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The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, by Lewis Namier, appeared in 1929, coinciding with the first issue of Annales. ¹ Changes in historical attitudes accompanied its arrival on library shelves, begging the twofold question of what changed and how did that relate to French scholarship. Namier believed that "political ideas are the rationalizations men used to mask their interests and only by studying the lives of Members of Parliament that we can understand why events took shape as they did"; he had therefore investigated "individual psychological drives and dispositions' and shown an interest in Freudian psychology, as had Bloch and Febvre.² This prosopographical method, by which he "Namierized" eighteenth-century political history as historians would Namierize other periods, came after three decades in which historians had divested themselves of energy in the refinement and expansion of the techniques they used to investigate constitutional and political history, for them history per se.³ Something had altered as it arrived. "There [had] been not only a growth of knowledge but a change in perspective of historians", who, as a result, wanted to spend more time on "economic and social matters and the history of ideas and of the arts' than on political and constitutional history in isolation. ⁴

DOI: 10.1057/9781137294982_7

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