Steven Mintz — History with a Human Soul

Few works of literature grapple with historical causation as ambitiously as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. More than a panoramic account of the Napoleonic Wars, it is a meditation on the forces that shape history—at once a study of structures and an intimate portrait of individual lives.

Tolstoy’s achievement lies in his refusal to choose between competing visions of the past. He holds in tension two perspectives: the impersonal drift of historical systems and the inner worlds of human actors.

His challenge to conventional historiography begins with the “Great Man” theory. Where Hegel saw Napoleon as a world-historical figure, Tolstoy depicts him as vain, theatrical, and largely irrelevant. The real drivers of history, he suggests, are countless small forces: terrain, timing, fear, weather, inertia.

The Battle of Borodino serves as a case study in contingency. Orders go unheeded, soldiers act from habit and confusion, and outcomes hinge less on strategy than on exhaustion and logistics. History, Tolstoy insists, is made not by leaders but by “the swarm-life of mankind.”

Yet War and Peace is no exercise in determinism. Unlike later structuralists, Tolstoy attends closely to the moral and psychological life of individuals. Prince Andrei and Pierre Bezukhov are not reduced to cogs in a system; they wrestle with conscience, loss, and meaning. Andrei’s dream of glory collapses into sorrow; Pierre’s captivity yields spiritual awakening. They cannot steer history, but they can live ethically within it.

In this synthesis of structure and soul, Tolstoy models a way of writing history that neither deifies agency nor erases it. He rejects the historian’s urge to impose tidy narratives on chaos, exposing coherence as illusion. Yet he affirms that within war and politics, individuals still matter—not as prime movers, but as moral beings.

For today’s historians, Tolstoy offers a challenge: to acknowledge systems—capital, empire, war, bureaucracy—without losing sight of contingency, character, and choice. In an age prone to either fatalism or simplistic heroism, War and Peace remains a masterclass in how to hold both realities at once.

History Beyond Borders: Structure, Conjuncture, and Moral Reckoning

Most students learn history within national frames: presidents and parliaments, revolutions and wars, landmark legislation. These stories are familiar—even comforting. They provide coherence, identity, and moral clarity. But they also obscure deeper realities: the structures and transnational processes that shape human life across borders and generations.

It is time to rethink how we write—and teach—history. Rather than focusing only on discrete events or national milestones, we must foreground systems and comparisons. This does not mean rejecting narrative or agency. It means reframing them: asking not simply what happened, but how societies are built, why power is exercised as it is, how inequality is sustained—and when change becomes possible.

A structural approach shifts perspective from individuals and episodes to the systems that shape behavior, constrain choices, and channel activity. These include political economies, empires, labor regimes, racial hierarchies, states, and ideologies. Structural history examines how such forces operate across time, borders, and institutions.

Yet structure is not destiny. History changes when systems crack, when contingency and choice become decisive. Revolutions, wars, financial crises, and decolonizations are not just episodes but turning points. The abolition of slavery was tied to economic shifts, but its timing and form depended on rebellion, ideology, and leadership. Decolonization followed imperial decline, but its character was forged in local struggles and strategic alliances.

To write history with a human face is to see both: the force of systems and the unpredictability of action. Structure sets the stage, but it does not dictate the plot.

This method resists triumphalism. Emancipation did not always mean freedom. Independence did not always mean sovereignty. Democracy did not always mean equality. Progress must be interrogated, not assumed.

We need this kind of history now. As authoritarianism rises, inequality deepens, and the climate crisis unfolds, national myths and event-driven chronologies explain too little. We must analyze the systems that organize life—and the moments when those systems fracture or transform.

In this view, history is not only a record of what happened but a map of what was possible—and what might still be. We teach it not just to commemorate, but to equip: to help people see the present more clearly and act more wisely within it.

A structural and conjunctural history—analytically bold, ethically alert—offers our best chance of understanding how the world was made. And how it might yet be remade.

To see this in practice, we turn to defining episodes—the Age of Revolution, the Age of Emancipation, the Age of Empire, and the World Wars—and trace how each reveals the interplay of deep structures, contingent turns, and human agency.

The Age of Revolutions: Structure, Contingency, and the Reordering of the Modern World

The Age of Revolutions (1760s–1820s) is often taught as a series of national uprisings—the American, French, Haitian, and Spanish American revolutions. But seen structurally, it was more: a global rupture, driven by deep social, economic, and ideological transformations. From the Urals to the Andes, ancien régimes buckled under war, debt, Enlightenment ideals, and demands for equality, giving way to contested new visions of rights, governance, and labor.

At its core was the collapse of hierarchical orders that had governed monarchies, colonies, and empires. Fiscal exhaustion, imperial overstretch, mercantilist restrictions, and rising capitalist aspirations created systemic crises. Enlightenment thinkers promised reason, rights, and civic equality, yet populations still lived under hereditary privilege, confessional exclusion, and entrenched stratification.

Revolutions sought to overturn these contradictions: replacing monarchy with republics, privilege with legal equality, subjecthood with citizenship, and restricted economies with freer markets.

Colonial uprisings were never only about political independence. They responded to imperial trade exclusions, oppressive taxation, and racial hierarchy. Independence movements were shaped by commerce, print culture, and the declining authority of distant empires.

Viewed structurally, the revolutions were not just bids for liberty but attempts to renegotiate the foundations of social order: Who counts as a citizen? Who owns land? What rights do women, the enslaved, and Indigenous peoples hold?

Outcomes diverged. The United States rejected monarchy but preserved slavery and accelerated Indigenous dispossession. Revolutionary France abolished feudal privilege but faltered on equality, veering from republic to empire. Haiti alone destroyed both slavery and colonial rule—at immense cost and political and economic isolation. Spanish America expelled imperial power but entrenched creole dominance. Everywhere, dreams of universal rights collided with the weight of colonialism, racial caste, and inequality.

While structures shaped the revolutionary landscape, outcomes hinged on contingency—alliances, ideological struggles, wars, and individual choices. The American Revolution might have failed without compromise on slavery or foreign intervention. The French Revolution spiraled into terror and empire through crises no one foresaw. In Haiti, enslaved people transformed revolt into the most radical emancipation in history. Simon Bolívar’s hope for a unified Spanish America collapsed under regional rivalries and elite power.

These outcomes were never foreordained. They were forged at conjunctures where structures and choices collided, opening multiple, uncertain paths.

The Age of Revolutions demands an approach that holds structure and agency together. Fiscal collapse, Enlightenment discourse, and imperial decline created conditions for upheaval, but not its form. Movements, leaders, and local struggles shaped outcomes—partial, unstable, and deeply compromised.

To reduce these revolutions to triumph or failure is to miss their complexity. They exposed both the fragility of power and the volatility of change. They redefined citizenship, rights, and sovereignty—concepts that would fuel abolitionist, feminist, labor, and anti-colonial struggles for generations.

This was not a straightforward “birth of modernity” but a global conjuncture: a convergence of crises that briefly made the redefinition of political life possible. Structural analysis explains why revolutions erupted when and where they did. Only attention to contingency explains what they became—and why they so often fell short.

The revolutions shattered old regimes but did not erase them. Their actors worked within constraints they did not choose—yet still found ways to resist and reimagine. To write their history is to trace both collapse and creation: how the future is shaped not only by inherited systems but by the moral choices and collective actions of those who dared to transform them.

The Age of Emancipation: Structures of Domination and the Contingency of Freedom

The 19th century is sometimes described as the “Age of Emancipation,” when slavery was abolished across the Atlantic, serfdom dismantled in Eastern Europe, and religious minorities such as Jews and Catholics gained civil rights.

These milestones are usually celebrated as moral victories. Yet seen structurally, emancipation was less a break from oppression than a reconfiguration of it—shifting domination into new forms suited to industrial capitalism, expanding bureaucracies, and modern state power.

Legal liberation did not erase hierarchy. It reshaped it through labor contracts, racial classifications, and administrative surveillance. Nor was emancipation inevitable or uniform; its meaning was shaped by political struggles, institutional design, and the choices of those navigating fragile new freedoms.

Across the 19th century, societies redefined “freedom” even as they deepened labor control. The end of slavery—Britain in 1833, the United States in 1865, Brazil in 1888—did not bring equality. It gave rise to sharecropping, debt peonage, and indentured labor, coercion disguised as consent.

In Russia, the 1861 abolition of serfdom freed peasants but denied them land, binding them to villages through taxes and internal passports. In Latin America, the end of tribute systems coincided with Indigenous land dispossession and new dependencies in market economies.

Emancipation marked a transition from personal dependence to abstract domination—wage labor, property regimes, and bureaucratic oversight. These were not survivals of the past but innovations of modern statecraft.

Nor did emancipation dismantle racial stratification. It recast it. The abolition of slavery did not end white supremacy; it re-inscribed it through legal exclusions and economic marginalization. In the United States, emancipation gave way to Jim Crow, voter suppression, and convict leasing. In the British Caribbean, freed Afro-Caribbean people faced exclusion while indentured workers from India and China were imported to preserve the plantation economy.

Even where emancipation meant formal inclusion, as for Jews in Western Europe, it was conditional. In Eastern Europe, Jews remained confined and vulnerable to violence. In Latin America, Indigenous people lost land and were reclassified as “peasants”—legally equal, structurally subordinate.

The liberal state did not abolish caste and class systems. It masked them with claims of neutrality and equality while embedding hierarchy more deeply in law, citizenship, and markets. The Age of Emancipation was the crucible of modern liberalism: the creed of free labor, individual rights, and legal equality. But liberalism empowered and excluded, universalized and privatized, liberated and disciplined.

States proclaimed slaves and serfs free, but denied them land, capital, and education. Explicit coercion was outlawed, only to be replaced by new controls—censuses, passports, schools, and policing. Freedom was proclaimed, but carefully managed.

Still, emancipation was not a single story. Its outcomes varied with political ruptures, resistance, and local leadership. Haiti was the most radical case: a slave revolt that destroyed slavery and colonial rule to create a Black republic—punished ever after by global isolation.

Russia’s top-down emancipation preserved elite landholding. In the United States, abolition followed a civil war and the self-liberation of enslaved people. Even within empires, trajectories diverged—Jamaica and Trinidad differed in Black landownership; Cuba and Puerto Rico in labor relations and racial politics.

These variations reflected not just structures but agency: freedpeople, landowners, missionaries, and officials contested freedom’s meaning in every locale.

The Age of Emancipation was not a linear march toward justice but a historical conjuncture: a moment when old regimes cracked, new logics emerged, and freedom was violently renegotiated. Structural analysis reveals the global patterns—wage labor, surveillance, race-making, and liberal citizenship. But contingency explains what emancipation became—and for whom.

Emancipation was not an endpoint but a beginning: an unfinished struggle over who counts, who is constrained, and who still awaits freedom.

The Age of Empire: Structural Expansion and Contingent Resistance

From the 1870s to World War I, the Age of Empire marked the height of global domination. European powers redrew the map, claiming more than 80 percent of the globe. But empire was not just a European project. Settler states—the United States, Russia, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Argentina—expanded aggressively, displacing Indigenous peoples in the name of national consolidation.

A structural view exposes the forces that drove imperial expansion: industrial capitalism’s demand for raw materials, markets, and labor; settlers’ hunger for land; strategic ambitions of global trade and naval dominance; and technological innovations—steamships, railroads, machine guns, quinine—that made conquest feasible. Ideologies such as Social Darwinism and the “civilizing mission” made expansion appear justified.

In settler societies, empire took the form of internal colonization. The United States marched west, Russia into Central Asia, Argentina against Indigenous peoples, Canada and Australia into frontier lands. These projects were framed as national growth but relied on exclusionary laws, military suppression, infrastructure, and privatization to erase Indigenous sovereignty.

Empire everywhere worked through structural mechanisms: commodifying land, criminalizing nomadism, imposing taxes, building extractive economies, and using censuses and maps to classify and control.

In Africa and Asia, informal commercial dominance gave way to formal colonial rule. The Berlin Conference of 1884–85 codified the “Scramble for Africa,” drawing borders with little regard for cultures or ecologies. Conquests were justified by promises of development but structured around forced labor, plantation economies, and resource extraction.

In Asia, Britain consolidated control over India and Burma, France over Indochina, Russia over Turkestan and the Caucasus, and the Dutch over Indonesia. Japan joined the imperial order with conquests in Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria.

Empire was never total. Colonized and Indigenous peoples resisted, adapted, and asserted agency. In Africa, resistance ranged from armed uprisings like the Maji Maji Rebellion and Zulu wars to legal challenges and religious movements. In India, the 1857 Rebellion set a precedent for reformist and nationalist struggles. In settler colonies, Indigenous resistance was fierce but often crushed by disease, firepower, and demographic pressure—though cultural survival endured in language, ritual, and memory.

Agency also surfaced within imperial systems. Colonized subjects used education, bureaucracy, and legal loopholes to negotiate or subvert authority. Diasporas and labor migrations created new global solidarities, linking revolutionaries, workers, and intellectuals across empires.

The Age of Empire was both a structural process and contested terrain. It reorganized the world around capitalism, race, and sovereignty, but it was unstable and riddled with contradictions. Borders shifted, alliances broke, and administrators often lost control. Anti-colonial movements frequently grew from imperial modernization itself—railroads, print culture, schools. Settler states that sought to erase Indigenous peoples later saw their resurgence.

Empire was not a monolith. It was built to dominate, but it was constantly disrupted by those it sought to control. To write its history is to reckon with both the builders and the resisters—the unfinished struggles that still shape global inequality today.

Rethinking the World Wars: Structure, Contingency, and the Making of the Postwar World Order

The two world wars of the 20th century are often explained by immediate triggers—an assassination, an invasion, a failed alliance. But structurally they were global convulsions, born of deep contradictions: imperial rivalries, industrial capitalism, militarized nationalism, and racial hierarchy. These were not anomalies but crises of a world system under strain.

Yet the outcomes were anything but inevitable. Structural pressures made great wars likely, but their trajectories and aftermath hinged on contingent events, strategic decisions, and human choices. To grasp their full significance, we must hold structure and contingency together.

World War I erupted from a brittle imperial system sustained by colonial domination and precarious balances of power. By 1914, Britain and France held global empires, while Germany and Austria-Hungary pressed for greater influence. Arms races, secret treaties, rigid mobilization plans, and fervent nationalism made collapse likely. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the spark, but only because the system was so fragile.

The war reflected the industrial and imperial logics that produced it: trench warfare, mechanized slaughter, and global mobilization of colonial troops. But its outcome—the fall of four empires (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and German)—was shaped by contingent turns: the Russian Revolution, U.S. intervention, battlefield attrition. The old order crumbled as much from human missteps and improvisation as from structural decay.

World War II shattered the imperial order completely. The Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—sought to overturn a hierarchy dominated by Britain, France, and the United States. They framed expansion as liberation but pursued it through brutal conquest.

At the same time, the Allies fought for democracy while clinging to colonial domination. As colonized peoples fought and died for liberty, anti-colonial movements surged. The defeat of the Axis coincided with rapid decolonization, making WWII not just a geopolitical reordering but the end of an imperial age.

Still, outcomes were contingent. Had Hitler avoided war with the Soviet Union and the United States, or had Japan not attacked Pearl Harbor, the Axis might have prevailed. Instead, the war turned on decisive moments: Stalingrad, D-Day, the atomic bomb, Soviet advances in Eastern Europe. The postwar order—Cold War bipolarity, U.S. hegemony, new international institutions—was forged through choices made in crisis, not historical inevitability.

Taken together, the two world wars both exposed long-term structural tensions and served as catalysts for new systems: nation-states, decolonization, and ideological polarization. But neither followed a fixed script. Revolutions, treaties, invasions, and uprisings remade the world—but always through uncertainty, improvisation, and struggle.

To study the world wars is to see how deeply embedded systems can implode—and how outcomes still depend on decisions, accidents, and moral responsibility. A history that balances structural depth with contingency not only explains the past; it reminds us that even in catastrophe, the future remains unwritten.

History’s Double Helix: The Grip of Structure, the Power of Choice

In War and Peace, Tolstoy dismantles the illusion that history is made by “great men.” He shows it instead as the outcome of countless forces—terrain, timing, inertia—and the quiet decisions of ordinary lives.

Yet Tolstoy never surrenders to fatalism. Amid the churn of armies and empires, he insists on the moral weight of individual action. Pierre’s awakening, Andrei’s disillusionment, Natasha’s grief—all unfold within structures they cannot control, but each affirms the irreducible humanity that animates history.

So too must our histories resist both determinism and hero worship. To understand the past is not only to chart the architecture of power—capital, empire, race, bureaucracy—but to see how people lived within it: trapped, complicit, defiant. Structures set the boundaries of possibility, but contingency—revolt, invention, error, hope—shapes the path of change.

In an age tempted by cynicism and abstraction, we need histories that show both patterns and faces, systems and choices. Like Tolstoy, we must write with rigor and moral imagination, recognizing that even within rigid structures, something human still stirs and resists.

This is not just academic. We live amid structural ruptures: the breakdown of liberal capitalism, the erosion of democracy, the fragility of global order, the strains of climate change, mass migration, and aging populations. These are structural dilemmas, but not destiny.

History teaches that structures endure—until they don’t. And when they crack, outcomes depend on choices. Our agency is limited, but it is real. We are not free from history’s weight, but neither are we excused from its burdens. In a world of converging crises, we must reckon with the systems we inherit—and summon the courage to shape what comes next.