Ocean Spaces and Global Microhistories

8 June 2026 from 2pm to 6pm, Maison des Astronomes

Iméra’s Mediterranean programme is organising a new edition of its Mediterranean Workshop entitled Oceanic Spaces and Global Microhistories on Monday, June 8th, 2026.

Credit: Extract from the painting Arrival of the Southern Barbarians by Kanō Naizen, WikiCommons.

Reflections on the concept and practice of microhistory

The workshop on Oceanic Spaces and Global Microhistories reexamines the concept and practices of Microhistory, a methodological approach developed by pre-modern historians such as Carlo Ginzburg, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Natalie Zemon Davis.

Historians craft microhistories by using archival records to narrate fascinating stories, considering how the personal experiences of extraordinary individuals reveal ordinary dimensions of everyday life. Although early microhistories focused on Europeans subjects in the medieval and early modern period, the methodology has become globalized, as historians consider cases of merchants, mariners, pilgrims, missionaries, travelers, and enslaved persons utilizing microhistorical methods. Historians have considered objects and commodities such as porcelain, salt, sugar, coffee, and tea through global histories described as microhistory. The methodology has also been embraced by modern and contemporary historians and also by historians working on Latin America, Africa, East Asia, and other regions around the world.

Microhistories for reconstructing culture and society

Oceanic Spaces and Global Microhistories will re-examine historians’ use of microhistories to reconstruct early modern culture and society. Workshop participants will each explore the lives of individuals and particular groups in the early modern period (1500-1800) using microhistorical methods.

We will explore the sweeping changes that transformed world beginning around 1500, as maritime expeditions and commercial developments constructed early forms of globalization. At the same time, the early modern world remained a mosaic of kingdoms, principalities, and city-states, whose inhabitants were culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse with strong local identities. The early modern period represented a transitional period as religious reforms, confessional politics, warfare, and social crises convulsed many societies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. European states supported the emerging transatlantic slave trade and gradually established colonial empires, transforming the early modern world and its peoples.

Intellectual, scientific, and cultural movements challenged existing systems of knowledge and created new understandings of global system and geographies. In the late eighteenth century, revolutionary movements shook political systems and societies, forging notions of human rights and modern representative politics. Returning to the early modern period should allow for new reflections on microhistorical methodologies and practices, as well as the limitations of the concept. The workshop presentations and discussions will explore the possibilities of constructing histories of oceanic spaces and global microhistories.

Programme

2pm-3.30pm: Session I – Archives and Microhistorical Methodologies
- 2pm: Jérémie Foa, Senior Lecturer (HDR) in History (TELEMMe, Aix Marseille Université), Microhistory of the Saint-Barthélemy massacre (1572)
- 2.30pm: Thomas Glesener, Senior Lecturer in History (TELEMMe, Aix Marseille Université), Microanalytical reading exercise: the census of Muslims in Cartagena (1720)
- 3pm: Discussion
3.30pm: coffee break
4pm-5.30pm: Session II – Fragmented Lives: Global Microhistories
- 4pm: Brian Brege, Associate Professor of History (Syracuse University), The Promise and Peril of Global Trade: Francesco Carletti’s Circumnavigation, 1594-1606
- 4.30pm: Junko Takeda, Professor of History and Chair (Syracuse University), Connectivity without Mobility: Maria Guimar de Pinha, the Ayutthaya Kingdom, and a Global Mediterranean
- 5pm: Discussion
5.30pm: General discussion