Micro-histories zoom into the historical canvas. They focus intensely on particular events or places in order to capture the texture and social dynamic of human relationships and assess, as neatly as possible, the creative agency of ordinary people. Keith Wrightson, on a more cautious register, has recently described micro-history as ‘a way of observing and trying to comprehend the network of relationships and webs of meaning in which [the chosen individuals or groups] lived their lives’. In some measure the popularity of micro-history grew as historians became dissatisfied with serial history and the dangers of ignoring the jagged edges of human experience in favour of homogenised patterns of human behaviour popularised by the social sciences. Some micro-historians adopted a highly nominalist stance in which clues, anecdotes andtrifles unlocked hidden worlds of human endeavour, lost or barely visible, in the records of the past.Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms, for example, is a brilliant account of how a Fruilian miller imagined Creation, how he ‘misread’ the Bible, what books influenced him, and what his interrogation by the Inquisition might tell us about peasant radicalism in sixteenth-century Italy. Ginzburg's work expresses a critical impatience with the then dominant school of European social history, the French Annales, whose majestic vistas and penchant for ‘histoire immobile’ overlooked, in his eyes, a great deal of unorthodox behaviour. And yet other micro-historians have seen the construction of historical series as a valuable context for situating a particular event or place. David Levine and Keith Wrightson did this in their study of Terling, a grain-growing parish in Essex. Working from a backbone of historical demography over several centuries, and combining this with legal records of parochial disputes and conflicts, they were able to test the solidarity of local social structures and, by identifying the rise of a middling sort in the village, identify critical changes in the tempo and nature of parish life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

My debt to serial history should be obvious. A lot of vital information about transatlantic shipping, and of Bristol ships and their crews in particular, would not have been at my fingertips had it not been for the work of David Eltis, David Richardson and company, whose slave voyage database allowed me to identify the ships John Kimber captained, who owned them, when they sailed, and in the most basic terms what happened on their voyages.