The (; ) is the French
Annales School
The ''Annales'' school () is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century to stress long-term social history. It is named after its scholarly journal '' Annales. Histoire, S ...
approach to the study of history. It gives priority to long-term historical structures over what
François Simiand called ("evental history", the short-term time-scale that is the domain of the
chronicle
A chronicle (, from Greek ''chroniká'', from , ''chrónos'' – "time") is a historical account of events arranged in chronological order, as in a timeline. Typically, equal weight is given for historically important events and local events ...
r and the
journalist
A journalist is a person who gathers information in the form of text, audio or pictures, processes it into a newsworthy form and disseminates it to the public. This is called journalism.
Roles
Journalists can work in broadcast, print, advertis ...
). It concentrates instead on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures, and replaces elite biographies with the broader syntheses of
prosopography
Prosopography is an investigation of the common characteristics of a group of people, whose individual biographies may be largely untraceable. Research subjects are analysed by means of a collective study of their lives, in multiple career-line a ...
. The crux of the idea is to examine extended periods of time and draw conclusions from historical trends and patterns.
Approach
The is part of a tripartite system that includes short-term and medium-term conjunctures (periods of decades or centuries when more profound cultural changes such as the industrial revolution can take place).
The approach, which incorporates social scientific methods such as the recently evolved field of
economic history
Economic history is the study of history using methodological tools from economics or with a special attention to economic phenomena. Research is conducted using a combination of historical methods, statistical methods and the Applied economics ...
into general history, was pioneered by
Marc Bloch
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch ( ; ; 6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944) was a French historian. He was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval history and published widely on France in the Middle ...
and
Lucien Febvre
Lucien Paul Victor Febvre ( ; ; 22 July 1878 – 11 September 1956) was a French historian best known for the role he played in establishing the Annales School of history. He was the initial editor of the ''Encyclopédie française'' together wit ...
in the
Interwar period
In the history of the 20th century, the interwar period, also known as the interbellum (), lasted from 11 November 1918 to 1 September 1939 (20 years, 9 months, 21 days) – from the end of World War I (WWI) to the beginning of World War II ( ...
. The approach was carried on by
Fernand Braudel
Fernand Paul Achille Braudel (; 24 August 1902 – 27 November 1985) was a French historian. His scholarship focused on three main projects: ''The Mediterranean'' (1923–49, then 1949–66), ''Civilization and Capitalism'' (1955–79), and the un ...
, who published his views after becoming the editor of Annales in 1956. In the second part of the century, Braudel took stock of the current status of social studies in crisis, foundering under the weight of their own successes, in an article in 1958, "Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée". Among the works which Braudel remarked on as examples of the ''longue durée'' was Alphonse Dupront's study of the long-standing idea in Western Europe of a
crusade
The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and at times directed by the Papacy during the Middle Ages. The most prominent of these were the campaigns to the Holy Land aimed at reclaiming Jerusalem and its surrounding t ...
, which extended across diverse European societies far beyond the last days of the actual crusades, and among spheres of thought with a long life he noted
Aristotelian science. In the ''longue durée'' of economic history, beyond, or beneath, the cycles and structural crises, lie "old attitudes of thought and action, resistant frameworks dying hard, at times against all logic." Braudel also stressed the importance of slow-changing geographic factors, like the constraints placed by the natural environment upon human production and communication. In the first volume of
''The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II'', for example, he described the tension between mountain dwellers and plain dwellers, with their different cultures and economic models, as a basic feature of Mediterranean history over thousands of years.
The history of the that informs Braudel's two masterworks therefore offers a contrast to the archives-directed history that arose at the end of the 19th century, and a return to the broader views of the earlier generation of
Jules Michelet
Jules Michelet (; 21 August 1798 – 9 February 1874) was a French historian and writer. He is best known for his multivolume work ''Histoire de France'' (History of France). Michelet was influenced by Giambattista Vico; he admired Vico's emphas ...
,
Leopold von Ranke
Leopold von Ranke (21 December 1795 – 23 May 1886) was a German historian and a founder of modern source-based history. He was able to implement the seminar teaching method in his classroom and focused on archival research and the analysis of ...
,
Jacob Burckhardt
Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (; ; 25 May 1818 – 8 August 1897) was a Swiss historian of art and culture and an influential figure in the historiography of both fields. His best known work is '' The Civilization of the Renaissance in ...
or
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges.
Averil Cameron
Dame Averil Millicent Cameron ( Sutton; born 8 February 1940), often cited as A. M. Cameron, is a British historian. She writes on Late Antiquity, Classics, and Byzantine Studies. She was Professor of Late Antiquity, Late Antique and Byzantine ...
, in examining the Mediterranean world in
late antiquity
Late antiquity marks the period that comes after the end of classical antiquity and stretches into the onset of the Early Middle Ages. Late antiquity as a period was popularized by Peter Brown (historian), Peter Brown in 1971, and this periodiza ...
concluded that "consideration of the is more helpful than the appeal to immediate causal factors."
Sergio Villalobos also expressly took the long view in his ''Historia del pueblo chileno.''
Jean-François Bayart extended the concept to Africa. The systems of inequality and domination inherent in pre-colonial African societies have their own historical dynamics. Consequently, postcolonial national constructions cannot be understood from the sole point of view of their relations with the Western powers and their position in the world economy, Bayart argued.
African states must therefore be analyzed in their historicity, which implies analyzing the power relations within contemporary African societies - in particular the role played by the dominant class in its societies, so as to update all the parameters that influence the present and the future of these States, he posited.
In her work ''A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon,'' Munira Khayyat applies the concept to South
Lebanon
Lebanon, officially the Republic of Lebanon, is a country in the Levant region of West Asia. Situated at the crossroads of the Mediterranean Basin and the Arabian Peninsula, it is bordered by Syria to the north and east, Israel to the south ...
. According to Khayyat, ''resistant ecologies'' have developed in the region. This term describes adaptation and survival strategies of the population, nature, and animals to the long-lasting effects of multiple wars which, she argues, should not be seen as isolated conflicts but as a prologued persistent condition - the ''longue durée''.
See also
*
Cliodynamics
*
Macrohistory
*
World-systems theory
*
David Nirenberg § Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition
Notes
Sources and further reading
Fernand Braudel and Sarah Matthews, ''On History'', The University of Chicago Press, 1982
* Robert D. Putnam with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, ''
Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy'', Princeton University Press, 1993,
Debating the long durée a special section in ''Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales – English Edition'',
ISSN: 2398-5682 (Print), 2268–3763 (Online)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Longue duree
Theories of history