The rich analyses of Fernand Braudel and his fellow Annales historians have made significant contributions to
historical theory and research. In a departure from traditional historical approaches, the Annales historians,
assume (as do Marxists) that history cannot be limited to a simple recounting of conscious human actions, but
must be understood in the context of forces and material conditions that underlie human behavior. Braudel was
the first Annales historian to gain widespread support of the idea that history should synthesize data from
various social sciences, especially economics, in order to provide a broader view of human societies over time
(although Febvre and Bloch, founders of the Annales school, had originated this approach).
Braudel conceived of history as the dynamic interaction of three temporalities. The first of these, the
evenementielle, involved short-lived dramatic “events,” such as battles, revolutions and the actions of great
men, which had preoccupied traditional historians like Carlyle. Conjonctures was Braudel’s term for larger
cyclical processes that might last up to half a century. The longue duree, a historical wave of great length, was
for Braudel the most fascinating of the three temporalities. Here he focused on those aspects of everyday life
that might remain relatively unchanged for centuries. What people ate, what they wore, their means and routes
of travel – for Braudel these things create “structures” which define the limits of potential social change for
hundreds of years at a time.
Braudel’s concept of the longue duree extended the perspective of historical space as well as time. Until the
Annales school, historians had taken the juridical political unit the nation-state, duchy, or whatever as their
starting point. Yet, when such enormous timespans are considered, geographical features may well have more
significance for human populations than national borders. In his doctoral thesis, a seminal work on the
Mediterranean during the reign of Philip II, Braudel treated the geohistory of the entire region as a “structure”
that had exerted myriad influences on human lifeways since the first settlements on the shores of the
Mediterranean Sea. And so the reader is given such arcane information as the list of products that came to
Spanish shores from North Africa, the seasonal routes followed by Mediterranean sheep and their shepherds,
and the cities where the best ship timber could be bought.
Braudel has been faulted for the imprecision of his approach. With his Rabelaisian delight in concrete detail,
Braudel vastly extended the realm of relevant phenomena; but this very achievement made it difficult to delimit
the boundaries of observation, a task necessary to beginning any social investigation. Further, Braudel and
other Annales historians minimize the differences among the social sciences. Nevertheless, the many similarlydesigned studies aimed at both professional and popular audiences indicate that Braudel asked significant
questions which traditional historians had overlooked.
In the third paragraph, the author is primarily concerned with discussing:
Section: Verbal Reasoning
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