of power across space and social groups. Building on this tradition,
micro-spatial history seeks to bring power back at the centre of historical narratives, through the

Microhistory’, 110-111; Edoardo Grendi, Il Cervo e la Repubblica. Il modello ligure di antico regime (Torino,
1993), 34, 72, 199-202; Angelo Torre, ‘Comunità e località’, in Lanaro, Microstoria, 54-57. For a broader
discussion on the issue: Espada Lima, A micro-história italiana, 219, 260-62.
41
E. Grendi, ‘Micro-analisi e storia sociale’, Quaderni Storici, xxxv (1977), 512. See also: Hans Medick,
‘Entlegene Geschichte? Sozialgeschichte und Mikro-Historie im Blickfeld der Kulturanthropologie’, in Joachim
Matthes (ed.), Zwischen den Kulturen? Die Sozialwissen- schaften vor dem Problem des Kulturvergleichs
(Göttingen 1992), 167–178, see esp. 168; J. Clyde Mitchell, ‘Case and Situation Analysis’, in Evens and
Handelman (eds.), The Manchester School, 29, 36-7. For an empirical study based on these premises: Sumit
Sarkar, ‘The Kalki-Avatar of Bikrampur. A Village Scandal in Early-Twentieth-Century Bengal’, reprinted in
Idem, Essays of a Lifetime. Reformers, Nationalists, Subalterns (Bangalore et al., 2018), 312-368. Incidentally,
this understanding of the concept of “exceptional normal” diverges with the one proposed by de Vries in his
contribution.
42
For examples of awareness of this risk: Maxine Berg (ed.), Writing the History of the Global:
Challenges for the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, 2013), especially Jan de Vries’ e Peer Vries’ contributions; S.
Gänger, ‘Circulation: reflections on circularity, entity, and liquidity in the language of global history’, Journal of
Global History, xii, iii (2017), 303-18.
43
Kimberle Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against
Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review, 43, 6 (July 1991), 1297; Stefan Hirschauer (ed.), Un/doing Differences:
Praktiken der Humandifferenzierung (Weilerswist, 2017).

11
analysis of its concrete manifestations across space and in the configurations of social practices
and networks.
This is perhaps one area where the concept of scale might be useful: neither as a notion that
describes allegedly existing ‘sizes’ or ‘levels’, nor as a tool to observe historical processes. Rather,
as a social construction, scale can be studied to understand the ways in which historical actors
think and produce ‘vertical’ binaries such as local/global, agency/structure and
periphery/centre.44 I am suggesting a shift from using these concepts – and the notion of scale –
as heuristic tools to turning them into objects of historical study. To this end, as Andrew Herod
and Melissa W. Write have observed, we can build a research agenda around questions
concerning ‘how our world is scaled, how we think about such scaling, and how social actors go
about attempting to scale their own activities in ways that allow them to exercise power or that
facilitate their denial of power to others’.45 For example, we may ask ourselves which discourses,
representations and practices contributed to construct certain places as the ‘centre’ and other as
‘peripheries’, notwithstanding the multi-sited and multi-actors practices that lay behind those
historical processes, as in the case of the Atlantic slave trade. At the same time, we can address
the way events originated in specific sites were appropriated elsewhere and became associated
with widespread concepts and ideologies, triggering broad multi-sited debates.46 In this special
issue Zoltán Biedermann showcases the potential of this approach in his sophisticated analysis of
the capitalization of (fragile and ambiguous) long-distance diplomatic engagement for the
internal power consolidation of specific social actors. Finally, we can reverse the perspective and
study the multiple traces that the processes of scaling have left across space and in the material
culture, as testimonies of inequality and discontinuity: we can look for signs of the international,
gender and ethnic/racial division of labour; investigate the shifting geographies of state power;
and explore the construction of specific places at the cross-roads of the areas of influence of
multiple institutions.47

IV. Beyond temporal scales: Time and the making of places, connections and social
practices

When scholars view ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ as belonging to different levels, they do not only
place them at the ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ scales respectively, but often also at distinct temporal scales.
Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranée provides an unambiguous example in this respect, with its
famous tri-partition among the ‘almost imperceptible’ history of the relationship between
humans and the environment, the history ‘with slow but perceptible rhythms’ of civilisations,
institutions and social groups, and the history ‘of brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations’ of the

44
For a survey: S.A. Marston, ‘The social construction of scale’, Progress in Human Geography, xxiv,
ii (2000), 219-242. For an insightful analysis of scaling and translocality: L. Porst and P. Sakdapolrak, ‘How scale
matters in translocality: Uses and potentials of scale in translocal research’, Erdkunde, lxxi, ii (2017), 111-126. A
not fully developed intuition about the need to study the making of scale is presented in Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing,
Friction. An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton and Oxford, 2005), 57-58, 76 and 271.
45
Andrew Herod and Melissa W. Wright, ‘Placing Scale: An Introduction’, in Idem (eds,), Geographies
of Power: Placing Scale (Oxford, 2002), 2.
46
For example: Nicola Pizzolato, ‘“On the Unwary and the Weak”: Fighting Peonage in Wartime United
States: Connections, Categories, Scales’, in De Vito and Gerritsen, Micro-Spatial Histories, 291-312.
47
Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour. Social Structures and the Geography of Production
(Houndsmills and London, 1995); Neil Brenner, New State Spaces. Urban Governance and the Rescaling of
Statehood (Oxford, 2004). See also: A. Lowenhaupt Tsing, “On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not
Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales”, Common Knowledge, xviii, iii (2012), 505-524.

12
everyday life, or histoire événementielle.48 The persistence of this scalar approach to the
relationship between time and history is evident too in Sebastian Conrad’s advocation of
temporal jeux d’èchelles: in his view, by zooming in on ‘specific moments and short time frames’
we can expect to gain insights into ‘personal decisions and individual agency’; conversely, an
extended time frame would bring ‘more anonymous factors’ to the fore. 49 Jo Guldi and David
Armitage’s The History Manifesto reveals a similar mind-set, albeit with less subtlety than
Conrad’s. Not only do the two scholars reproduce the standard separation between long-term and
short-term history, but they locate the former ‘above’ the latter. Therefore, they also take the
traditional path of viewing the macro-analytical construction of ‘big-data’ as the primary way to
build long-term historical interpretations, and confining micro-history to the realm of the
‘recovery of the subaltern’ and the ‘patient sifting of the archives’.50 Against this well-established
interpretation, in this section I argue that microhistory is not bound to synchronic narratives and
that a micro-spatial perspective questions the very partition between short- and long-term
analyses, and reveals more articulated patterns of multiple and combined temporalities.
Although microhistorians have hitherto focused primarily on relatively short-time frames,
rich micro-histories spanning several centuries have been written, the most impressive being
Hans Medick’s study of the German town of Laichingen between 1650 and 1900.51 Moreover,
besides centring on single localities, microhistories can stretch across time by addressing
connections. Take for example the history of the Manila Galleon, the Spanish fleets that connected
Acapulco (New Spain) and Manila from 1565 to 1815, and carried free and unfree migrants, silver,
fruit and other Asian, European and American products, and multiple ideas.52 A long-standing
homogenous line on the maps of macro-historians, its closer study on the long-term reveals that
continuities such as those in the transportation of convicts between the seventeenth and the early
nineteenth centuries were matched by the discontinuation of flows of other coerced migrants, as
is the case of the Asian slaves sold in the Manila market and deported to New Spain between the
late sixteenth century and 1672.53 The same route, moreover, was imbricated in very different
networks of trade over time. Thus, across the centuries, the Manila Galleon became increasingly
integrated in trans-polity trade with China and Japan, and with the Atlantic trade, while other
exchanges became less relevant or ceased altogether.54
The micro-spatial perspective has the potential to combine these multi-centuries studies with
the micro-analytical epistemology that highlights complexity, discontinuity and unevenness.
Indeed, just like the singularity of a place is made by its simultaneous connections across space,
it is also constructed out of the multiplicity of its past connections. Thence, the traditional divide
between synchronic and diachronic analyses can be overcome. In his study on labour in the mines

48
Fernand Braudel, ‘Preface to the First Edition’, in Idem, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (London, 1995), 20-1.
49
Conrad, What is Global History?, 156.
50
Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge, 2014), quotes from pp. 1 and 119-
20.
51
Hans Medick, Weben und Überleben in Laichingen 1650-1900. Lokalgeschichte als Allgemeine
Geschichte (Göttingen, 1996).
52
For an overview of the recent scholarship: Christian G. De Vito, ‘Towards the Global Spanish Pacific’,
International Review of Social History, 60 (2015), 449-62.
53
D. Oropeza Keresey, ‘La esclavitud asiática en el virreinato de la Nueva España, 1565-1673’, Historia
Mexicana, lxi (2011), 5-57; Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico. From Chinos to Indians (Cambridge,
2014); Birgit Tremml-Werner, Spain, China, and Japan in Manila, 1571-1644 (Amsterdam, 2015).
54
C.G. De Vito, C. Anderson and U. Bosma, ‘Transportation, deportation and exile: Perspectives from
the colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, International Review of Social History, special issue 2018,
1-24.

13
of contemporary Sierra Leone, for example, anthropologist Lorenzo D’Angelo has addressed the
entanglements of various labour experiences and practices originating in different periods and
sites.55 The author has argued for the need to understand how this very intertwining provides
‘old’ labour relations with new meanings and roles which in turn interact with synchronic spatial
configurations. The metaphor of the ‘Wittgenstein’s thread’ has helped D’Angelo to conceptualize
this perspective. This is a thread made of fibres of variable length, expressing various
chronologies related to multiple phenomena that, taken together, construct each specific
historical context. As the thread can be dissected not only at the height of contemporary events,
but also at other heights, this approach allows historians to address connections over time and
space within past contexts. Moreover, it highlights the diverse temporalities of processes taking
place in various fields (politics, economics, culture, etc.), and how they come together into specific
events and produce unplanned and unexpected dynamics.56 Indeed, it is precisely this plurality
of distinctive, yet connected temporalities that which bestows events their depth, rather than just
superficial événementialité.
Acknowledging the interactions among plural temporalities allows for an understanding of
historical change as uneven and combined across and within regions. Different societies move at
different pace and in different directions, and they conceptualize time and history in diverse and
often conflictual ways. 57 Within each society, as Giovanni Levi observes in his contribution to this
collection, micro-analytical studies also reveal the co-existence of multiple temporalities in
relation to different social actors, practices and sites.58 Time has been experienced differently by
elite and subaltern groups, men and women, children and adults, and by individuals and groups
with distinct ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds. Social practices, therefore, entangle
individuals and groups who are not only scattered across multiple localities, but who also bear
distinct pasts, memories and expectations. Objects too participate in this process of construction
and multiplication of temporality: as the costume books analysed by Giorgio Riello in his
contribution, they do not only reflect and produce specific images of locality and globality, but
additionally associate them with certain ideas of time. Moreover, the tensions around different
conceptions of time emerge as fundamental expressions of power relations, as it has been
revealed by the scholarship on the imposition of the disciplinary time of the factory and the
plantation during the nineteenth century, but also by studies of the practices of time discipline in
European labour at least from the medieval period.59 Indeed, conflicts around temporalities are

55
Lorenzo D’Angelo, ‘From traces to carpets: Unravelling labour practices in the mines of Sierra Leone’,
in De Vito and Gerritsen, Micro-spatial Histories, 313-42.
56
Vittorio Morfino and Peter D. Thomas (eds.), The Government of Time. Theories of Plural
Temporalities in the Marxist Tradition (Brill, 2017); Reinhart Kosellek, Sediments of Time. On Possible Histories
(Stanford, 2018).
57
Jörn Rüsen (ed.), Time and History. The Variety of Cultures (New Yord and Oxford, 2007); Alexander
Anievas and Kamran Matin (eds.), Historical Sociology and World History. Uneven and Combined Development
over the Longue Durée (London and New York, 2016).
58
William Gallois, Time, Religion and History (Harlow, 2007); Jörn Rüsen (ed.), Time and History. The
Variety of Cultures (New York and Oxford, 2007); L. D’Angelo and Robert J. Pijpers, ‘Mining Temporalities:
An Overview’, The Extractive Industries and Society (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2018.02.005. On the
‘temporal turn’ in anthropology: R. Hassan, ‘Globalization and the ‘temporal turn’: recent trends and issues in
time studies’, The Korean Journal of Policy Studies, xxv, ii (2010), 83-102; L. Bear, ‘Time as technique’, Annual
Review of Anthropology, vl (2016), 439-502.
59
E.P. Thompson, ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’, Past and Present, xxxviii
(December 1967), 56-97; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1975);
Mark M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill, 1997);
C. Maitte and D. Terrier, ‘Une question (re)devenue centrale: le temps de travail’, Genèses, lxxxv, iv (2011), 156-
170; Corinne Maitte and Didier Terrier (eds.), Les temps du travail. Normes, pratiques, évolutions (xiv-xix siècle)

14
central to the construction of scaled discourses and practices. History writing, as ‘a specific way
in which humans deal with the experience of temporal change’, is part and parcel of this process
of scaling.60
This differentiation and discontinuity in social practices, together with the central role of time
in the making of places and connections, create an ‘unpredicted sequence of different
configuration states’, and this ‘blind evolution’ – as Gribaudi has named it – questions teleological
perspectives per se.61 What is at stake here is the way historical evolution is understood. Clearly,
from a micro-spatial perspective this is neither linear nor predictable. Moreover, it is not enough
to point to the existence of multiple or connected modernities and refuse the equation of
modernity with the Western standard.62 More radical ‘unthinking’ of modernity and rethinking of
periodisation are needed.63 The traditional divisions of history into ‘pre-modern’ and ‘modern’,
and into pre-historical, ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern periods, represent two of
the most visible legacies of the Eurocentric approach micro-spatial history seeks to overcome.
We need to move beyond these predefined periodisations, and towards pertinent chronological
contexts, that is, ad hoc periodisations, constructed through and embedded in the research
process. Only then can we pay full attention to historical continuities and discontinuities across
time and space, and acknowledge the simultaneity of multiple temporalities, depending on the
social groups, places and topics we address.

V. Un-thinking scale and the politics of micro-spatial history

Since their inceptions, the projects of both microhistory and global history have not just
positioned themselves within scholarly debates, but have also carried broader visions of society.
Microhistorians have been especially interested in unearthing the stories of subaltern historical
actors with a view to empowering contemporary subaltern groups.64 To this end, they have aimed
to enter a dialogue with a broader readership. By discussing explicitly in their texts the limitations
of the sources and the construction of the concepts and units of analysis, they have sought to
break with the ‘traditional assertive, authoritarian form of discourse adopted by historians who
present reality as objective’.65 Meanwhile, scholars writing on global environmental history have
brought the relationship between humanity, environment and power to the fore, and addressed

(Rennes, 2014). For the power effects of the construction of conflicting temporalities: Sumit Sarkar, ‘Kaliyuga,
Chakri, and Bhakti. Ramakrishna and His Times’, in Idem, Essays of a Lifetime, 151-236, especially 181-182;
Lorenzo D’Angelo, ‘Diamonds and Plural Temporalities: Articulating Temporal Encounters in the Mines of Sierra
Leone’, in Robert J. Pijpers, T.H. Eriksen (eds.), Mining Encounters. Extractive Industries in an Overheated
World (London, 2018), 138-155.
60
Jörn Rüsen, ‘Introduction’, in idem, Time and History, p. 2.
61
Gribaudi, ‘Scala, pertinenza, configurazione’, 141-3; idem, ‘Les discontinuités du social. Un modèle
configurationnel’, in Lepetit, Les forms de l’expèrience, 251-294. This view resonates with Althusser’s “aleatory
materialism”: Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter. Later Writings, 1978-1987 (London and New York,
2006), 163-207.
62
On non-Western origins of ‘modernity’: Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions. Peru and the Colonial
Origins of the Civilized World (Durham and London, 2004). On ‘connected modernities’: Saurabh Dube and Ishita
Banerjee-Dube (eds.), Unbecoming Modern. Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities, (New Delhi, 2006);
Gurminder K. Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonial and the Sociological Imagination (Basingstoke,
2007).
63
Gennaro Ascione, Science and the Decolonization of Social Theory. Unthinking Modernity
(Basingstoke, 2016). On the need to rethink the problem of periodisation: Étienne Balibar, ‘Sur les concepts
fondamentaux du matérialisme historique’, in Althusser, Balibar et al. (eds.), Lire Le Capital, 558-559.
64
Espada Lima, A micro-história italiana; Alf Lüdtke, ‘Introduction. What is the history of everyday life
and who are its practitioners’, in Idem, The History of Everyday Life.
65
Levi, ‘On Microhistory’, 110.

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the issue of sustainability; global labour historians, in turn, have sought to provide explanations
for social inequalities, suggested long-term interpretations of labour flexibility and
precariousness, and have explicitly connected their quest to rethink the ‘working class’ beyond
wage labour with the analysis of the ‘global labour relations of the Twenty-First Century’.66
Micro-spatial history shares these broad visions of the relationships between history and
society, in sharp contrast to the growing tendency to simply equate ‘dissemination’ to connecting
with the small world of the ‘policy-makers’, and the ‘usable past’ with the production of ‘big-data’
that supposedly can influence contemporary ‘public opinion’ and again policy makers.67 Besides
addressing specific topics that directly resonate with present-day debates, historical research can
make a difference through its methodology, that is, by showing how the way we think about the
past is central to the interpretation of contemporary societies.
In particular, by un-thinking scale as an analytical category and viewing scales as social
constructions, a micro-spatial perspective offers tools to question scale-bounded discourses and
practices which have come to dominate contemporary politics and our everyday lives. Thus, it
helps to rethink ‘globalization’ as a set of contradictory bundles of social and discursive practices
of hegemony, rather than a uniform and ubiquitous process that simultaneously haunts the whole
world. Globalisations, in the plural, then include top-down projects and processes put forward by
multi-located and conflicting elites, as much as multiple ‘counter-global networks’ emerging from
below.68 At the same time, the micro-spatial perspective provides alternatives to mainstream
conceptualizations of ‘the local’. These see local sites necessarily as ‘fortresses’ where individuals
hide to defend themselves from the allegedly overpowering forces of globalization, and enact
excluding strategies – typically against migrant ‘others’ – that reinforce their own communitarian
identities.69 On the contrary, viewing globalization as plural and contradictory, and places as
constructed by multiple connections and social practices, we can anticipate empowering uses of
places and trans-local networks. In addition, the analytical inconsistence of any ethnocentric
postulate emerges in the light of the multi-millennial history of migrations and the standard
hybridity and multiplicity of human ‘identities’. In a related move, it is possible to deconstruct the
primacy of the nation state both historically, by relativizing its origins, ideologies and borders,
and methodologically, by avoiding taking it (and any other political-administrative unit) as the
standard unit of history. While a micro-spatial perspective implies taking the impact of state-

66
Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (Cambridge, 2008); Ian G.
Simmons, Global Environmental History (Chicago, 2008); J.R. McNeill, Erin Stewart Mauldin (eds.), A
Companion to Global Environmental History (Boston, 2012). On Global Labour History: Marcel van der Linden
and Karl Heinz Roth (eds.), Beyond Marx. Theorising the Global Labour Relations of the Twenty-First Century
(Leiden and Boston, 2014); L. Lucassen, ‘Working together: new directions in global labour history’, Journal of
Global History, xi, i (2016), 66-87; Christian G. De Vito, ‘Labour flexibility and labour precariousness as
conceptual tools for the historical study of the interactions among labour relations’, in Karl Heinz Roth (ed.), On
the Road to Global Labour History. A Festschrift for Marcel van der Linden (Leiden and Boston, 2017), 219-40.
For thought-provoking contributions on the politics of global history: Conrad, What is Global History?, chapter
10; J. Adelman, ‘What is global history now?’, Aeon (2017), https://aeon.co/essays//is-global-history-still-
possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment
67
These narrow views on ‘dissemination’ and the ‘usable past’ are echoed even in Guldi and Armitage’s
apparently radical call for a renewed engagement of historians in their ‘History Manifesto’.
68
Radical geographers and ethnographers have long argued in this direction: Doreen Massey, ‘A Place
Called Home?’, in Idem, Space, Place, and Gender, 157-73; P. Lapegna, ‘Ethnographers of the world… united?
Current debates on the ethnographic study of “globalization”’, American Sociological Association, xxv, i, pp. 3-
24; David Featherstone, Resistance, Space and Political Identities; David Featherstone and Joe Painter (eds.),
Spatial Politics. Essays for Doreen Massey (Chichester, 2013).
69
Examples of influential works based on these views are: Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization?
(Cambridge, 1999); Zygmunt Bauman, Community. Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Cambridge, 2001).

16
bound space and politics seriously, it also foregrounds alternative spatialities that emerge from
the social practices of other actors, groups and institutions, and points to the importance of
connections that exist within and/or beyond the national borders.
I am arguing that un-thinking scale and pointing to its constructed nature have liberating
effects. They allow viewing open-ended and conflictual social processes whereas dominant
discourses on globalization, locality and the state suggest the existence of predefined,
homogeneous and unquestionable entities. This can also inspire historians to reimagine their
own work as a collaborative and trans-local, rather than a competitive and hierarchical,
endeavour. In recent years it has been rightly pointed out that multi-sited, cross-cultural, and
cross-linguistic studies require systematic collaboration among scholars in various parts of the
globe, and imply addressing issues such as the design of projects and funding schemes, and inter-
institutional exchange.70 Meanwhile, important technological innovations (digitization of sources,
text searchability and digital communication) can reduce the costs of research and improve
communication among scholars, but they do not remove, and often they even exacerbate, existing
asymmetries of power among groups of researchers and among countries.71 In this context, the
quest for a cooperative style of research clearly has broad political implications. It highlights
thorough democratization of the academic world as an essential requisite to improve the quality
and breadth of research, in a time of growing exclusion from, and large inequalities within, the
academia. In the case of trans-national projects, it additionally demands the construction of
horizontal exchanges among researchers and research centres located in the Global North and in
the Global South. This contrasts with the tendency to centralization that qualifies macro-
analytical global history, whose main hubs are disproportionately located in a relatively small
number of Western or Western-funded institutions. Furthermore, the multi-sited nature of
micro-spatial history calls for reflexivity about the ‘politics of language’ in the scholarly world. In
particular, it invites us to overcome the present over-representation of Anglophone academia in
global history, through cooperation across various linguistic and academic traditions and the
recourse to multiple working languages and multi-directional translations. Finally, context-
sensitive research requires awareness about the implications of historical research for each local
community and the construction of its memory and self-representation. In this way, it pushes the
discipline towards ever more cooperation with institutions and informal groups outside of
academia.
Calling for a ‘history without scale’, the micro-spatial perspective therefore is not only an
invitation to growing self-reflexivity on the epistemology and methodology of history. It also
offers alternative visions on the social role of the historian, critical contributions to key
contemporary debates and ways to reimagine the historian’s craft.

70
For example: Berg, ‘Global history’ and John Darwin, ‘Globe and Empire’, in Berg, Writing the
History of the Global, 13 and 199 respectively.
71
On other problems raised by the new technologies applied to historical research: L. Putnam, ‘The
Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitised Sources and the Shadow They Cast’, The American Historical
Review, cxxi, ii (2016), 377-402.

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