Global biographies: Lived history as method

Introduction

Laura Almagor, Haakon A. Ikonomou and Gunvor Simonsen

I do not think of myself as a biographer; biography is just a form I have used once or twice to encapsulate history.¹

With these words, Barbara W. Tuchman, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian, sought to situate herself in a seminal collection on the art of writing biographies. Tuchman herself explained: ‘In so far as I have used biography in my work, it has been less for the sake of the individual subject than as a vehicle for exhibiting an age’.² In other words, for Tuchman biography served first and foremost as an approach to shedding light on larger developments.³ Decades later, in the introduction to a 2019 issue of Past & Present, John-Paul A. Ghobrial bluntly presented the challenges that global history is facing:

The fate of place-based research, the ability to explain change, its relationship to sources and theoretical frameworks, and its record on Eurocentrism: these four issues are just some of the problems facing global history today, and they are as much a concern to people working within the field as they are to those working outside it. Without addressing these issues, global history risks becoming unsurprising in its narratives, uncritical in its methods, Eurocentric in its appeal and programmatic in its agenda.⁴

In this volume, biography is the tool and global history is the ‘sink that needs fixing’. More concretely, our aim is to present and explore three approaches that historians can use in order to mobilize biography as an analytical instrument to write global history. We have gathered twelve contributions by scholars specializing in diverse subjects covering the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, and who collaborated across four workshops to develop the three approaches.

Our volume thus responds to the recent call in global history to develop a more applicable methodology and to ‘ground’ analysis in primary sources and concrete contexts. (However, it should be mentioned at this early point that we do not claim to ease all of Ghobrial’s scholarly global history pains; for instance, we do not explicitly aim to tackle Eurocentrism or to ‘explain’ change.) This volume also shares Tuchman’s evaluation of biography as a gateway to explaining something larger than merely the individual lives under scrutiny. The contributions speak to the long turn away from the ‘cradle-to-grave’ biography of unitary, ‘solid’ individuals in the historiography of biography. It is not our ambition to completely deconstruct the subject, but rather to embed her/him in a global context and to think creatively about how s/he can be made into an instrument for our purposes. The shared conviction here is that the biographical approach in history and the social sciences holds analytical opportunities that remain underused in global scholarship to this day.

In this introduction, we will address some of the main trends, challenges and opportunities apparent in the marriage between biography and global history – and then present our three approaches as clearly as possible. The key methodological questions addressed are: how can biography be productive for global history writing, and how can global history expand our understanding of individual lives and their historical and historiographical relevance?

Biography in global history

In the inaugural issue of the Journal of Global History (2006), Patrick O’Brien – prominent economic historian and practitioner of global history – offered an introduction to the field of global history. In his contribution, O’Brien sketched his vision for a particular kind of history. Global historians should ‘construct negotiable meta-narratives … that will become cosmopolitan in outlook and meet the needs of our globalizing world’.⁵ By presenting cosmopolitanism as the credo of global history, O’Brien echoed William McNeill, who concluded his The rise of the West (1963) with a survey of ‘Cosmopolitanism on a global scale’.⁶ Like McNeill, O’Brien in the early 2000s still saw global history as having to concern itself with ‘long chronologies’, ‘major forces’ and ‘extended spaces and large populations’. The proper units of this historiographical endeavour were ‘continents, oceans, cultures and civilizations’.⁷ Within this vision, the biography had a very limited place: its role was merely to ‘complement’ the serious, large-scale histories of slavery and patriarchy.⁸

This rejection of biography did not persist, and since then global historians have increasingly begun to include other scales than those built of aggregate data. Indeed, biography has gained wide acceptance as an approach relevant to the field of global history. In 2010, Tonio Andrade argued that global historians ought to adopt biographical approaches to their analysis of the human past. Global history needed to be populated by ‘real people’, who ‘inhabited’ and ‘lived through’ the structures and large-scale processes that global historians had successfully documented during the previous century. For Andrade, the need for ‘real people’ was grounded in a particular kind of historical responsibility linked to both the past and the future. As historians of the future, global historians needed to write books that were ‘fun to read, exciting’ and reached ‘a wide audience’ by bringing people of the past ‘alive’.⁹

Global historians have indeed begun to include people in their narratives. However, beyond using biography as a means to entertain a wider readership, global history has not demonstrated a particular interest in the analytical and methodological benefits of the approach. In one of the formative works of global history, Kenneth Pomeranz’ The great divergence: China, Europe and the making of the modern world economy (2000), the reader will look almost in vain for people. Pomeranz rigorously pursued the material foundations of economic development by comparing the Yangtzi delta and England along a number of socio-economic factors. The result was an analysis that excluded individual consciousness from the making of the world economy. Indeed, the few times individuals do appear in The great divergence – such as the several mentions of George Staunton, British envoy to China in the late eighteenth century – these are merely mobilized faute de mieux to compensate for the lack of more solid aggregate data.¹⁰

While individuals are all but absent from Pomeranz’ book, global histories that attempt to intertwine economic, social and cultural processes in one interpretative framework, rather than focus on just one of these dimensions, have often been more attentive to people and their places in global processes. In seminal works such as The human web: a bird’s-eye view of world history (2003) by William and John McNeill, Christopher Bayly’s The birth of the modern world, 1780–1914 (2004) and The transformation of the world: a global history of the nineteenth century (2009/2014) by Jürgen Osterhammel, individuals frequently appear. Yet the inclusion of people in these synthetic works appears in particularly patterned ways: first, individuals are used as ‘place-holders’ for larger trends and developments. In The human web Albert Einstein is mentioned as an example of the integration of intellectual spheres that resulted from the escape of Jews from Nazi Germany, while Osterhammel includes Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin as examples of scholars who financed their research out of their own pocket. These individuals – incidentally, all well-known white men – become illustrative tools rather than analytical units or domains in their own right. Indeed, the use of the individual as mirror of a historical development leaves unexplored individual subjectivity and its connection to globalizing contexts and processes.¹¹

Different from the ‘place-holder’ individual is the supra-historical individual that moulds the world but is seemingly not of it. These – for instance dictators such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong – are presented through their monstrous ability to cause change, often death, in the lives of millions of people.¹² Like biographical ‘place-holders’, this focus on Powerful Men (and Women) also dodges the question of how subjectivity is shaped by its relationship to shifting global contexts. Using influential figures to explain global processes in this way does not allow for an examination of these people as what Pomeranz, in a later piece, has termed ‘full historical units’.¹³ While nature, climate, goods, capital, technology, politics, populations and family, to mention a few historical domains, are established as agents and outcomes of historical processes, until recently global historians have paid scant attention to the place of subjectivity in the historical processes they study. These risks are somewhat mitigated by the recent contributions by intellectual and conceptual historians to the field. Or Rosenboim has given us a detailed mapping of the twentieth-century concept of the global while Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori have fruitfully drawn attention to the analytical possibilities of looking at ideational formations as a part of global history.¹⁴ Sartori’s exploration of the culture concept in Bengal – which incidentally focuses on ‘some of the great men from the pantheon of Bengal Renaissance’ – attempts to grasp the culturalism of Bengali intellectuals as shaped by global capitalist structures while also setting ‘in motion distinct and even potentially contradictory … projects’.¹⁵ Nevertheless, David Washbrook’s observation still rings true: ‘the world of the mind, of culture, ideas, and aesthetics, which informs how various peoples came to perceive and evaluate their own lives’ still finds little place in global history.¹⁶

Despite (or perhaps precisely because of) this limited presence of a full biographical approach in established global history, the argument that a small-scale and more thoroughly contextualized approach – like microhistory – can contribute to the field has gained currency during the last decade or so. Mark Gamsa, exploring the role of biography in microhistory, pinpoints three interconnected developments leading to a renewed interest in what he calls ‘global lives’: first the shift away from the nation state as the prima facie framework of historical analysis; second, the return of microhistory as a methodology, not only in its stringent Italian version, but also in a more narrative anglo-saxon variation; and, last, the emergence of transnational history – which he labels a ‘byproduct of globalization’.¹⁷ Still, Gamsa is rather on his own in actively trying to bring biography into a conversation that is mostly about microhistory, mostly (still) prescriptive and mostly concerned with the early modern period. It is emblematic (and unsurprising given the traditions of microhistory) that the issue of Past & Present mentioned earlier, while dealing with how to combine micro- and global history, focusses in its entirety on the ‘early modern globalization’ between the fifteenth century and the late eighteenth and does not mention the word ‘biography’ even once. When biography is discussed as an approach to global history, the justifications offered tend to be either very general, almost universalistic/programmatic in tone, or so particular that a sense of broader relevance is lost.

One prominent example of the programmatic advocacy for biography is Sebastian Conrad’s recent exposition on global history. Conrad notes that one of the central contributions of what he terms ‘global microhistory’, (in which category he counts for example Natalie Zemon Davis’ Trickster travels: a sixteenth-century Muslim between worlds (2007)), is that it can lead to ‘fascinating insights into processes of global change and how they frame the space for individual agency. Not least, micro-perspectives are able to reveal the heterogeneity of the past and the stubbornness of historical actors.’¹⁸ In other words, what a bird’s eye perspective will not capture is the great variety in which global change manifests itself in local contexts; and that the movements, practices and articulations – individual agency – are interchangeably productive in and produced by structures.¹⁹ This is a step beyond protagonists merely exemplifying broader structural forces. In Conrad’s opinion the protagonist is not a mere pedagogical tool or a narrative trick used to entertain. Rather, individuals as history-making agents must be included as an integral element of global history’s methodology.

Thus far, then, global historians have attempted to align biography with global history in three different ways. Firstly, the biographical approach is presented as a way of making a presumably dull historiography readable. Secondly, historians advocate biography as a way of generating insights about the heterogeneity of the global past. Thirdly, it is seen as a way of placing global phenomena – such as the intercontinental traveller – in a local context. The question remains, however, what makes a biography global? How can a focus on people as subjects and agents make an actual difference – a difference that leads to substantial changes in the ways we conceptualize and narrate global histories?²⁰

Biography as approach

Biography writing itself has come a long way from its one-sided focus on the impact of prominent (male) individuals on changes in societal structures. In this older understanding of biographical research, the choice was presented between a focus on the individual and on the historical context in which she or he lived.²¹ James L. Clifford’s 1970 remark that beyond this choice not much valuable critical work on biography had been done no longer rings true.²² Ever since the different methodological revolutionary schools and ‘turns’ of the 1970s and 1980s brought about a whirlwind of innovative approaches in the humanities, followed by the more direct revitalization of the biographical approach in the 1990s, ‘biography’ has been liberated from the rigid constraints that had defined it. The ‘biographical turn’ is in the process of redeeming biography from its relatively low status in the hierarchy of scholarly prestige.²³ Thanks to the accomplishments of microhistory, oral history, the Annales school and postmodernism and poststructuralism in their many manifestations, no longer now does biography refer just to biography as a ‘product’: its scope has expanded to include biography as a method or approach.²⁴ The fruitful result of these trends is an increase of creative narration in life stories in what is a maturing scholarly field.²⁵

As mentioned, a central part of the biographical turn has been the rejection of the ‘womb-to-tomb’ narrative and a move towards a critical dismantling of the ‘solid’ subject, in order to examine a life as performed, fragmented and self-fashioned.²⁶ With such a perspective, individuals are always positioning themselves – and being positioned – within multiple (cultural) contexts.²⁷ Moreover, biographers have begun to scrutinize ‘biographical uncertainties’, based on source limitations and the relative unavoidability of the biographer’s subjective stance.²⁸ These critical interventions owe much to the fields of subaltern studies and gender studies. There has also been a defiant turn away from ‘representability’. Biography has thus developed into a genre that includes what Virginia Woolf termed the ‘lives of the obscure’, those largely invisible ‘connectors’ between more visible institutions, processes and people, and is therefore well positioned to investigate the human experience and agency in global processes from less obvious angles.²⁹

Interestingly, a diverse collection of non-historians made the first real attempt to develop a theoretical and methodological basis for biographical research. Thanks to the work of scholars such as anthropologist Clifford Geertz, the connections between biographical research, ethnography and microhistory have been laid bare.³⁰ Years before historians began to see biography as something more than just a field or product, social scientists already spoke of a ‘biographical method’, thus following Bertaux in posing one of the central questions that drives our enquiry today: ‘what is the relationship between individual and collective praxis and socio-historical change?’³¹ Still, much theoretical work on historical biographies remains confined to introductions to anthologies and edited volumes (such as this one).³² Also, the vast majority of self-standing theoretical studies of biography focus almost exclusively on literary biography and therefore discount the types of historical and political biographical approaches that we are interested in.³³ Therefore, while paying tribute to the valuable theoretical work that has been done in the past couple of decades, Global biographies aims to fill a scholarly lacuna.³⁴

Barbara Caine, at the end of her important study on biography and history, anticipated our and others’ endeavours when she concluded that biography’s appeal is growing ‘at a time when historical interest is extending beyond the national and even the imperial to the transnational and the global’.³⁵ The 2010 volume Transnational lives: biographies of global modernity, 1700–present speaks to that point. In part, our engagement echoes that of the editors of Transnational lives: ‘The patterns of careers, networks, enterprises, relationships, families and households that make up an individual life story have formed themselves across a global canvas. Tracing the unique contours of such a life compels us to see the world as at once profoundly connected and deeply divided.’³⁶ Much in line with the convictions underlying the current volume, the editors of Transnational Lives propose that a purely national framework is insufficient to study figures that during their lifetimes were all part of a story of ‘global circulation’. Indeed, studies of transnational lives, such as for instance those contained in Paul Gilroy’s seminal study The Black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness (1993) have established that the experiences of translocation, border crossing and mobility – in addition to racism and antisemitism – have created particular conditions for diaspora subjectivity, famously expressed by W. E. B. Dubois’ notion of double consciousness.³⁷ However valuable these insights are, the transnational biography is concerned with connections and movements across and beyond (national) borders, but stops short of explaining, rethinking or exploring global formations.³⁸

The notion that biography can highlight connections otherwise overlooked or pushed to the margins of our historical work echo the standard description of the methods used in global history: connections and comparisons.³⁹ However, as Ghobrial recently argued, global history has become a victim of its own success by emphasizing connectedness, circulation and integration and thus ‘downgrading … place-based knowledge and expertise …’⁴⁰ Those writing about ‘global lives’ are married to mobility to such an extent that their protagonists barely touch the ground they so hurriedly scatter across.⁴¹ Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, when applied to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries these standard methods of global history may not be as productive as they are for earlier periods. To trace and document the emergence of ‘a new sense of the limits of [ the ] inhabited world’, as Subrahmanyam once put it, may be considered a substantial expansion of our knowledge of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁴² For the early modern period, as Lara Putnam argues, the ‘telling example is a useful evidentiary paradigm in cases where there is a strong presumption of absence, and therefore simply finding one or more instances of presence is something to write home about’.⁴³ When investigating the global during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the location and narration of ‘mobility’ and ‘connections’ are of less, if any, intrinsic value. Establishing interconnectedness is not something the biography can do for our understanding of the global. Rather, these observations are the starting point of our inquiry – the globalizing and interconnected world is the canvas, the scale and the phenomenon to be probed, questioned and disentangled; we do not need to prove it.⁴⁴ In this era of globalized communication, cross-continental mobility, scientific documentation, imperial entrepreneurs, religious missionaries and capitalist adventures, we have a wealth of source material and contemporary contextualizations, which allows us to choose our protagonists more freely. We can trace them in detail, deliberately decentre our object of study and connect perhaps seemingly disparate trajectories and scales. These different analytical steps will help us to question, unpack and rethink interpretations arrived at through large-scale analyses. Rather than merely ‘dramatizing the issues’ and ‘animating the more abstract processes’,⁴⁵ the aim is to rely on biographical approaches to shift our understanding of the global.

To support this point, Linda Colley forcefully argues that ‘a purely abstract approach to changes and influences that transcend continents means that we understand them only imperfectly’. The biography, then, helps us to ‘deepen … our understanding of the global past’.⁴⁶ The trajectory of the Marsh family that Colley lays bare allows her to nuance understandings of the institutions and processes that connected continents and smaller regions during the eighteenth century.⁴⁷ The biographical approach adopted by Colley introduces a layered notion of time (its expansions and contractions), of establishing empire and commerce as incongruent, yet linked domains, and allows her to document the way imperial and capitalist expansion afforded individual opportunity. This ability to make sense of synchronic processes is a key strength of biography: its vertical analytical structure complements traditional global history’s diachronic and horizontal gaze.⁴⁸

Accordingly, the biographical approach promises a way of dissolving – or, better, reconceptualizing – the distinction between a macro and a micro level of historical analysis.⁴⁹ By turning to biography, we direct our attention to the social processes that establish as well as undermine what Pierre Bourdieu once described as the ‘institutions of integration and unifications of the self’.⁵⁰ The biographical approach provides, Lindsay and Wood argue in their work on Black Atlantic biographies, evidence of self-fashioning against structural barriers, and works as a means to rethink the temporality/ies of past worlds, allowing us to reconceptualize the spatial units that undergird our studies.⁵¹ In a similar fashion, Birgitte Possing has noted that twenty-first-century biographers approach their historical actors as ‘culture carriers’ or ‘culture breakers’.⁵² While we do not necessarily agree with the notion that people ‘carry’ or ‘break’ culture, these terms nevertheless emphasize the fact that the exploration of the protagonist as productive and embedded in cultural contexts is central to biographical endeavours. As such, the biographical approach helps to nuance the materialist concerns of much of global history. This is so because the biographical approach underlines that ‘it is impossible to segregate the public from the intimate, the economic from the cultural or the political from the personal’.⁵³ With biography as an approach, self, time and space are opened up to critical analysis.⁵⁴ Is there, we might ask, a global script at play in the making of the self and what are the analytical dividends of excavating such a script?

In the above, we have discussed the place of biographies and the individual in global history, and the developments in the field of biography refining it as a distinct methodological approach. We have argued that the biographical approach is uniquely positioned to explore human experiences and agency in global processes, as well as the relationship between individuals being in the world and socio-historical change on the global scale. The approach can also help trace movements and connections across disparate spaces, offer a layered, archive-based, synchronic analysis of global phenomena typically explored diachronically and at an aggregate level and, finally, counter the materialist bias in global history writing by exploring the cultural construction of the self as inextricably interwoven with global forces. In this final section, we turn to our operationalization of biography as an approach to global history, which also makes up the structure of the volume.

Global biographies: three approaches

Rather than downplaying agency and the role of individuals and particular places in shaping global forces, our contention, to borrow from David Bell, is that a protagonist’s doings can ‘serve as profoundly intense, dynamic laboratories of change in their own right’.⁵⁵ Singular people act in the world and therefore should be understood as more than the sum of global structural forces. Secondly, we also contend that the biography of a protagonist can be used as an analytical prism to change how we – the interested readers – understand global structural forces. A third contention is that the biography can be mobilized to scrutinize and challenge how we – the scholarly writers – have previously narrated global structural forces. The approaches presented below – time and periodization; exceptional normal; space and scales – have the potential to combine these three strengths of the biography as a method.

Time and periodization

‘Any occurrence’, and any individual, ‘can be interpreted within different and multiple time frames’, writes Sebastian Conrad.⁵⁶ If we take the methodological implications of this statement seriously, we may use the excavation of the embodied self as a method of unpacking layers of time, questioning temporalities of events unfolding on broader scales and rethinking perceived ‘breaks’ in history and even historiographical periodization. As Matthew S. Champion writes:

Thinking with ‘temporalities’ has helped historians to understand that ‘time’ cannot be considered as an object separate from human configurations, perceptions and measurements, as well as to emphasize that ‘time’ is always and everywhere a condition of life in the world, and therefore an essential category of historical analysis.⁵⁷

One reason for this importance of time is that the global biographer can distinguish between experienced time and historical time, as well as connect the two. To this we can add the critical theory of the relationship between time and narration. As Paul Ricœur argues, things that happen to us are given meaning through a narrative emplotment in which events are ordered to uphold the plot. Thus, narratives do not operate with a linear understanding of time – instead events are connected to create a meaningful self in the present. However, this is true not only for the protagonists under scrutiny, but also for the historian who structures and connects temporalities through narrative in a sense-making exercise.⁵⁸ Just as individual stories can be used to defy neat geographies, they may also be used to scrutinize chronologies produced on a more abstract or aggregated scale. What is perhaps even more intriguing is that the global biography allows us to hold together and analyse the interplay between several scales of time. History unfolds – in a Braudelian sense – in several tempi, and the biographical approach allows us to grasp how they interact with, and indeed produce, experienced time which, on the other hand, might engage, resist, cheat (or even alter) historical time.

In chapter 1, Haakon A. Ikonomou poses the central question: what is a moment? Ikonomou explores the issue through an analysis of the Ottoman-Greek Thanassis Aghnides’ lasting negotiations of what has been labelled the Wilsonian moment: the time immediately following the First World War, when anticolonial and national movements across the globe believed in, petitioned and fought for national self-determination, animated by the promises of US President Woodrow Wilson for a postwar settlement. The chapter displays biography’s ability to capture and simultaneously break down the analytical barriers between continuity and change across this global watershed moment at the end of the First World War and the ensuing new international order. One of the strengths of the biographical approach, Ikonomou argues, is its ability to bring the ‘experiential’ and the ‘perspectival’ axes of temporality together. Thus, by striking down on instances when Aghnides sought to make sense of his times, we are prompted to ask new questions: What is the importance of the afterness of the Ottoman Empire in the interwar international order? What role did non-Western imperial experiences play in the development of liberal internationalism? Aghnides’ trajectory reveals that these are important and underappreciated areas of further study.

The year 1956 was not easy for admirers of the Soviet Union, as we learn in chapter 2 from Rósa Magnúsdóttir’s analysis of Þóra Vigfúsdóttir and Kristinn E. Andrésson’s long love-affair with Soviet Communism. By examining the writings of two dedicated Icelandic socialist intellectuals during the early Cold War and their reactions to important developments in the Soviet Union and in socialism as such, the chapter studies the couple’s ideological belief system, which was firmly grounded in both anti-Americanism (the two were exasperated by the strong US presence in Iceland) and Soviet socialism, and their unwavering mission to expose Icelandic audiences to Soviet culture and artists. As Magnúsdóttir argues, Þóra and Kristinn – as part of a global network of socialist intellectuals who met regularly for conferences and events in Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia – were intensely convinced of the superiority and the promise of the Soviet project. ‘1956’ – a global watershed moment in Communist history – became for Þóra and Kristinn a marker of continuity, reaffirming their stubborn belief in the promises of Soviet Communism in the face of increasing evidence of its faults. With this, Magnúsdóttir complicates our understanding of the temporalities of global crisis.

In chapter 3, Diana M. Natermann unpacks the life and career of Duke Adolf Friedrich zu Mecklenburg from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. The duke, as he is named, was a pro-imperialistic military man, Africa traveller and governor of Togo, German representative to South America in the 1930s and member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) during the decades after the Second World War. By connecting the peculiarities of the duke’s professional and personal practices with an analysis of what are traditionally conceived of as watershed moments in German history, the chapter highlights two glacial, global shifts: first, the slow economic and social transformation of the role of nobility from the mid-nineteenth century; second, the transformation of imperial knowledge as a currency that came to serve new purposes, as Germany lost her colonial empire, turned to Nazism and eventually emerged divided in the Cold War era. The global transformation of his nobility and his imperial credentials allowed the duke to stay ‘afloat’ during several ruptures in German history.

Finally, in chapter 4, Natalia Aleksiun attempts a very different approach. She offers a collective biography of a cluster of Jewish medical students from eastern Europe studying in interwar Vienna, many of whom left Europe altogether after the Second World War. As Aleksiun demonstrates, the Holocaust and the Cold War are two watershed moments that lie, so to speak, between the object of study (students in interwar Vienna) and the memories, localities and narratives of the protagonists. The global language of the medical profession was the madeleine that transposed and connected their postwar selves with their past. In this way, Aleksiun not only argues that it was the universality of medical knowledge that allowed her protagonists to bridge and translate ruptures of time, such as the Holocaust; she also explores how the memories of the Holocaust and of their pre-Holocaust lives were shaped by their actual locality, thus showing that global processes, such as the Cold War and the breakdown of the Habsburg Empire, were co-constituent of a memory-formation that is often understood solely in relation to the Holocaust.

Exceptional normal

As Giovanni Levi noted more than thirty years ago, biographies contain a number of key elements that enable their historiographical intervention. The study of marginal or exceptional persons highlights and circumscribes the social field in which marginality emerges. As such, the biography is instrumental in addressing questions about the typical and the frequent. According to Levi, to write a biography that does not follow ‘la description traditionnelle, linéaire, et l’illusion d’une identité spécifique, cohérente, sans contradiction’ historians must direct themselves towards the social relations that shape individuals, to the kind of rationalities that guide them, to the possibilities of negotiation for them and, importantly, to the links that tie together a social field and an acting person.⁵⁹ This microhistorical approach to writing about a society through the lens of the ‘exceptional normal’ is well suited for a biographical approach to global history. It is not the choice of an exceptional (meaning fantastical) character for the sake of narrative zest or increasing book sales, but the choice of the outlier as an analytical tool that provides a peripheral gaze on normality, the centre and the taken-for-granted.⁶⁰ The approach generated by the exceptional normal institutes a deliberate decentring of global processes. What is more, in-depth sources, detailed scrutiny of individual traits and practices, and intense contextualization might alter ‘the normal’ altogether.⁶¹

In this section, four authors mobilize the notion of the exceptional normal to interrogate their biographical subjects and the larger global processes to which they contributed. At the most general level, this results in four methodological moves. One move mobilizes the notion of the exceptional normal to trace the dialectic movement back and forth between normal and exceptional, thereby opening up new perspectives on standard narratives. A second move emphasizes the normal in order to dissolve the exception, questioning the usefulness for global history of notions of transparent singularity. A third move employs the concept of the exceptional normal to highlight the traits of the biographical subject in view that were outstanding, thereby probing conventional generalizations; and a final move shows the exceptional as a contingent quality that emerges and disappears as global contexts shift.

This part of the volume begins with Ismay Milford’s study of the Zambian nationalist Munukayumbwa Sipalo, who was described by a fellow activist as ‘just an African radical’. Milford establishes that Sipalo was part of both the project of Zambian nationalism and the global Third World project, while also being marginal to both projects at various times. Milford traces Sipalo’s uneasy engagement with Zambian nationalism and his, largely unsuccessful, attempts to participate in the large-scale Third World project of decolonization and independence. This move allows Milford to suggest that we need to recognize the Third World project and its agents as ‘more complex, more conflict-ridden, less state-centric and less heroic than the conventional narrative’. Indeed, what appears exceptional about Sipalo, Milford concludes, may be normal in terms of how political struggles unfolded for many activists of and in the third world. In this chapter, the notion of the exceptional normal works to generate important insights into the exclusive elements of the Third World project.

The second move is employed by Isa Blumi in chapter 6, to critically engage with a historiographical tradition of exceptionality. By writing what Blumi provocatively terms an antibiography of Fan S. Noli, a national hero praised in Albanian historiography, Blumi demonstrates that Noli was in fact the result of Tosk-Albanian elite networks supportive of the Ottoman Empire. This is an insight that Blumi obtains by tracing Noli’s trajectory beyond Albania to Cairo, Alexandria and Boston in the United States. By dislocating Noli, and paying close attention to those around him, Blumi demonstrates that Noli was – in the terms Blumi uses – exceptionally normal. He is better understood, so to speak, as a fairly normal member of networks whose representatives were by no means as sure of their support of and membership in future nations as historians would like them to have been.

The third move is employed