ABSTRACT
And, a little later: ‘The History of the World . . . [is] the Biography of Great Men.’1
This laid the foundation for much of what Peter Burke has dubbed ‘traditional history’, characterised by, among other things, a focus on ‘the great deeds of great men, statesmen, generals, or occasionally churchmen’.2 And it is precisely against this focus on ‘Great Men’ that many of the supposedly ‘new perspectives’ (with, actually, long and distinguished heritages themselves) have been developed.3 The issue of structural determination or constraint versus individual agency has continued both to perplex and to divide historians, with some tending to emphasise the former, others the latter.
