Moving beyond fragmentation of historical research does not mean simply reverting to grand narratives, but rather cultivating a new integrative sensibility. Photo: TUCHONG

In recent decades, historical research has undergone a marked shift from grand narratives toward microanalysis. The rise of cultural history, the history of everyday life, and microhistory has redirected scholarly attention from nations, wars, and great figures to the marriages, diets, clothing, and even emotional worlds of ordinary people, greatly enriching our understanding of the past. This “micro turn” initially emerged as a corrective to traditional political and elite history. Yet as the unit of analysis has continued to shrink—from villages to families, from families to individuals, and in some cases to a single event or object—many scholars have drifted away from a deeper aim of historical inquiry: using individual cases to illuminate the broader socio-cultural structures of an era.

This approach, which “sees the trees but not the forest,” has fragmented historical knowledge into countless isolated segments. But why has this phenomenon occurred? And how might the holistic, integrative, and macro-level dimensions of historical research be restored?

Dialectical view needed for fragmentation

In the 1970s and 1980s, the micro turn and the cultural turn gained momentum in response to the dominant grand narratives associated with the Annales School and the structural frameworks of modernization theory. Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, a leading figure in microhistory, sparked both admiration and controversy with his 1976 work The Cheese and the Worms. Drawing on the trial records of the 16th-century miller Menocchio, he revealed the interaction between popular culture and the Protestant Reformation, while also raising enduring questions about fragmentation.

In his article “Playing with Scales: The Global and the Micro, the Macro and the Nano,” Jan de Vries, professor emeritus of History and Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States, explains that microhistory’s core method lies in narrowing the analytical lens—often to an individual or small group, a specific locality, and a limited time frame—in order to reconstruct, with precision, networks of events and relationships.

“They [microhistorians] sought to examine social behavior at the micro level, where one might observe individuals negotiating with normative reality. These observations might then form the basis of a new understanding of social freedom and social constraint,” de Vries wrote.

He further notes that microhistory became entangled with what has been termed the cultural or linguistic turn, as well as the “new cultural history.” In this context, it often served as a vehicle for postmodern approaches to historical writing. By emphasizing the irreducible specificity of place and person, some strands of microhistory called into question the very possibility of narratives of exchange and connection, not to mention the testing of grand theory. Although the cultural turn is sometimes framed as a revival of narrative, it in fact privileges a particular form of narrative—one operating at a human scale.

“The post-modern sensibilities introduced with the cultural turn have had the beneficial effect of making historians more self-critical and aware of the confining and distorting influence of ‘grand narrative.’ Thus, the way forward cannot be a return to narrative, but should incorporate both post-modern criticism and social scientific history,” de Vries stated in a recent interview with CSST.

Gaurav C. Garg, an assistant professor of History at Ashoka University in India, noted that by focusing on micro-level analysis, historians initially sought to test, reframe, transform, and humanize prevailing grand narratives, and in some cases to challenge them outright. Micro-narratives have broadened the horizons of historical thinking, bringing scholars closer to the ambition of historicizing everything and loosening the hold of dominant frameworks.

Garg emphasized that this dynamic has been particularly evident in historiographies of the Global South. Edward Said’s Orientalism and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe demonstrated that grand narratives and many social science concepts are not only Western in origin but also limited in their ability to interpret non-Western societies.

“As welcome and important as these moves were, I think it is in these non-West, Global South contexts where the difficulties in connecting micro studies to ‘grand narrative structures,’ has been most acute,” Garg observed. He sees both a challenge and an opportunity: Historians of the Global South are uniquely positioned to rethink, reinterpret, and reconstruct new, more inclusive large-scale narratives for future scholarship.

“Is fragmentationism a problem by itself?” Garg asked. “The issue with fragmentationism however that bothers me is when historians implicitly or explicitly abandon attempts to make connections, and strive to write better, more inclusive, global and viable meta-narratives.”

Potential, limitations of global history

Also emerging in the latter half of the 20th century, global history has often been viewed as a response to the fragmentation associated with the micro and cultural turns. Its rise is commonly marked by the publication of Canadian historian William H. McNeill’s The Rise of the West in 1963. By tracing the movement of people, goods, and ideas, global history seeks to reconnect fragmented local studies.

In Garg’s view, global history has, to some extent, reshaped world narratives in innovative ways. “It has bolstered our understanding of how interconnected the world has and continues to be; it has shown how seemingly disparate events taking place in remote corners of the world can impact/influence some other remote corners in some other parts of the world. It has also helped situate histories of the Global South better in world narratives.”

Nonetheless, he pointed out that global history agendas are often expansive and resource-intensive. Scholars in the Global South frequently lack the institutional and financial support required to undertake such research, which can further marginalize their participation in global academic discourse.

De Vries explained that the large scale of global history lends itself to prospective theories and various forms of structuralism. It also calls for consensus around methodological frameworks, and perhaps even overarching narratives capable of organizing provisional findings.

Garg also highlighted two concerning phenomena regarding global history research. First, the growing reliance on digital sources risks devaluing place-based knowledge, as scholars increasingly depend on readily accessible online data rather than cultivating immersive familiarity with the contexts they study. Second, in some quarters, an overemphasis on global mobility and connectivity is paradoxically diminishing the intellectual value of small-scale studies or of regions less integrated into global networks.

“In other words, we need to strike a balance between global and non-global histories,” he suggested.

Opportunities, challenges of archive digitalization

The digital revolution has led to unprecedented research conditions for historians. In principle, the digitization of archives, the expansion of databases, and the proliferation of online resources should encourage more comprehensive and integrative scholarship. In practice, however, digitalization has in some respects intensified fragmentation. Scholars face a familiar paradox: The more detailed their knowledge becomes, the harder it is to grasp the whole.

“The more we know in detail, the more difficult it becomes to think ‘big,’” Garg lamented. “This happens again because the relations between micro and macro in all social disciplines including history are difficult to establish. We either assume the part to be nothing but derivative of the whole—which makes the part relatively uninteresting—or we assume that the part adds up to make the whole, but it becomes difficult to show just how. Nevertheless, I think this is a productive tension that historians need to and have been grappling with.”

Garg characterizes the relationship between part and whole as an ontological problem and suggests engaging more deeply with how philosophers of science and social science conceptualize ontology. “In my own work I have deployed Roy Bhaskar’s critical realist ontology, and in particular a version of it which I call ‘soft critical realism,’ to grapple with the details while thinking of the whole. Amongst others in the realist tradition, many scholars find Gilles Deleuze’s assemblages helpful for thinking about such problems too.”

De Vries, for his part, argues that in the digital age the key is to begin with a question—ideally one that is testable. Only then can the abundance of data become a genuine advantage. “The historian who makes a fetish of his sources is doomed to become an antiquarian.”

The fragmentation of historical research is not simply a “problem,” but a complex condition of modernity, closely intertwined with theoretical reflection, institutional constraints, the digital revolution, and other factors. It has deepened knowledge even as it has narrowed perspective; it has liberated neglected voices even as it has obscured the holistic historical picture. Moving beyond fragmentation does not mean simply reverting to grand narratives, but rather cultivating a new integrative sensibility—one capable of holding together detail and totality, the local and the global, and the particular and the universal.