KERRY WARD
My somewhat tongue-in-cheek one-sentence definition of world history is: People on the move, whether they want to or not. Movement, communication, connection, exchange – physical, temporal, spatial, and conceptual – makes us human. To examine people in the context of world history is to engage with motion. World historians adopt various approaches to describe people in motion and this chapter posits four registers of scale as an analytical framework, using a few specific examples, to examine some of these approaches. Needless to say, it is not meant to be comprehensive in coverage. In using scale as an organizing principle I have been inspired by Douglas Northrop’s University of Michigan undergraduate world history course “Zoom,” which, as the title suggests, zooms in from the broadest to the narrowest perspective to create a coherent “history of everything.” Using a “nesting” of scales in a set of four, from the largest possible dimension of human motion to the smallest, each scale in this chapter directly narrows the focus of the former. The purpose of this approach is to show what comes into view and what is obscured by adopting a particular scale of analysis in examining migration in world history. Although the chapter focuses on a limited number of historians and their methodologies as their work demonstrates each scale, for the most part world historians are all cognizant of the “big picture” even when they are writing at the smallest scale – a biography of an individual. Likewise, while “big history” examines humans within the context of the whole cosmos, the individual is not irrelevant to the narrative even if they are not a point of focus. These issues of scale have been particularly challenging for historians writing world history textbooks for high school and undergraduate students. (See Bain, this volume.) Individual narratives are not only inserted into textbooks to enliven and illustrate narratives that encompass the entirety of human history, the shift in scale demonstrates to students that individual subjectivity and experience lies at the heart of human society and the production of sources which we examine as evidence. “Zooming” in this chapter implicitly recognizes that the entire spectrum of human mobility, encounters, and exchange exists simultaneously throughout time, but explicitly uses different scales as an ordering principle to examine people in motion.
Scale One, the Cosmos: Big History and Life on Earth
“Like merchants in a huge desert caravan, we need to know where we are going, where we have come from, and in whose company we are traveling. Modern science tells us that the caravan is vast and varied, and our fellow travelers include numerous exotic creatures from quarks to galaxies.” In this evocative opening to Maps of Time (2004: 1), David Christian at once tells us the core of his argument – big history is a “modern creation myth.” As an approach to world history, it is designed to integrate now generally accepted scientific knowledge about the origins of the universe with commonly held understanding about the evolution of humans as a species.1 (See Spier, this volume.)
At the scale of big history essential binaries frame the cosmos – being and nothingness; energy and entropy; order and chaos; simplicity and complexity. Contained in each of these binaries is the notion of movement and change. The only point at which stasis is contemplated is the infinitesimal moment of origin more than 13 billion years ago, which scientists call Planck time, when the “big bang” created the universe. At this moment, essential forces and elements came into being out of which the universe, and eventually humans, were created. Humans are therefore linked directly to the origins of the universe in a physical dimension and are part of the dynamic harnessing of energy generated and expended in increasingly complex ways. Four and a half billion years ago, gravitational forces caused the sun and our solar system to emerge from a cloud of matter. Less than a billion years later, through a process of natural selection, organic chemicals stabilized into living single-celled organisms able to reproduce, and then diversified, around 3 billion years ago, and began to form multicellular organisms. Species diversification emerged as life developed on Earth; it took 7 million years of evolution, for instance, from the appearance of the first bipedal hominines to the appearance of modern humans. The evolution of human language and humans’ unique capacity for collective, inherited learning enabled our species to store and utilize information about each other and the surrounding environment. Harnessing the energy of collective learning and resource exploitation is the hallmark of human society. Humans as a species have embodied the gravitational forces of the cosmos through processes of migration that have generated larger and more complex urban centers and societies. Historians of precolonial Southeast Asia aptly named these societies “galactic polities,” but the global trend transcends region. About 250,000 years ago modern humans began migrating out of Africa and this process of movement, combined with increasingly diverse and far-reaching forms of communication, collective action, and exploitation of the natural environment, has accelerated ever since. The human twentieth (into the twenty-first) century stands – even at a cosmic scale, when measured against the entire history of the universe – as a period of escalating and accelerating complexity, societal diversity, movement and change, combined with exponential growth of humans’ impact on the biosphere. This period, merely an instant in the cosmos’s history, returns the narrative full circle: the production and consumption of multiple forms of energy by humans of course contains the potential for our own extinction as well as that of other species and, indeed, the entire planet.
The great achievement of big history is the interdisciplinary integration of the study of humanity with natural history in a coherent historical narrative. In employing the methodologies that explore the largest possible chronological scope, big history paradoxically also relies on methodologies that examine some of the smallest possible scales – such as chemical evolution, because the argument is based on the universality of matter being organized into structures that (at every scale) require the expenditure of energy. The result is an astonishing connection of humans as a life form not only with all other life forms but with all other forms of matter in a state of constant movement and change. Our commonalities with the cosmos are greater than our differences, resulting in a historical narrative where people are a miraculous chance combination of carbon and hydrogen producing and expending energy. Given the trajectory of increasing complexity through evolution and chance innovation alongside the general trend towards entropy, the ultimate fate of humanity is yet to be determined.
David Christian takes big history one step further by projecting his analysis into the future, thereby fulfilling one of the core criteria of a creation myth. At the largest scale of the cosmos, scientific predictions point towards infinite expansion. Less certain is the future of Earth and, in a relatively immediate time frame, humans as a species. One scenario contemplated by Christian continues the pattern of energy and movement at the center of big history: “Humans may migrate to planets or moons within the solar system, and perhaps even farther afield …” (2004: 491). The logic of this argument makes it impossible to conceptualize humans as static and confined in space. Big history points to an inherent need as a species to expand our horizons. It also offers a cautionary tale. Humans appear as but a brilliant spark of energy in the brief exuberant springtime of the lifetime of our universe.
In Christian’s hands, big history also explores humans’ own quests for creation myths over time and in different cultures, linking these spiritual quests with the quest for all forms of knowledge, including the scientific knowledge upon which his own methodology rests. It is fascinating at this broad sweeping scale to note the commonalities in these myths and forms of knowledge. Humans as a species are united at one level despite all the differences and divisions that constitute the usual scale of human history.
Big history perhaps inevitably loses sight of individuals in this grand vision of the universe through the examination of progressively smaller but more complex periods of time to our present. But contemplating big history narratives as a creation myth is simultaneously an intensely individual experience, and this contemplation of the meaning of life has been shared by people throughout human history.
Scale Two, the Earth: Peopling the World
The scale of the entirety of human history constitutes the foundation of world history. The challenge of constructing a narrative that encompasses this entirety has resulted in a variety of approaches to human history constructed on the edifice of specific themes and metaphors, as shown by many of the chapters in this book. It is also at this scale of world history that academic and trade monographs meet textbooks and encyclopedias. Particularly in the United States education system, the content of world history curricula remains hotly contested alongside the huge growth in the Advanced Placement World History course and examination. One of the major conceptual divisions in this debate is between the “Western Civilization” trajectory that first developed after World War I and the proliferation, in the late twentieth century, of more fluid approaches to the analysis of changing patterns in world history that are not based on civilization models. (See Pomeranz and Segal, this volume.) The first posits a trajectory from the emergence of human civilization to its apotheosis in contemporary American (and European) society and the triumph of this “Western model” as the basis of the new globalized world order and the embodiment of a human ideal. The second is more open-ended in the examination of multiple perspectives on culture and history in which humans are not locked into single cultural identities from which they view the world, interactions with others, and the past (Dunn 2000). Each of these approaches focuses on the emergence of distinctive peoples, their movement over time and through space, and their interaction with other peoples within and between complex social formations like cities, states, empires, and modern nations – culminating in the contemporary global era when borders are often still porous despite states’ attempts to police them. At this scale, humans are not examined as a species but as culturally and historically diverse peoples. (See McKeown, this volume.)
Academic monographs and textbooks aside, the most famous example of the civilizational approach is Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), which won a Pulitzer Prize in1998 and remains probably the most widely read popular work on world history. (See the chapters by Yoffee, by Chase-Dunn and Hall, and by Simmons, this volume.) Diamond has been criticized for presenting a geographically deterministic argument that Eurasian dominance over other societies was inevitable. In this march of civilization, Eurasians were able to move faster, over more favorable terrain, than others, and this resulted in their ability to eventually overrun slower, more sedentary folk. The book raises some of the problems of scale embedded in conceiving human history along a trajectory of emergence to the present because it inevitably leads to generalizations that stereotype civilizational models – in Diamond’s case this is particularly problematic in the loose and inconsistent definition of “Eurasia.”
In general, “Western Civ” approaches in textbooks have increasingly eschewed arguments about the inherently superior nature of Europeans in favor of more complex explanations about the “rise of the West” – even if the baton race of Western civilization, starting from the emergence of human society and passing along a progression of societies ending with the contemporary United States, is still embedded in the narrative. Two examples of alternative approaches to “peopling the Earth” suffice to illustrate a different narrative of people on the move. The first is Jerry Bentley and Herbert Ziegler’s Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past (published in its fifth edition in 2011) and the second is Valerie Hansen and Kenneth Curtis’s Voyages in World History(2010). Both traverse the complex terrain of comprehensive coverage of human history from the evolution of modern humans to the globalized present, not losing sight of individuals or the production of historical texts within this macronarrative. Traditions and Encounters, as the title suggests, simultaneously stresses the two themes of the evolution of individual societies and the cross-cultural encounters between different peoples. Central to these encounters is the theme of human movement in various forms – travel, exploration, trade, migration, and invasion. Covering similar content, Voyages in World History forefronts individual travelers and their journey narratives. Its primary theme of “movement” also stresses cross-cultural interaction through the eyes of the travel narrative, yet contact is embedded in the connection between different societies. Again the narrative trajectory is towards the increasing ease of travel for humans, the mass migration from rural to urban areas, alongside opportunities and obstacles for migration between states.
The overarching theme at this scale of world history is the relentless movement of humans and their quest for mastery over their environment, themselves, and each other. As in big history, narratives of peopling the world accelerate the pace of movement and change towards the present. Most of these narratives, whether monograph or textbook, begin with a discussion of the evolution of various species of hominids in Africa and the slow movement of Homo erectus into Eurasia and throughout the eastern hemisphere. These early migrations were mirrored by the emergence of Homo sapiens (modern humans) from central-southern Africa, but unlike their predecessors, modern humans traveled not only on foot but also by boat, eventually populating the entire habitable world.
“Peopling the world” approaches to world history beg one obvious question: who constitutes a people? The evolution of human language and communication, which sets us apart as a species, involves the evolution of linguistic communities that become the basis of different “peoples”; ergo these are said to become the foundation of civilizations. Debates still rage about whether human languages have a single origin in Africa or appeared simultaneously and diversely in multiple sites in Afro-Eurasia. Whatever the origin of human language, though, distinctive linguistic groups indisputably become a basic unit of analysis for human society. (See Liu, this volume.) These societies create boundaries of human communication while simultaneously being transformed from within and through interaction over space and time. Patrick Manning argues that “human migration portrays migratory movement as a human habit and as a thread running through the full extent of our history as a species” (2005: x). The encounter of people speaking different languages as they migrate over small and large distances, and then learn to communicate with each other through language transmission, remains a constant feature of the human condition, one that is still shaping our existence. Despite the current globalization of English in modern forms of mass communication, linguistic differences are still relevant for cultural identity in the contemporary world.
The increasing scale and pace of human interaction through various forms of movement invoke the metaphor of webs of connection. John and William McNeill employed this metaphor in their book The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (2003). While the avian metaphor indicates viewing humans from not too high a vantage point, the narrative has much in common with the scale of peopling the world: from the evolution of humans as a species, to the emergence of multiple webs of civilizations, to the thickening of these webs of connections into the first worldwide web in the early modern period. From this point onward, the human web is depicted as one interconnected system of cooperation and competition. The worldwide web has consistently increased in density through revolutionary changes that have occurred in production and consumption; population growth, migration and the commodification of labor; and political and social changes. All of these forms of communication, cooperation, and competition have also generated profound ecological transformations. The human web is a set of connections that link people to one another. In all such relationships, people communicate information and use that information to guide their future behavior. What drives history is the human ambition to alter one’s conditions to match one’s hopes (McNeill and McNeill 2003: 3). The Human Web depicts the peopling of the world as a process of increasing density and intensity of interaction, based on movement and communication – fueled particularly by mass rural–urban migration as a phenomenon of contemporary globalization.
Scale Three, Modern Human Society: Globalizing Encounters and Migrations, 1500–1900
There are few current terms so widely used and so little understood as “globalization,” a word much invoked in both world history narratives and many other realms besides. In the domain of world history, it often underlies writers’ efforts to construct narratives of human history at a planetary scale, especially during the modern period. Frederick Cooper, a historian who is strongly skeptical of such efforts, bluntly states: “There are two problems with the concept of globalization, first the ‘global,’ and second the ‘-ization.’” In criticizing the implicit claim that “systems of connection” have penetrated the entire globe and that this is essentially a contemporary process, Cooper dismantles what he sees as the presentist bias of concepts of “the global,” further arguing that to look for the moment of globalization is fundamentally misguided. Globalization narratives, he argues, posit an image of increasing fluidity of movement without examining the limitations and unevenness of connections, or historicizing how these connections and disconnections have reconfigured, dissipated or consolidated over time (2009: 32).
Equating the moment of globalization with the era of European voyages of “exploration” leading to Columbus and the “discovery” of the “New World,” and culminating in Magellan and the circumnavigation of the globe, moreover, has proved a particularly powerful narrative convention in world history textbooks and classes. These oceanic voyages are often presented as the most significant turning point in world history. They often structure the conceptual and chronological “break” in world history literally by physically marking the dividing point between two volumes in an otherwise unwieldy textbook, or between two semesters in a year-long sequence course. This narrative break also separates the premodern from the early modern and modern – with implications that modernity is newly global in scope and reach, and that it is, by virtue of its association with changes that developed after ca. 1500, a process emanating from Europe.
Chronological terminology itself becomes challenging in world history narratives, and no other periodization illustrates this better than the designation of “early modern.” The beginning of the early modern period in European history is also hotly contested, to be sure, but how do world historians make sense of this term in relation to, for example, sixteenth-century Bali? What does the “early modern” mean for examining people on the move? The emphasis is often placed instead on maritime expansions directly linking peoples in new ways. Global patterns of connection through maritime voyages were forged between peoples who had not previously come into contact with each other, as in the initial encounter between peoples of southern and western Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, and west and central Africa in the making of the “Atlantic World.” Simultaneously, European maritime powers – first the Spanish and Portuguese, then the Dutch, English and French (and a few Danes) entered into and altered the diverse, and in some cases ancient, maritime trading networks linking African, Arab, Indian, and Southeast and East Asian maritime trading societies in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Polynesian and Melanesian voyages of exploration and migration across the Pacific were eventually followed by European maritime powers creating new networks across the Pacific to the South China Sea and onwards to the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. The emergence of new imperial, colonial, and state formations and an intensification of competition between them, marked the emergence of an era that connected much of the world through maritime networks. While continental trade routes and migrations are not ignored in this narrative, the emphasis is oceanic – although the experience of people on ships is often ignored. (See Salesa, this volume.) Rather, it is the transfer of people from one place to another, often in large numbers, and their encounters with resident societies in the forging of (“modern”) trading posts, colonies and empires that constitute the main focus of these narratives.
One of the major theoretical approaches to world history, world-systems analysis, developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, also posits the origins of the modern world-system which now dominates the globe as being in the sixteenth century with the emergence of capitalism in Western Europe and the Americas (Wallerstein 2004).2 (See Chase-Dunn and Hall, this volume.) Although world-systems analysis focuses on relationships of exchange and processes of commodification, including the commodification of labor, it does not focus on migration per se. The basic structure of this theory is the division of the world into core, semiperiphery, and periphery – emerging within empires and adapting to the modern state system. Exchange in the modern world-system is fundamentally unequal, with the core areas disproportionally and continuously accumulating capital at the expense of the semiperiphery and periphery.
Nevertheless, even if one refuses to adopt either the “discovery of the New World” or the inauguration of the modern world-system as the key turning point in world history, it can be argued that the period from 1500 to 1900 represented a shift in patterns and scales of human migration that connected parts of the globe previously isolated or marginally visited, and that in the course of these mass migrations much of the world was transformed. (See Bright and Geyer, this volume.) This period witnessed the creation of new routes and networks created by oceangoing vessels of increasing size and speed, which together with the evolution of railways in the nineteenth century facilitated an unprecedented movement of people around the globe. Bearing in mind Cooper’s admonition regarding the ruptures and limitations of global patterns of connection, it is still difficult to argue against the character of people on the move during this period as something new under the sun. Although all mass population movements of course took place in regional and continental contexts, the remainder of this section will focus on transoceanic exchanges to illustrate the scale of this modern human movement through evolving maritime technology.
The chronological scale of 1500 to 1900 is not the typical temporal framework for world history narratives – many break around the end of the eighteenth century with the Atlantic world revolutionary period. I am suggesting a different chronological unit to demonstrate how combining these four centuries can bring into view new aspects of human mobility. Most crucially, mass human movement during this period exists along a spectrum of free and forced migration. As David Eltis suggests: “Generally, large-scale and systematic coerced migration began with European expansion and ended when free and contract migrants became more willing – or in the Russian empire were allowed – to replace slaves and prisoners. In effect the predominance of slave, serf, and prisoner migrants was sandwiched chronologically between long periods when voluntary migration was the norm” (2002: 11).
The initial period of substantial migrations from Europe and Africa to the Americas and Caribbean, beginning in the fifteenth century, involved interaction between people from societies and environments which had had no previous contact, and it wrought profound short-term and long-term transformations. This process was first described by Alfred Crosby in 1972 as “the Columbian Exchange” (Crosby 2003). The term has passed into common usage for the cultural and ecological change set in motion by the forging of contacts between peoples around the Atlantic Ocean. Crosby extended his argument in 1986 to examine the global consequences of the expansion of European empires, migration, and contact (Crosby 2004). Such arguments posit that migration and contact between people from the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa resulted in the exchange of diseases, plants, animals, and goods that transformed all of these cultures and environments. The argument is by now familiar, so three quick examples will suffice. First, diseases borne by the Spanish, particularly smallpox, resulted in the devastation of Amerindian peoples, initially in the densely populated Aztec and Incan empires and the smaller-scale Caribbean societies because they had no preexisting immunities. Second, the introduction of American native staple crops, especially corn and potatoes, eventually transformed the diets of people in much of Afro-Eurasia, resulting in significant population increases. Finally, the introduction of horses from Europe to the Americas facilitated state formation in the North American plains. (See the chapters by Pernick, by Simmons, and by Morillo, this volume.)
European sailing ships, settlements, and colonies were peopled by a range of willing and unwilling travelers and migrants. The Portuguese constructed the first global network of settlements peopled by male and female convicts, orphans, soldiers, free migrants, and slaves from Europe, Africa, and Asia. Likewise the Dutch East India Company operating in the Indian Ocean – and its Atlantic counterpart, the Dutch West India Company – used penal transportation as well as free migration and the slave trade in peopling their ships, settlements, and colonies. After the establishment of colonies in North America based on both free and forced migration from Britain, Britain’s expanding empire constructed global ethnic and regional networks of migration, largely determined by ethnicity. When the American Revolution cut off penal transportation from Britain, for instance, new colonies in Australia were founded on the basis of British convict labor (Ward 2009; Christopher et al. 2007). The complex spectrum of freedom and coercion in networks of migration during this period belies any attempt to stereotype forms of migration through a simple dichotomy of free or slave. At the global scale, one discerns a pattern: the numbers of coerced migrants outnumbered free migrants in transoceanic voyages until the end of the legalized global slave trade in the nineteenth century.
The slave trade from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean across the Atlantic Ocean, from the early sixteenth century until the second half of the nineteenth century, ranks as the most massive transfer of people categorized primarily in terms of their race and status in human history. “The Voyages: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database,” a cooperative research project, has documented almost 35,000 slaving voyages carrying over 10 million African men, women, and children as slaves to the Americas and Caribbean (Voyages 2009). David Eltis (2007) estimates that in total there were more than 43,600 voyages carrying approximately 12.5 million African slaves between 1514 and 1866. Historians have long speculated about the extent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which brought African slaves as forced migrants and shaped the development of societies throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. The effect of this mass population transfer on the African societies from which they were taken is still widely debated, and may be impossible to fully determine. What is clear is that African slaves shaped the colonial societies of the Americas and Caribbean as profoundly as European migrants and indigenous Amerindians.
The experience of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is often termed “the Middle Passage.” Recently, this term has been reinterpreted to include multiple forms of transoceanic forced migration, particularly in the period 1500 to 1900. In this broader context, two distinct global networks of the mass movement of people come into view: penal transportation and indentured servitude. Imperial networks of penal transportation from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries evolved from the Spanish, Portuguese and English policy of using prisoners to provide labor for military posts and proto-colonies in foreign territories. The establishment of a number of British colonies in North America was facilitated by penal transportation and indentured servitude as forms of unfree labor that were eventually displaced by slave labor. The expansion of intra-imperial networks of penal transportation resulted in specific patterns of population transfers. Clare Anderson, for example, has written the history of Indian convicts being transported by the British East India Company to Mauritius, Southeast Asia, and the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean from the late eighteenth century (Anderson 2000). Simultaneously, the British government began sending convicts from its own territory halfway around the world to establish penal colonies in the distant continent of Australia. These networks of penal transportation also became intra-imperial with convicts transported between colonies. However, the British government implemented a policy to restrict penal transportation to the Australian colonies only to convicts of European origin. Australia was thereby incorporated into the British Empire through the establishment of a series of settler colonies reserved primarily for white free and forced migrants. (See Sinha, this volume.)
The decline of global transoceanic slave trades and penal transportation networks in the nineteenth century coincided with shifting patterns of mass migration, with significant increases in free migration motivated by labor shortages in recipient societies and economic depression in societies of origin. These new and expanded networks of global migration were also facilitated by the development of maritime steam technology, which considerably lessened the perils and duration of transoceanic voyages. Alongside the growth of free migration, slave emancipation globally stimulated demands for other forms of cheap labor which were fulfilled by the mass migration of people, overwhelmingly from South Asia and China, who were contracted as indentured workers. Indentured servitude was only partially free, and evidence is widely available that in many cases people were coerced and deceived into signing contracts that restricted their freedom as migrant laborers. It can therefore be analyzed along a spectrum running from free to forced migration. Imperial networks were conduits for indentured labor migration, which had the effect of completely altering the population of many smaller colonies and states. This was the case particularly for island colonies that were dependent on plantation agriculture. For example, Indian indentured servants went in their hundreds of thousands to sugar-producing colonies such as Trinidad and Tobago in the Atlantic, Fiji in the Pacific, and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Unlike in the slave trade and free migration, the gender pattern of indentured servitude was overwhelmingly male. Some of these men, if they survived their terms, often sought to remain as migrants after their service contracts and to establish families through migration of women from their homelands. Others returned home. Indentured servitude of South Asians and Chinese workers was phased out in the early twentieth century, as abuses of the system, which at its worst constituted a form of slavery, brought it into disrepute.
But increasingly from the late nineteenth century, as Adam McKeown (2008) points out, global migration was as much about monitoring borders and enforcing exclusion as it was about attracting labor and migrants. Restrictions on immigration were initially implemented by states that sought to severely curtail migration of people from Asia. The creation of border controls as a foundation of modern sovereignty demonstrates Cooper’s critique of globalization as a process of increasingly unimpeded flows and connections. By the end of the nineteenth century, all forms of forced migration had become illegal in most parts of the world, and free migration had been increasingly channeled through assertions of state sovereignty that granted the right of entry (or refused it) to people as either members of an ethnic group, citizens of a particular state, and/or individuals.
Scale Four, Microhistory and Biography: Individual Lifespans and Journeys
Most individual human beings are in constant motion, of course, even if they stay in the same dwelling space their entire lives – the human lifespan on a temporal level is a form of movement that, on the one hand, is profoundly intimate and, on the other, brings my narrative of people in motion full circle, back to the cosmological character of existence. Aging, after all, is a form of energy expenditure and entropy. Humans have recognized this metaphysical perspective on life in their quest for the meaning of existence. (See Vélez, Prange, and Clossey, this volume.) Buddhist philosophy takes the idea of constant change one step farther, positing that reality itself is not fixed and that humans are continually in flux. Biological imperatives aside, examining people in motion on the scale of the individual inevitably raises questions of self-identity and its shifting nature in the context of changing circumstances – temporal and spatial. World historians have engaged with biographical writing as a way to engage with the complexities of human experience in a global context. Biographies seem to present historians with a limited chronological framework, but one that can enable a microhistorical examination of experience, context and change. (See Gerritsen, this volume.)
One way to overcome the chronological limitation of biography – and to stretch its temporal scale – is through family history. Rebecca Scott’s approach to the transregional, even global microhistory of the Tinchant family goes beyond showing how individuals are embedded in familial relationships and traces how radically the status of individuals and the scope of family networks can change over a relatively brief period of time. Her narrative focuses on “a single peripatetic family across three long-lived generations, from enslavement in West Africa in the eighteenth century through emancipation during the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s to emigration to Cuba, Louisiana, France, and Belgium in the nineteenth century” (Scott 2009: 84). While Scott’s aim is to trace the emergence of an Atlantic vernacular public-rights framework as expressed by members of this family, the breadth of geographical residence within this family over generations shows how the movement of individuals simultaneously constructs intimate global connections. Although an individual’s self-identity shifts with life stages and is particularly shaped by changing circumstances and mobility, family history can amplify this combination of micro- and macroscales of analysis.
In closing, therefore, I will zoom in on the lives of two individuals who were born in the mid-eighteenth century during the heyday of complex networks of free and forced migration that included global slave trades. Each of them experienced aspects of free and forced migration on a global scale, which makes their life stories illustrative of these broader patterns. Not coincidentally, both individuals also wrote and published autobiographies which have provided rich detail about their lives. While biographical research and writing is experiencing a resurgence as a promising methodology for world history, autobiographies are much trickier – as few can meet the field’s core criterion of engaging with a wider world. So these two individuals, Olaudah Equiano and Elizabeth Marsh, are at once extraordinary because their experiences with capture and enslavement warranted an audience for their stories, but also ordinary in the sense that their lives were shaped by contexts experienced by many others. Both individuals have been the subject of biographies as well (and in the case of Equiano, multiple biographies that have made their way into world history textbooks). It is fair to say that Equiano was famous in his own lifetime as a result of his autobiography and political involvement and has become an iconic figure in narratives of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Elizabeth Marsh received considerable attention around the publication of her autobiography, but this did not shape the remainder of her life. She was neither famous nor, much less desirable for a woman of her era, infamous. Her story has been reproduced by historians extensively in the context of similar stories in the “captive narrative” genre (Colley 2003). She has, however, been the subject of only one biography, written by Linda Colley and aptly titled The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (2008).
Olaudah Equiano published his Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African in 1789. It immediately became a bestseller, launching the author into public view, where he became an outspoken critic of the slave trade and slavery during the ascendancy of the Abolitionist movement. Equiano’s autobiography was the first detailed account of the shock of enslavement as a boy captured from his family home in West Africa, the horrors of the middle passage on a slave ship, and the iniquities of slavery as he experienced them in multiple contexts in the Americas. It was also a redemption story: Equiano found God and freedom and vowed to praise both for the remainder of his life. He rose to the status of a gentleman in England and, having married a local woman and raised a family, he left his daughters with a considerable inheritance upon his death. Equiano’s talent as a writer enabled him to describe, graphically and movingly, his experiences and perspectives on the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century, which he traveled during most of his adulthood as a sailor before arriving in England and eventually becoming a spokesperson for the Abolitionist movement. This, at least, has been the received version of Olaudah Equiano’s life story since the appearance of his Interesting Narrative (Equiano 2001).
Yet recently, Vincent Carretta has raised questions about the accuracy of Equiano’s self-presentation. Although there is no doubt that Equiano is the author of the narrative, which he assertively stated was “Written by Himself,” it is less clear that the contents reflect his lived experiences as an “Atlantic creole” born in Africa. All autobiographies are acts of self-fashioning, of course, but Carretta claims to have uncovered evidence in the form of baptismal and naval records to prove Equiano was born a slave in South Carolina. “The available evidence suggests that the author of The Interesting Narrative may have invented rather than reclaimed an African identity. If so, Equiano’s literary achievements have been vastly underestimated” (Carretta 2005: xiv). It appears likely that Olaudah Equiano constructed a fictive autobiography by drawing on composite narratives told to him by other slaves or through written accounts of the experiences he depicts as his own. Carretta’s findings have proved controversial, as they bring into question the most iconic life narrative of the middle passage. One could argue that even if Carretta is correct, this does not undermine the significance of Equiano’s autobiography or his achievements in his own lifetime. What it does suggest, though, is that even at the intimate level of self-representation through autobiography, it is the ability of a life story to connect with the experiences of others or the broader context of its time that gives such narratives lasting power. The horrors of the middle passage and of the experience of slavery were indeed brought to life by Olaudah Equiano to an increasingly literate and book-buying public in Europe who were expanding their global awareness by reading popular travel and biographical narratives.
Elizabeth Marsh decided to write about her experiences of capture by Barbary pirates in 1756 and potential enslavement in the seraglio of the Sultan of Morocco, Sidi Muhammad, much later in her life. By the time she penned The Female Captive and published it anonymously in 1769, while still assertively declaring it was “Written by Herself,” Marsh was a respectable married woman with children. Her husband was in the service of the British East India Company in Dhaka. Linda Colley’s depiction of Elizabeth Marsh’s life in the context of her familial connections “charts a world in a life and a life in the world. It is also an argument for re-casting and re-evaluating biography as a way of deepening our understanding of the global past” (2008: xix).
Marsh spent much of her life traveling on British naval and merchant ships, movements at first controlled and then later facilitated by her male relatives. Her story simultaneously reveals the social and economic restrictions imposed on women, and how individuals and families strategized to maintain or improve social status and security across generations in the context of global opportunities of trade and empire. (See Burton, this volume.) While Marsh’s Female Captive describes a moment of extreme vulnerability for a young Englishwoman in a precarious position as a hostage in Morocco, it is Linda Colley’s extraordinary achievement in tracing archival records pertaining to her extended family, particularly the business and official records left by her male relatives, that fashions a life for Elizabeth Marsh. Although her account shows her as an extraordinary and captivating woman, Marsh was nevertheless confined by her gender role and her desire to ensure her own financial and social security as well as that of her children. Her own mother migrated from the Caribbean with her father, and Colley speculates that she may have been a creole. Depicting a very different experience of slave societies in the Americas than her contemporary Equiano, Marsh came from a family belonging to the slave-owning colonial elite. They were, however, not members of the British elite, but occupied a somewhat precarious aspiring middle-class position facilitated by naval and merchant global networks providing the basis of employment for menfolk and profit for the family. Marsh asserted her independence through oceanic and colonial travel and her range of itineraries was extraordinary. She clearly had a restless streak. Elizabeth Marsh and her family experienced both the opportunities and constraints of her time. As Colley suggests:
This micro-strategy – using the perspectives on the past afforded by a family – becomes paradoxically more, and not less, valuable when dealing with historical developments that extend over vast territorial and oceanic spaces … I have sought to reveal the many and diverse connections that existed between “impersonal and remote transformations” on the one hand and, on the other, “the most intimate features of the human self.” (2008: 300)
For historians, trained in close archival reading, the digital revolution has created access to sources of evidence worldwide that has reinvigorated biographical writing and expanded the possibilities of writing world histories on an individual scale. This is the value of biography in world history.
Notes
1 The next section is a summary of Christian (2004).
2 For the full articulation of world-systems analysis, see Wallerstein (1974–2011).
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