Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
-William Blake, "To See a World"
Taiwan, October 1661. In the dark, dangerous waters of the Taiwan Strait, a frightened Chinese farmer tries to steer a stolen boat. The Dutch are shooting at him, but this is the only rowboat they had on their ship, and if they want to chase him they'll have to raise the anchor, so he has a head start. He aims toward shore, hoping to run away into the high grass, but the night current carries him out toward the rest of their fleet. As he drifts between the shadowy hulls, sailors stir. They call down and ask if he wants to come aboard, thinking the shots might have been an alert about the enemy and maybe this man in a boat has information. In the darkness they can't tell he's Chinese. Each time they ask he answers "Neen," one word so they can't hear his accent. He keeps rowing. A group of them begins chasing him in a sloop. They shoot from behind but miss as he zigzags wildly through the waves. There's a bump as the sloop strikes the little boat. The sailors are lashing the two vessels together. Their commander is about to step aboard. The farmer draws his knife.1
This man's bloody death a few seconds later is insignificant in the sweep of global history. There's no pressing historiographical need to piece together his story from the sandy manuscripts where it lay for three hundred and fifty years. Except for one thing: balance. World history has tended toward the social science side of history. We've made great strides building powerful models of global historical structures and processes: global silver flows, strange parallels, divergences great and small. But we've tended to neglect the human dramas that make history come alive. I believe we should adopt microhistorical and biographical approaches to help populate our models and theories with real people, to write what one might call global microhistory.
How does one write on the scale of individuals from a global perspective? Certainly it's...