Global liveswriting global history with a biographical approach

Resumen

The rise of global history has certainly been one of the strongest tendencies in thedevelopment of historiography in the last two decades. As Francesca Trivellato formulates, “the adjective ‘global’ is everywhere.”1 It is however quite difficult to define precisely what global history isinsofar as it coversa relatively wide diversity ofthemes and approaches. As an inheritorof world history, global history tends toanalyze historical processes ona large scale -a macro-scale-in terms of time and space:in that sense, by “combining local histories,”2 it produces meta-narrativesdealingwith “world-systems”and continentsover time. Besides this “big history”, global history has also developed in a slightly different direction by focusingon the history of globalization: its perspective is to study-mainly economically but not exclusively-long-distance connections and interactions, to uncover the existence, or not, ofan early globalization and,if it can be found, to identifyits characteristics. Nevertheless, some studies (self-)identified as “global history” or “world history” do not fit intothis large-scale pattern. It is especially the case of what I call “global lives”, using Miles Ogborn’s expression to refer to the biographies of individuals who were particularly involved in the globalization process