Between 1907 and 1914, Filipino lawyer, journalist, and nationalist Vicente Sotto found in Hong Kong a sanctuary from the clutches of the Americans. The city also provided him with a space in which to explore alternative ideas for both his own development and the future of the Philippine Islands beyond the confines of pan-Asianism and anti-imperialism. Using Sotto’s experience in Hong Kong as a point of access, this article demonstrates modern Asia’s anti-imperial era as a product of transimperial ‘connectivities’ and ‘ruptures’ wherein new political affinities were forged between like-minded Asians, while interstitial imperial spaces between colony and metropole carved space for radical, yet nuanced and inconsistent, visions of national independence to materialize—at the expense of abutting empires. It serves to decentralize the role of empire, conflating instead the activities of local, colonial, and imperial actors as a singular experience that shaped modern Asia’s revolutionary decades.

How can historians of “small spaces” and cities focus on local events and issues and at the same time carry on conversations with peers in a disciplinary mode marked by the spatial expansiveness of global history, on one hand, and a focus on objects and individuals of microhistory on the other? At stake here are key questions connected with the intellectual value of place-based knowledge and detailed single-site historical case studies. I argue that as long as we are caught between the positivist idea that causal regularity and time-place independence of explanatory mechanisms are the hallmark of theory, and the postmodernist resistance to generalizations, histories of cities and other small spaces will suffer from “defanged empiricism.” This problem is particularly debilitating for non-global histories of small spaces and cities of the global South, which often “do not travel well.” Is there a way out? I argue that a critical engagement with the stratified ontologies of critical realism— in particular, a version that I call “soft critical realism”—and Charles Tilly’s “deep order” can enable historians of small spaces and cities to re-situate their research at the heart and center of social theory, and simultaneously strike a better balance between attention to local details, the narrative form, and engagement with larger processes, concepts, and theories. Finally, I concretize the discussion by offering the example of how my own research on late colonial and early postcolonial Calcutta has benefitted from this approach.

This article traces histories of the Kru in West Africa from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, arguing that divergent identities of fifteenth- to eighteenth-century Kru canoers became unified when that unified identity was necessary for maintaining political, economic, and cultural autonomy during and after the slave trade. In conjunction with earlier multilingual work on the Kru mariners of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article seeks to place the narrative of Kru identity and labor in a larger context of maritime history across the region at large. This article argues that the Kru relied on longstanding maritime traditions from localized groups to capitalize on the need for work and cash in a capitalist economy driven by growing European imperialism. The historical narrative of Kru maritime power shows how local and global identities in Atlantic Africa shifted in response to exploitation, blurring the lines between response and resistance.

Despite its destructiveness, disaster clears the way to accomplish a set of goals. That was why the Gold Coast governor and officials welcomed the 1939 earthquake as an opportunity to rebuild Accra. However, mishandling their reconstruction plan proved disadvantageous. The aftermath of the disaster, including an unprecedented rehousing project, exacerbated urban discontent. How everyday urban residents responded to rehousing further exposed the weakness of the colonial state and gave momentum to nationalism. The paper introduces natural disasters and relief programs into the scholarly narratives that have demonstrated that anticolonial nationalism emerged from a chain of grievances from amongst colonial subjects, some of which were unfulfilled social and economic expectations. The experiences of rehousing following the earthquake powerfully informed local perspectives and contributed to the chain of events leading to formal decolonization.

Recently, voices have been raised regarding the challenges of Big Data-driven global approaches, including the realization that exclusively tackling the global scale masks social and historical realities. While multi-scalar analyses have confronted this problem, the effects of global approaches are being felt. We highlight one of these effects: as classical scholarship struggles to decolonize itself, the ancient Mediterranean in global archaeology pivots around the Graeco-Roman world only, marginalizing the non-classical Mediterranean, thus foiling attempts at promoting post-colonial perspectives. In highlighting this, our aim is twofold: first, to invigorate the debate on multi-scalar approaches, proposing to incorporate microhistory into archaeological analysis; second, to use the non-classical Mediterranean to demonstrate that historical depth at a micro level is essential to augment that power in our interpretations.

This article, originally presented as a public lecture at the occasion of the Fukuoka Prize Ceremony in September 2019, approaches from biographical and microhistorical perspectives the careers of three early-modern protagonists, Suminokura Ryōi, François Caron, and Zheng Zhilong, who were all involved in the maritime trade of the Eastern Seas. It shows how these Japanese, Dutch, and Chinese entrepreneurs became entangled with the epochal changes of regime in China and Japan in the first half of the seventeenth century, and concludes with remarks on their agency, loyalty, and legacy.

This global microhistorical analysis of the Swede Brigitta Scherzenfeldt’s capture in Russia and her subsequent enslavement in the Dzungar khanate stresses actors and regions needed to nuance the history of globalisation. The early globalisation process is commonly exemplified with maritime contacts, involving free and often male West European actors. In contrast, this study combines multilingual source material to trace and discuss economic integration, cross-border trade, forced migration, the circulation of knowledge, literary depictions, and diplomatic contacts in the Central Asian borderlands between China and Russia. In the process, I clarify the importance of female, coerced actors, and overland connections between non-European empires for the history of early modern globalisation.

Were the effects of First World War truly similar globally? A comparison of how the conflict was perceived by two extremely different groups of rural people – southern Americans of the Jackson Purchase region of far western Kentucky and Africans in the small British Protectorate of Nyasaland in south central Africa – makes their microhistories significant rather than trivial by placing them a global context. In the early twentieth century, both groups were not only rural, but removed, decidedly disconnected from each other. Yet, drawing on documentary evidence, especially interviews with the last generation of First World War survivors in both regions, offers a significant perspective on how similar their experiences actually became in the crucible of a global war. The call to arms, their recruitment and resistance to service, combat adversities and cultural experiences, post-war disillusionments and triumphs, and especially the economic consequences of their war provide penetrating insights into the wide-ranging ordeals and opportunities that this first truly global event offered peoples worldwide.

In Carl Kaestle's 1992 essay “Standards of Evidence,” generalization is how we know when we know. Kaestle sketches a model of increasing certainty in historical claims as they are developed and refined at increasing scales of research, from local to international. A historical claim might originate in the study of a particular place or case, but to know that the claims were true, the historian needed to move from the microlevel view to a more macro one, perhaps at the national rather than local level. Once tested and refined through comparison with other cases, possibly smoothing some of the rougher edges in the process, the claim could then be transferred beyond national borders. When a historical claim is polished enough to fit other contexts, we know it is true. Kaestle illustrates this increasing certainty through increasing scale with reference to the history of literacy and, more specifically, to scholarship on how Western European and US industrialization shaped literacy rates. Bringing studies from various locales into connection, and then comparing these cases with the national context, Kaestle summarizes that it was the commercial processes of urbanization, rather than industrialization itself, that helped produce rising literacy in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Generalization at greater scale becomes not only the means through which to claim the value of historical work, but the basis for constructing historical knowledge in the first place.

Explaining why restraint of violence becomes a strategy for armed groups has recently attracted the attention of researchers, especially political scientists. The emergent literature generally argues by way of macro-level statistical correlation, in which a single factor, such as the desire of armed groups to adhere to international norms about human rights or the existence of high levels of political education among fighters, is believed to explain the presence of restraint. Missing in this approach are close analyses of actual historical episodes of restraint. We thus lack comprehension of how those with ideas about restraining violence translate their thoughts into actions, especially in contexts such as civil wars. This article addresses this weakness by examining the history of a Balkan community wracked by intercommunal violence during 1941 to explain the puzzling practice of restraint in the midst of waves of retaliatory violence. Rather than identify a single factor, this micro-comparative case study reveals that a cluster of mostly endogenous factors, shaped significantly by ongoing violence, explains the successful practice of restraint. Methodologically, this article stresses the need for researchers of restraint to employ microhistorical and comparative methods. They hold the greatest potential to illuminate what remains insufficiently explained in the extant political science literature: the contingent local processes whereby a desire for restraint or escalation of violence—the existence of which may be conditioned by longer-term historical developments—becomes a reality in certain moments.