On global history, “trade book history,” and why we care
I have not read Alan Mikhail’s book on Selim the Grim, though I would like to. But like every global historian on Twitter, I have read the reviews. And I have also read the commentary on the reviews. Who could resist? The controversy has everything: brilliant and acclaimed historians, institutional rivalry, small field drama, accusations of selling out, counter-accusations of misogyny, and (always popular) critiques of global history. It also has a long discussion of the origins of coffee, a mention of the dowager empress Cixi, and a foray into the possible presence of Vikings in the Yucatán.
I would be lying if I said none of this interested me. I find it all fascinating. But what I am most concerned about is the way everyone involved has been drawn into a discussion that, in my mind, conflates three very different things: popular history, “great man” history, and global history.
I understand why people are tempted to put these three kinds of work in the same category. It makes for a good story, in which bad incentives lead to bad ends. As I see it, it goes something like this: “Historians of places other than the United States have trouble competing in the market for trade books because publishers are looking to profit and only make offers on accessible, familiar topics. As a result, historians trying to write for trade end up making huge leaps to suit the demands of the market. They try to relate everything to the more familiar story of the United States (resulting in “fake global history”), or they choose a narrative approach that simplifies the past by attributing world historical change to the actions of a charismatic, famous man.”
This argument is appealing in some ways, but its premise is fundamentally flawed. “Popular” is an audience, not an approach. People write successful trade books about all kinds of things: eels, plant biology, poker, mundane suburban extra-marital affairs, Mumbai slums, and owls. John McPhee wrote a book about the cultivation of oranges and 2421 readers have rated it 4.07 stars on Goodreads.
People will tell you it’s impossible to sell a trade history book that isn’t about the United States. They will tell you it’s impossible to sell a trade book that isn’t about a famous man. They will tell you it’s impossible to sell a trade book if you are not the chair of the History Department at Yale, or if you do not resemble David McCullough. I heard all of these things, and they are all wrong. I take it personally, because this kind of conventional wisdom discourages people who are already marginalized in academic history, particularly women and those who would write about them.
Critics of trade history are not wrong when they point out that the History shelves at bookstores are overcrowded with biographies of famous men, and critics of global history are not wrong when they point out that the field is dominated by male historians. Both popular history and global history tend to encourage “great man” dynamics – in their subjects and in their practitioners. But trade history and global history are not the same thing, and there are different mechanisms at work.
If successful non-fiction can be about anything, why does it seem as if trade history is entirely books about George Washington? One lazy answer is that readers are far more interested in the adventures of famous men than the mundane lives of non-famous women. But we know from other genres that this isn’t the case. The protagonists of literary fiction are often women living ordinary lives, and much of the memoir boom of the past twenty years has been sustained by non-famous women writing about themselves. If you wander from the History section to the Historical Fiction section of the bookstore, you’ll find a ridiculous number of books about the alchemist’s daughter and the shoemaker’s daughter and the painter’s daughter. All of them imagine the lives of ordinary women in the past – and not just in the United States! – and they all sell.
Other people might say that the readers of nonfiction and the readers of fiction and memoir are entirely different – and that history readers are men who like enormous, block-like tomes with pictures of Napoleon on the cover. But that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Why wouldn’t the audiences for fiction and memoir read history, if we gave them something they were interested in? One explanation for women’s investment in historical fiction is that it allows them to read stories about the past that feature women, stories they are unable to find in their history courses or in the nonfiction section of the bookstore.
So what keeps these women from reading popular history, and what keeps us from writing it for them? I think we might find an answer in the tension between the evidentiary standards of historical writing and the expectations and desires of readers. When people read fiction, they can often find pieces of their own experience rendered precisely, and beautifully, in someone else’s words. They care about Mrs. Dalloway because they, too, have gone out to buy flowers for a party, and because some of her darker thoughts have echoed in their own minds. When they read historical fiction, they think, “Who would I have been in seventeenth-century England, or in Renaissance Florence, or in Japanese-occupied Singapore?”
The history of great men allows readers some of that joy of identification because the inner lives of famous men are so accessible – they wrote endlessly, and other people wrote about them. As a result, the many biographers of Thomas Jefferson can recreate his inner life, much as a novelist would, without sacrificing any of the standards of historical evidence. Historians of ordinary people can’t make this leap, because they rarely have enough to go on. They can write histories that are scrupulously non-fictional, and they don’t feel true, or readable, because they seem to stubbornly obscure the subject’s thoughts and feelings..
As I see it, the solution to this problem is not to abandon the standards of evidence, or to resign oneself to endlessly writing about the same dozen famous men. Instead, it’s to choose our subjects more carefully and – within reason – to speculate, so that ordinary people are allowed the same vibrancy, the same liveliness, the same sense of possibility as their more famous contemporaries. Saidiya Hartman accomplished this unforgettably in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. And I believe such projects are essential if we want popular history books to be more democratic and less boring.
The problem with global history is a different one. Although Subrahmanyam, Kafadar, and Fleischer critique the simplistic narrative ambitions of “fake global history,” the type of global history Subrahmanyam writes has an ambivalent relationship to narrative and a more openly troubled relationship to women’s and gender history.
The problematic relationship between global history and narrative is, I think, relatively easy to explain. Many of the original leaders of the field – and here I’m thinking of people like Ken Pomeranz, Bin Wong, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam – thought of themselves as countering a dominant story about the Rise of the West by offering counterexamples and provocations from regional histories. That older story had its arc – the “rise” – and it had its protagonists, let’s say from Vasco Da Gama through maybe James Watt – who were all European men. With the new global history there were new protagonists (for Subrahmanyam, the King of Calicut), and new arcs (for Pomeranz it was “divergence” rather than rise). But the goal was still to complicate the unified narrative, and as we began to account for new places, new actors, new conceptions of space and setting, the story split off in many directions.
Yet women still did not feature very often as the protagonists of global history, particularly history set before the twentieth century. As many others have noted, traditional women’s and gender history came out of social history, which relies on intense archival work in obscure locations. In contrast, the new global history relied on surveying vast expanses and making comparisons. When new protagonists surfaced, they were those who were already prominent at the level of national histories: i.e. usually not women.* Thus it is no surprise that we are more likely to get a global history featuring Selim the Grim than an anonymous woman washing clothes in an Anatolian stream, even if we take the “trade book” question off the table. It is a surprise that global historians suddenly have a problem with great man history, but I assume that they are more upset with the greatness than the men, per se.
Finally, as Patricia Crossley points out, the field of global history is stubbornly male dominated. This becomes particularly obvious whenever there is a big conference, but you can also see it in the citations of “state of the field” articles. For example, David Motadel and Richard Drayton’s defense of global history cites roughly thirty-five women and more than twice as many men, which is actually a good ratio by the standards of the field. There is no good intellectual explanation for this, so I will not offer one. But I will note that historians such as Lara Putnam, Emma Rothschild, and Linda Colley have been among the most vocal advocates of finding new kinds of global history protagonists, pointing out that new search technologies have made it possible to find obscure people and trace them through multiple archives. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all these historians are women. (And, for the record, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh was a trade book.)
This is now a very long blog post, and I have to go make dinner and tend to all kinds of domestic labor, but here is my point: there is no good reason that trade books have to feature famous men, familiar places, and dramatic, simple stories. There is also no good reason why global history has to foreground famous men. Thus there is no reason whatsoever that a good trade history that is also a global history must end up being a story about a famous man. By using this explanation – “well, it’s a popular history that features the non-West, so of course it’s a slap-dash story about a great man” – we are actually cutting off the possibility of more democratic, less boring, and more inclusive popular histories. And we desperately need them!
So we should be wary of how we frame the discussion of global history, trade history, and great men, lest we encourage the very dynamics we are trying to critique.
*The usual strategy of overcoming this is the “global microhistory,” that might have a woman at its center – think Linda Colley’s brilliant The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh (mentioned above). Since microhistory is, in itself, a way of recuperating narrative in the wake of the cultural turn, this is an example of a way in which narrative, gender history, and global history can work together. But there are very serious limitations, and these, again, bring us back into the Eurocentric problems that the new global historians tried to disrupt. The protagonists of new global microhistories are generally European women, who moved more than their East Asian counterparts and left more records than the African women who were moved en masse during the slave trade. So this seems to me to be a great strategy that produces fascinating work, but I don’t think it solves the problem of narrating global history in a way that can account for non-European women as protagonists.
Note: I edited this post on 9/27/20 to add the point about women historians and their search for new protagonists. Thanks to several people for their comments on this post!)