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The genre of microhistory is older than a half century, but many historians are returning to this narrative structure in recent years to tell biographical stories in a global frame. Is every biography a microhistory? What can microhistory do that Big History cannot? Based on studies of enslaved and free people in France’s the age of revolution and abolition, Sue Peabody analyzes the foundational rhetorical structures of microhistory and how centering historical inquiry on the lives of specific subaltern people forces historians to ask new questions of the imperial archive to generate new understandings of more traditional Big History narratives.

Sue Peabody is Meyer Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and History at Washington State University. Her books include, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime and Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies, winner of the Society for French Historical Studies 2017 Pinckney Prize for the best book in French history published in North America.

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