8 - Economic History and Microhistory

Summary

Introduction

Microhistory was perhaps the most significant original contribution by Italian historians to historiography since the Second World War. The main microhistorical texts were written between c.1975 and c.1995, with a particularly intense period of activity in the years around 1980. Many of its practitioners carried on writing in much the same vein afterwards, and many still do, but they now see this period as belonging in the (their) past; although the key principles of microhistory still seem fresh to me, it was their movement, so I guess they are right.

This chapter provides some reflections on microhistory, on its past as well as its (possible) future, with specific emphasis on the use of microhistory as a form of economic history. The chapter is divided in the following sections: first, an account of the origins and development of this microhistory is sketched, followed by an analysis of its aims and approach and of its limitations. The chapter continues with a study of the application of microhistory to economic history and concludes with some thoughts on possible future directions, including the use of microhistory to analyse the nature and logic of medieval economic organisation.

Origins and development

The intellectual focus of the movement was the Italian historical journal Quaderni storici, which published a number of explicitly microhistorical monographic issues between 1976 and 1987. As a whole, it was the work of a collectivity of left-wing historians, twenty or thirty in number, mostly early modernists, led – insofar as there were leaders – by Edoardo Grendi, Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi. The movement broadened out from Quaderni storici when the publishing house Einaudi (based in Turin, like many of the leading microhistorians) founded a monograph series called Microstorie, edited by Ginzburg and Levi and Simona Cerutti, which published longer microhistorical works, many of which became historical classics; this, too, ran until the mid-1990s. Microhistory was a highly self-conscious movement, and its activists wrote several accounts of it, including the first three historians mentioned above; of others, I would single out commentaries by Jacques Revel, and the recent backwards look by Osvaldo Raggio, another of the main participants.