ABSTRACT
Social anthropologists and moral philosophers would agree on one thing (if not much else): that personal identity is tied up in a narrative, or life course. Scaling up this insight to the study of institutions is, of course, complex, but this is where the discipline of history is of most use. As Richard Evans demonstrates in his masterly In Defence of History, even the most complex problem can be approached through a technique of multiple analyses. He outlines the 12 linked narratives which he employed to investigate the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892: from the ‘amateurish nature of the city administration,’ through examinations of political inequality, poverty, environmental conditions and nutrition to the state of medical knowledge and practice, the course of earlier epidemics and so on (Evans 1997: 144-6).
