Drawing widely on political historiography, political science, and political theory, this article seeks to push current understandings of the new political history through a newer, broader definition of politics. By conceptualizing politics as the activity of structuring, directing, and contesting social relations through the exercise of human agency or power, and by focusing on historical contingency, this article proposes that new political historians might take as their goal to reveal and explain how societies actively structured and restructured themselves in the past. Such an approach, this article contends, might allow new political historians to more fully explore the messiness of past politics both within and beyond government walls and to offer perhaps unexpected explanations as to how social relationships and inequalities found themselves constructed and reconstituted in the past.
