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A Defence of World History (The Prothero Lecture)

World history was once taken for granted as the only sensible basis for understanding the past. Christians could do no other than begin with creation and fit subsequent details into the framework of divine revelation. This ordering of the past survived into the seventeenth century as Bossuet and Walter Raleigh may remind us. But with the revival of antique letters, a different model for historical writing asserted itself that could not fit smoothly within the Christian epos. In effect, Thucydides and Tacitus challenged Augustine, presenting the history of states and their interaction as a self-contained whole. Guicciardini and Machiavelli wrote their histories accordingly, dismissing as irrelevant the world historical framework that had seemed essential to earlier believers.