Empire on a Small Scale: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Footnote as a Sāmoan Microhistory

Robert Louis Stevenson’s interest in historiography and historical modes of narration has been well established in recent scholarship, with A Footnote to History (1892), his account of the Sāmoan Civil War, receiving increased critical attention. Building on recent studies on this pamphlet, this chapter argues that the Footnote can be confronted with strategies and questions that Italian microhistorians like Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi employed or addressed. I focus on two features of Italian microhistory: the adoption of a micro-scale of analysis, normally conjoined with an interest for a-typical, exceptional individuals and events, which test, complicate or question historical meta-narratives; and the practice of explicitly telling – or rather, narrating – the steps, procedures and obstacles of historical research, as a way to navigate between positivist orthodoxy and epistemological scepticism. I argue that both aspects are present in Stevenson’s Footnote. On the one hand, the scale of historical narration, and the “outlandish subject” that Stevenson chooses, both function to question and estrange the mainstream narratives of imperial history. On the other, Stevenson’s narrative history also is stylistically defined by incorporating the obstacles to reach historical truth. This allows Stevenson to explicitly remind his reader of the tentative and artificial aspects of his historical recreation, while also not giving up on the task of the historian to reach a form of truth, however imperfect. By focusing on these theoretical, stylistic, epistemological convergences, I frame the Footnote as a microhistorical experiment ante litteram.