The Prius of Microhistories

Before I begin writing about Robert Harms’ The Diligent, I should explain that despite the title of my blog post, I am not trying to be flippant about this important book. Harms has told a difficult story and shared a painful history with amazing detail and depth. He has gone to incredible lengths to examine the unimaginable world of slavery from every angle, and has facilitated a greater understanding of slavery’s dark origins and transatlantic growth than I thought was possible.

A military history colleague of mine once told me that the old adage was wrong – history isn’t written by the victors; it’s written by the historians. Most often it is written by the victor’s historians, of course, but the point is that each historian has the unusual opportunity and responsibility for writing the history that she or he chooses to write, in the way they want to write it. Robert Harms wanted to write about slavery on his own terms – digging into the origins, ideologies, and impetus for the “peculiar institution” on both sides, the African and the European, to find out how it started, how societies came to accept it, and how it was allowed to grow to the point where millions of lives were shattered by it. Harms didn’t want to write the story of the Diligent, he wanted to write the story of slavery. As it happened, the detailed diary of First Lieutenant Robert Durand provided a convenient mechanism for telling this story. Not necessarily a “lens,” as we have seen with other microhistories, but more of a supportive witness to the events of a much larger phenomenon. The Diligent and her crew were not the main focus of the book, they were characters that floated in and out. They were a single thread in a vast tapestry.

I don’t see The Diligent as a microhistory along the lines that we have (perhaps vaguely) defined that genre, although it certainly could have been. A different historian, wanting to tell the story in a different way, could have taken Durand’s diary and built a very compelling narrative around it the way Ulrich did with Martha Ballard’s diary. Harms took a very different approach, creating a sort of hybrid history. His main thesis is a traditional, macro-style history of slavery, but he incorporates the micro-viewpoint of the Durand and the Diligent at those points where they can highlight specific details. The first slaves do not set foot on the ship until 250 pages into the book, but the details that accompany their arrival in the story could not have been provided without this micro-view. There are long sections of the book that do not even mention Durand and his crewmates, and at times the reader may forget that the Diligent is part of the story, let alone being the titular vessel. But then they drift in again, providing an eyewitness account to support Harms’ larger narrative.

Harms slides between historical genres smoothly and easily, with the result being a book that provides the best qualities of both traditional and microhistory. He has created the ideal historical hybrid.