As time puts things into perspective, the heated and sometimes misleading historiographical debates of the 1970s and 1980s on micro-history and its alleged focus on small subjects have faded away. Yet in the meantime historical micro-analysis has emerged as a useful method to approach a very diverse set of questions in different fields of social sciences and humanities. Economic history, positioned as it awkwardly is between the two cultures of history and economics, offers the ideal ground to develop the methodological potential of micro-historical method.
Micro-analysis focuses in fact on the reduction of scale as an instrument to answer theoretical general questions, maintaining a dynamic tension between ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ perspectives. In so doing, it offers a logical procedure to infer general considerations from specific cases, providing an alternative or a complement to statistical methods. At the same time, it makes possible to assess the scope limiting conditions of economic models and theories, highlighting the contextual determinants of their validity. Last but not least, this approach implies a contingent view of the relationship between agency and structure, highlighting the creativity of the former and the complexity of the latter in an anti-deterministic perspective that takes at heart the complex and chaotic nature of economic dynamics.
This workshop aims at discussing the contribution of micro-analytical historical approaches to research in economic history on different historical contexts and with reference to different theoretical approaches in the social sciences, moving from the most classical focus on local communities to the challenge of studying at micro level global connections and institutions, and from the original connection with anthropology to applications to sociology and organization studies. In this perspective, the participants in the panel are invited to address the methodological issues implied in the use of a micro-analytical approach with reference to their research field, focusing on the theoretical contribution it can provide, but also on the changes micro-analysis goes through when translated into different domains.
A further important topic for discussion concerns the ethical problems that emerge when the reduction of scale somehow abolishes the distance that economic history usually establishes with its human subjects and their choices, highlighting the responsibilities of “applied history” when it informs decision making.

Format:
This panel will follow a standard format, with sic papers and one discussant. The papers will be pre-circulated. Each panelist will have 15-20 minutes for presentation and specific Q&A. Presentations will be followed in the second part by discussion and general Q&A.