1 Among the most widely discussed articles that use the label directly—but in very different ways—see Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory,” Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2010): 573–91; Francesca Trivellato, “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?” California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0z94n9hq; John-Paul A. Ghobrial, “The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory,” Past and Present 222, no. 1 (2014): 51–93. See also Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory and World History,” in The Cambridge World History, vol. 6, The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 CE, part 2, Patterns of Change, ed. Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 446–73; Hans Medick, “Turning Global? Microhistory in Extension,” Historische Anthropologie 24, no. 2 (2016): 241–52; Giovanni Levi, “Microhistoria e historia global,” Historia crítica 69 (2018): 21–35; Angelo Torre, “Micro/macro: ¿local/global? El problema de la localidad en una historia espacializada,” Historia crítica 69 (2018): 37–67; John-Paul A. Ghobrial, ed., “Global History and Microhistory,” special issue, Past and Present 242, supplement 14 (2019). This issue of Past and Present aims to provide a space for encounters and discussion between British and American global history scholars and practitioners of microhistory, who tend to come from continental Europe).

2 Serge Gruzinski, Les quatre parties du monde. Histoire d’une mondialisation (Paris: La Martinière, 2004); Patrick Boucheron, ed., Histoire du monde au xv ^e siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2009).

3 This individual and collective research can take various forms. See, for instance, Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (London: Profile Books, 2008); Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things (New York: Routledge, 2013); Dagmar Freist, “Historische Praxeologie als Mikro-Historie,” in Praktiken der Frühen Neuzeit. Akteure, Handlungen, Artefakte, ed. Arndt Brendecke (Cologne: De Gruyter, 2015), 62–77; Maxine Berg et al., eds., Goods from the East, 1600–1800: Trading Eurasia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds., The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (London: Routledge, 2016); Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen, and Giorgio Riello, eds., Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

4 Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). These studies on global lives mostly follow on from Jonathan D. Spence, The Question of Hu (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). See, for instance, Allan D. Austin, “Mohammed Ali Ben Said: Travels on Five Continents,” Contributions in Black Studies 12 (1994): 129–58; Leonard Blussé, Bitter Bonds: A Colonial Divorce Drama of the Seventeenth Century [1998], trans. Dianne Webb (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2002); Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (London: Harper Press, 2007); Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Isabella Löhr, “Lives Beyond Borders, or How to Trace Global Biographies, 1880–1950,” Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 23, no. 6 (2013): 6–20.

5 Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Two Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Lucette Valensi, Mardochée Naggiar. Enquête sur un inconnu (Paris: Stock, 2008); Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Albert Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe [1999], trans. Martin Beagles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). This narrative vein is explicitly claimed in Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer,” and Ghobrial, “The Secret Life.”

6 Simon Schaffer et al., eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach: Science History, 2009); Bernard Heyberger and Chantal Verdeil, eds., Hommes de l’entre-deux. Parcours individuels et portraits de groupes sur la frontière de la Méditerranée, xvi ^e–xx ^e siècle (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2009); László Kontler et al., eds., Negotiating Knowledge in Early-Modern Empires: A Decentered View (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

7 Here we have an important work in mind: Edoardo Grendi, I Balbi. Una famiglia genovese fra Spagna e Impero (Turin: Einaudi, 1997). For more recent studies, see Lara Putnam, “To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 3 (2006): 615–30; Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empire: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Noel Malcolm, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Gagan D. S. Sood, India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

8 Alan Watson, Legal Transplants: An Approach to Comparative Law (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1974); Lauren A. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Guillaume Calafat, “Ramadam Fatet vs. John Jucker: Trials and Forgery in Egypt, Syria and Tuscany (1739–1740),” Quaderni storici 48, no. 2 (2013): 419–40; Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).

9 Francesca Trivellato, “A New Battle for History in the Twenty-First Century,” Annales HSS (English Edition) 70, no. 2 (2015): 261–70; Trivellato, “Microstoria/Microhistoire/Microhistory,” French Politics, Culture and Society 33, no. 1 (2015): 122–34.

10 For a very broad and optimistic overview of the development and field of global history, see Richard Drayton and David Motadel, “Discussion: The Futures of Global History,” Journal of Global History 13, no. 1 (2018): 1–21; Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Hugo Fazio Vengoa and Luciana Fazio Vargas, “La historia global y la globalidad histórica contemporánea,” Historia crítica 69 (2018): 3–20.

11 In this sense, studies of “global events” do not fall within the field of “global microhistory.” For an overview of this type of research, see Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

12 “Une histoire à l’échelle globale,” Annales HSS 56, no. 1 (2001): 3–4; Roger Chartier, “La conscience de la globalité (commentaire),” ibid., 119–23; Serge Gruzinski, “Les mondes mêlés de la monarchie catholique et autres ‘connected histories,’” ibid., 85–117. In this article, Gruzinski claimed his study was based on “data often ascribable to microhistory,” while adding that microhistory had “trained our eye so well for observing the near that some researchers have ended up neglecting the distant” (p. 88).

13 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” in Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to c. 1830, ed. Victor Lieberman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 289–316; Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2011); Caroline Douki and Philippe Minard, “Histoire globale, histoires connectées: un changement d’échelle historiographique ?” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 5/54, no. 4 bis (2007): 7–21.

14 Anaclet Pons, “De los detalles al todo: historia cultural y biografías globales,” História da historiografía 12 (2013): 156–75.

15 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Romain Bertrand, L’histoire à parts égales. Récits d’une rencontre Orient-Occident, xvi^e–xvii^e siècle (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2011).

16 Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Gerritsen and Riello, The Global Lives of Things; Kim Siebenhüner, “Les joyaux du souk. Marchandises globales, pratiques marchandes et espaces commerciaux locaux à Alep à l’époque moderne,” in La loge et le fondouk. Les dimensions spatiales des pratiques marchandes en Méditerranée. Moyen Âge–Époque moderne, ed. Wolfgang Kaiser (Paris/Aix-en-Provence: Karthala/Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme, 2014), 71–98.

17 Silvio A. Bedini, The Pope’s Elephant (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1997); Glynis Ridley, Clara’s Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: Atlantic Books, 2004); Silvia Sebastiani, “La caravane des animaux. Circulation des ‘orangs-outans’ et des savoirs, reconfigurations des frontières de l’humain,” Diasporas 29 (2017): 53–70.

18 On this constellation of relational approaches, see Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Penser l’histoire croisée: entre empirie et réflexivité,” Annales HSS 58, no. 1 (2003): 7–36.

19 This criticism is directed above all at radical morphological approaches that call for “comparing the incomparable.” For a well-balanced overview of the potential of comparative history, see Alessandro Stanziani, “Comparaison réciproque et histoire. Quelques propositions à partir du cas russe,” in Pratiques du transnational. Terrains, preuves, limites, ed. Jean-Paul Zúñiga (Paris: Centre de recherches historiques, 2011), 209–30; Philippa Levine, “Is Comparative History Possible?” History and Theory 53, no. 3 (2014): 331–47; George Steinmetz, “Comparative History and Its Critics: A Genealogy and a Possible Solution,” in A Companion to Global Historical Thought, ed. Prasenjit Duara, Viren Murthy, and Andrew Sartori (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 412–36.

20 On the expectations of this criticism and the specifications for reconciling approaches, see Trivellato, “Is There a Future”; Levi, “Microhistoria e historia global.”

21 Natividad Planas, “L’agency des étrangers. De l’appartenance locale à l’histoire du monde,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 60, no. 1 (2013): 37–56.

22 Trivellato, “Is There a Future”; Étienne Anheim and Enrico Castelli Gattinara, “Jeux d’échelles. Une histoire internationale,” Revue de synthèse 130, no. 4 (2009): 661–77; Filippo de Vivo, “Prospect or Refuge? Microhistory, History on the Large Scale: A Response,” Cultural and Social History 7, no. 3 (2010): 387–97; Ginzburg, “Microhistory and World History”; Torre, “Micro/macro.”

23 Trivellato, “Microstoria/Microhistoire/Microhistory”; Medick, “Turning Global?”

24 See the forum “Microstoria e storia globale” set up by the journal Quaderni storici. Of note among the articles in this series are Osvaldo Raggio, “A proposito di ‘The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh’ di Linda Colley. Storie individuali e storia dell’Impero Britannico,” Quaderni storici 149, no. 2 (2015): 551–66; Christian G. De Vito, “Verso una microstoria translocale (micro-spatial history),” Quaderni storici 150, no. 3 (2015): 815–33; Dagmar Freist, “A Global Microhistory of the Early Modern Period: Social Sites and the Interconnectedness of Human Lives,” Quaderni storici 155, no. 2 (2017): 537–56; Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, “A ‘New Wave’ of Microhistory? Or: It’s the Same Old Story. A Fight for Love and Glory,” Quaderni storici 155, no. 2 (2017): 557–76.

25 Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris: Gallimard/Le Seuil, 1996; Revel, “Paysage par gros temps,” in La forza delle incertezze. Dialoghi storiografici con Jacques Revel, ed. Antonella Romano and Silvia Sebastiani (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2016), 353–69; Simona Cerutti, “Microhistory: Social Relations versus Cultural Models?” in Between Sociology and History: Essays on Microhistory, Collective Action, and Nation-Building, ed. Anna-Maija Castrén, Markku Lonkila, and Matti Peltonen (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2004), 17–40; Carlo Ginzburg, “Our Words, and Theirs: A Reflection on the Historian’s Craft, Today,” in Historical Knowledge: In Quest of Theory, Method and Evidence, ed. Susanna Fellman and Marjatta Rahikainen (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 97–119.

26 See the debate surrounding the proposals of David Armitage and Jo Guldi in the thematic dossier “Debating the Longue Durée,” Annales HSS (English Edition) 70, no. 2 (2015): 215–303.

27 Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath [1989], trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991).

28 Jeremy Adelman, “What Is Global History Now?” 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment.

29 Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Maxine Berg, ed., Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). This point was raised early on by Chartier, “La conscience de la globalité,” 120, and echoed more than fifteen years later by Adelman, “What Is Global History Now?” and Drayton and Motadel, “Discussion: The Futures of Global History,” 8. Ironically, the linguistic provincialism of global history goes hand in hand with incantatory criticism of a Eurocentrism consubstantial with the rhetoric of an inescapable “rise of the West.” Attempts are being made, however, to find new international spaces for academic and intellectual dialogue, which include reflection on how visas are granted to researchers from the Global South and developing a policy for the translation of concepts and references. See, for example, Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds., Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), which attempts to rise to the challenge posed in Dominic Sachsenmaier, “World History as Ecumenical History?” Journal of World History 18, no. 4 (2007): 465–89.

30 Carlo Ginzburg, “‘L’historien et l’avocat du diable.’ Entretien avec Charles Illouz et Laurent Vidal. Première partie,” Genèses 53, no. 4 (2003): 113–38; Simona Cerutti, “Histoire pragmatique, ou de la rencontre entre histoire sociale et histoire culturelle,” Tracés. Revue de sciences humaines 15 (2008): 147–68.

31 Edoardo Grendi, “Micro-analisi e storia sociale,” Quaderni storici 12, no. 35 (1977): 506–20; Grendi, In altri termini. Etnografia e storia di una società di antico regime, ed. Osvaldo Raggio and Angelo Torre (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004); Matteo Giuli, “Morfologia social e contextualização topográfica. A micro-história de Edoardo Grendi,” Revista brasileira de história 37, no. 76 (2017): 137–62.

32 Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel, eds., Penser par cas (Paris: Éd. de l’Ehess, 2005); Giovanni Levi, “Les usages de la biographie,” Annales ESC 44, no. 6 (1989): 1325–36; Sabrina Loriga, Le “petit x.” De la biographie à l’histoire (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2010).

33 Antonella Romano, Impressions de Chine. L’Europe et l’englobement du monde (xvi ^e–xvii ^e siècle) (Paris: Fayard, 2016).

34 Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel, “Penser par cas. Raisonner à partir de singularités,” in Passeron and Revel, Penser par cas, 15–21.

35 A point that Sebouh David Aslanian raises in his article in this issue.

36 Romain Bertrand, Le long remords de la conquête. Manille-Mexico-Madrid: l’affaire Diego de Àvila, 1577–1580 (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2015). On the asymmetry of sources, see Roberto Zaugg’s article in this issue.

37 Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, “La micro-histoire,” Le Débat 10, no. 17 (1981): 133–36.

38 George E. Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117. Multi-sited ethnography shares certain methodological affinities with the approach of Bruno Latour. On this subject, see the remarks of Conrad, What Is Global History? 121–22 and 128–29.

39 In the sense intended by Bernard Lepetit, “La société comme un tout: sur trois formes d’analyse de la totalité sociale,” Cahiers du Centre de recherches historiques 22 (1999): http://journals.openedition.org/ccrh/2342. This was also the meaning it was given by Fernand Braudel, “En guise de conclusion [with discussion],” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 1, no. 3/4 (1978): 245, for whom “globality” was not the “puerile, congenial and insane … pretension … to write a total history of the world,” but simply the “desire, when addressing a problem, to systematically go beyond its limits.”

40 Jocelyne Dakhlia, “La question des lieux communs. Des modèles de souveraineté dans l’Islam méditerranéen,” in Les formes de l’expérience. Une autre histoire sociale, ed. Bernard Lepetit (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 39–61.

41 Simona Cerutti and Isabelle Grangaud, “Sources and Contextualizations: Comparing Eighteenth-Century North African and Western European Institutions,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, no. 1 (2017): 5–33.

42 See, for example, how Emma Rothschild brings to light, through a subtle “interplay of scales,” the fabric of economic and personal relations that the inhabitants of Angoulême forged across the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, thereby overcoming the simplistic dichotomy between the “connected world” and the “isolated world”: Rothschild, “Isolation and Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century France,” American Historical Review 119, no. 4 (2014): 1055–82 (which uses Ginzburg and Poni’s article, “La micro-histoire,” on names as Ariadne’s thread). As Torre, “Micro/macro,” 52, points out, there is still a need to investigate the social practices involved in establishing and maintaining these connections in order to explain their meanings and issues.

43 Jean-Frédéric Schaub, “Survivre aux asymmetries,” in L’expérience historiographique. Autour de Jacques Revel, ed. Antoine Lilti et al. (Paris: Éd. de l’Ehess, 2016), 165–79; Bertrand, Le long remords.

44 See the call for plural and collective writings made by Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2015), 151. For examples of pooling skills to document connections, see García-Arenal and Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds; Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers. In a different vein, for collaborative writing based on a comparison of social and textual practices, see Cerutti and Grangaud, “Sources and Contextualizations.”

45 Romain Bertrand, “Histoire globale, histoires connectées: un ‘tournant historiographique’ ?” in Le “tournant global” des sciences sociales, ed. Alain Caillé and Stéphane Dufoix (Paris: La Découverte, 2013), 44–66.

46 On this point, see Darío G. Barriera’s reflections in this issue.

47 Torre, “Micro/macro”; Torre, “‘Faire communauté.’ Confréries et localité dans une vallée du Piémont (xvii^e–xviii^e siècle),” Annales HSS 62, no. 1 (2007): 101–35. In a different vein, see Anne Gerritsen, “Scales of a Local: The Place of Locality in a Globalizing World,” in A Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrop (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 213–26.

48 Darío G. Barriera, “Entre el retrato jurídico y la experiencia en el territorio. Una reflexión sobre la función distancia a partir de las normas de los Habsburgo sobre las sociabilidades locales de los oidores Americanos,” Caravelle 101 (2013): 133–54.

49 De Vito, “Verso una microstoria translocale”; Christopher H. Johnson et al., eds., Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences Since the Middle Ages (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011); Johannes Paulmann, “Regionen und Welten. Arenen und Akteure regionaler Weltbeziehungen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert,” Historische Zeitschrift 296, no. 3 (2013): 660–99.

50 See, for example, Nicholas Purcell, “Unnecessary Dependences,” in The Prospect of Global History, ed. James Belich et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 65–79. Focusing on the production, distribution, and consumption of aromatic resins in the High Middle Ages, Purcell borrows from Jan de Vries the concept of “soft globalization,” that is, a globalization (even in the early modern period) seen not as the enduring and inescapable mold of the present world, but as a composite historical process of regional integrations and disconnections: Jan de Vries, “The Limits of Globalization in the Early Modern World,” Economic History Review 63, no. 3 (2010): 710–33.

51 This is effectively shown in Jessica Marglin’s article in this issue on the boundaries of private international law in the Mediterranean.

52 Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers; Guillaume Calafat, “Familles, réseaux et confiance dans l’économie de l’époque moderne. Diasporas marchandes et commerce intercultural,” Annales HSS 66, no. 2 (2011): 513–31, here pp. 527–28; Dagmar Freist, “‘Ich schicke Dir etwas Fremdes und nicht Vertrautes.’ Briefpraktiken als Vergewisserungsstrategie zwischen Raum und Zeit im Kolonialgefüge der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Diskurse, Körper, Artefakte. Historische Praxeologie in der Frühneuzeitforschung, ed. Dagmar Freist (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), 374–404.

53 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Par-delà l’incommensurabilité: pour une histoire connectée des empires aux temps modernes,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 5/54, no. 4 bis (2007): 34–53; Jocelyne Dakhlia and Wolfgang Kaiser, “Une Méditerranée entre deux mondes, ou des mondes continus,” in Les musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe, vol. 2, Passages et contacts en Méditerranée, ed. Jocelyne Dakhlia and Wolfgang Kaiser (Paris: Albin Michel, 2013), 7–31.

54 A reflexive activity of “casing” promoted in particular by Charles C. Ragin and Howard S. Becker, eds., What Is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

55 Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003–2009); Fazio Vengoa and Fazio Vargas, “La historia global.”