On Microhistories and the Antlantic Worlds

Robert Harms The Diligent forced me to return to my argument in my previous blog and class discussion on Kongolese St. Anthony and the nature of microhistories. As a caveat, I must say that I don't think the caveats and specifics of genres are too important to harp over, but the issue has interested me, so I'm going to harp over it nevertheless. At the end of the blog post, I will discuss more substantive issues of the book, specifically its fascinating vision of the Atlantic Worlds (notice "worlds" is plural).

I essentially argued that Kongolese St. Anthony was not a microhistory because it used the contextual information to explain the event rather than the event to explain the context. Some students argued the the order of the book made it seem that way, but John Thornton simply provided much of the context, which other authors weaved into the narrative, preceding the discussion of the actual event of the Antonian Movement. The Diligent has caused me to move closer to the latter camp. Robert Harms provides immense context to the story of the Diligent's voyage. Some chapters rarely discuss the voyage of the Diligent, but provide back story to one of the ports that they visited such as the war between Dahomey and Whydah for instance (chs. 20-22). The background is used to explain the experience of Robert Durand and his colleagues during their trip similarly to that of Kongolese St. Anthony. Yet, I consider The Diligent a microhistory, so I wonder how much the order influenced me on Kongolese St. Anthony.

The two books remain very different, however, despite their order. I do think that Thornton's goal is to explain the Antonian Movement for which contextual information is used significantly to explain it. Harms's focus is on "the Worlds of the Slave Trade" as the sub-title explains. The voyage of the Diligent and its crew provides him the opportunity to discuss how the particular historical environments in the very different parts of the Atlantic World of Vannes, the slaving states of central west Africa, and Martinique influenced and shaped the actions of the Diligent, its crew, and its owners, and perhaps more importantly the slave trade generally while largely remaining independent of one another.

This brings me to my second point. Harms here presents a very interesting vision of the Atlantic World in that it was not a singular world at all, but a group of separate worlds that acted independently of one another while also influencing one another. Or, as he writes, "the slave trade was really a kaleidoscope of diverse national and local endeavors that was constantly changing over time" (xiv). Perhaps I am reading too much into this (since he does use the term Atlantic World (sans s), but nevertheless, his vision is one of localization without a "global" context.