Rorotoko

In a nutshell

Global Lives aims to offer an introduction to global history between 1550 and 1800. Focusing on Britain’s changing relationships with the rest of the world, it sets out the contours of the forms of globalisation, or global connection, that developed across this two hundred and fifty year period. However, this is not simply a survey of the “Big Picture” history of the rise of the British empire. In order to engage readers with processes such as European settlement in North America, the slave trade, and navigation in the Pacific, Global Lives tells this history through over forty brief biographies of a range of individuals from Queen Elizabeth I to Mai, the first Polynesian to visit Britain.

This unique combination of global history and biography – the big picture and the fine-grained detail – aims to breathe some real life into what are too often thought about as abstract and anonymous historical and geographical processes – the development of trade routes, the spreading of settlement and the forging of empires.

In Global Lives, those who lived out these globalising processes are put centre stage. The history of early modern globalisation is told through the biographies of rulers and revolutionaries, the enslaved and the free, and profiteers and pirates. Each person is understood as trying to operate in the circumstances within which they found themselves. Each person is seen as trying to make a difference, for good or ill, for themselves and others. Each person, whether they travelled long distances or stayed close at home, is seen as playing a part in making this new global history and geography.

The wide angle

After a number of years researching, writing and teaching on global history (and what I call global historical geography) I was struck with two things. First, the unappealing nature of most introductions to global history. It seemed to me that there were important, and relevant, issues here for how people were and are part of processes of globalisation. But they were not being set out for readers in accessible and interesting ways. Second, judging by the popular works of history and biography that were appearing on bestseller lists and being reviewed in the newspapers, there was an audience for well told stories which set individual lives against the backdrop of the significant histories of which they were a part. Such works as Linda Colley’s Captives and The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, or William Dalrymple’s White Mughals, spring to mind as engaging their readers with tales that are once intimate portrayals of individuals and, at the same time, dependent upon the grand sweep of imperial history.

The book was, then, an attempt to bridge that gap. Instead of just outlining global processes and patterns – the networks of Atlantic trade, or the making and unmaking of the movement for the abolition of the slave trade – the book would explain those processes through the lives of people who were part of them. Whether the record of people’s lives was preserved in vast volumes of published letters and papers, or through a single forgotten document, they could find a place in this global history.

Instead of taking a single life, as in the standard biography, Global Lives takes forty-two lives of a hugely diverse range of people. Some of these would be well known, and already the subject of book-length biographies themselves, or even films: Captain Cook, or Walter Ralegh, or Pocahontas. Others would be known to historical specialists only: Thomas Thistlewood, a Jamaican plantation overseer who left extensive diaries, or Tupaia, a Polynesian high priest, navigator and artist who accompanied Cook on part of his first voyage through the Pacific. Still others would be almost completely unknown, hidden away in the archives: Essa Morrison, a poor young woman from London’s riverside, prosecuted for theft from a drunken sailor, or the enslaved African who took a gun and shot the captain of the slave ship Felicity during a ship-board revolt in 1789.

What emerged from this process was a sort of kaleidoscopic view of globalisation. There were many processes, networks and patterns, each of which was shifting and changing. There were many many people positioned in different ways in relation to these processes, all working to shape their lives and those of others. Without losing sight of the big picture, I have tried to illuminate the telling detail.

I wrote Global Lives having finished a more specialist book on writing and the East India Company (Indian Ink, 2007), and it has helped me to prepare for future work on communication in the Caribbean. What I have taken from Global Lives into that work is the importance of being true to the lives of historical subjects while understanding them as part of processes that they themselves would have seen only partially.

What I have taken from Global Lives is the importance of being true to the lives of historical subjects while understanding them as part of processes that they themselves would have seen only partially.