What Differences Make a Difference? Global History and Microanalysis Revisited

This article discusses a number of scholarly trends that fall under the rubric of global history, with particular regard for those that address the early modern period (c.1400–1800). It stresses the rubric’s lack of coherence from both a methodological and ideological perspective. Most importantly, it revisits longstanding debates about the intersection of microanalysis and global history by assessing landmark works by Italian microhistorians, scholars of the so-called great divergence, and historians of climate and the environment. In so doing, it also asks how recent contributions build on insights that classic studies had already yielded – at least on the margins of the profession – beginning in the 1970s.