Definition of "microeconomy"

Rediker looks not at that bigger picture but at the slave ship itself, as a microeconomy where the captain was chief executive, jailer, accountant, paymaster and disciplinarian, exercising these roles by maintaining, from his spacious captain’s cabin in a very unspacious ship, the mystique of what later military leaders would call command isolation.

2007 October 21, Adam Hochschild, “Voyage of the Damned”, in New York Times‎