Microhistory on a Mountain Pass

• In Event: Rethinking Microhistory in an Age of Global Narratives

Abstract

This paper uses a single event—the murder of a Scottish trader on the Karakoram Pass on April 8, 1888—to prod the definitional possibilities of the genre of microhistory. Besides the intrigue of the event itself, the conditions surrounding this high-altitude assault were exemplar of broader aspects of the northwestern Himalaya’s economic, social, and political history. But this episode also acts as a foil to certain narratives of global history; instead of the connectivity and “global uniformities” (Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World) that have come to highlight recent macrohistorical work, the events surrounding this murder signal the fracturing, bordering, and eventual peripheralization of the “crossroads of high Asia” (Rizvi, Ladakh). This “deglobalizing” narrative (to risk employing an anachronism) includes aspects that both complement larger transnational histories of marginalized space and borders, and those that resist global comparisons. Lastly, this encounter also exhibits features that may not be “scalable.” The tempos, textures, and experiences of this very human drama signal the psychological quality of intimate history—suggesting, perhaps, that microhistory is as much about the “–story” as it is about the “micro-.” In other words, microhistory might be defined as a genre that utilizes both the synecdoche of scales and the particularism of a humanistic drama. It is the latter humanistic particularism, I argue, that can also act as a critical counteractive mechanism to the confirmation biases often exhibited in broader, universalizing histories. The multi-definitional function of microhistory also forces us to reconsider the rather static array of “fields” with which we too frequently delineate the landscape of our discipline.

Author

• Kyle Gardner, University of Chicago