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.