Imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand

From Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Page 1244. Captures a certain deterministic view of man and his world with which I have little affinity. It seems pointlessly circumscribing.

[W]hen I think of the individual, I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before.