Longue Duree and World-Systems Analysis, The
Publication Year: 2012
Published by: State University of New York Press
Series: Fernand Braudel Center Studies in Historical Social Science
Introduction: Fernand Braudel, the Longue Durée, and World-Systems Analysis
Fernand Braudel, preeminently influential French historian and historiographer, has been celebrated to the extent that for decades his name has been cited in its adjectival form. More specifically, his insistence on the plurality of social times, anchored in the longue durée as structure, has been a, if not the, fundamental conceptual underpinning of world-systems analysis—underlined by the fact that, as Alain Brunhes writes, in 1977 “his career was consecrated internationally, particularly ...
The Order of Historical Time: The Longue Durée and Micro-History
In his remarks at the conference inaugurating the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University in 1977, Braudel emphasized the practical character of his conception of the longue durée and plural time. His intent was not to produce a work of theory or to “philosophize.” Rather, it was to organize the ideas that he formed while writing The Mediterranean (Braudel 1978: 244–45). In a similar...
History and Geography: Braudel’s “Extreme Longue Durée” as Generics?
Over the last decade I have been studying contemporary globalization through urban lenses. In this literature globalization is often interpreted in geographical scale terms as a pincer movement on the state with power moving both upward and downward. This is entirely consistent with my long-term concern for thinking beyond the state, which originally brought me to world-systems analysis some three decades ago. As a result I have found studying globalization to be intellectually ...
Dutch Capitalism and Europe’s Great Frontier: The Baltic in the Ecological Revolution of the Long Seventeenth Century
During the Middle Ages,” Fernand Braudel once observed, “the Baltic was a sort of America on Europe’s doorstep” (1984: 207). But is this not an even better description of the Baltic after the Middle Ages, during the era of Dutch world primacy? The Dutch Republic was, as Marx puts it, the “model capitalist nation of the seventeenth century” (1976: 916), its tentacles reaching from central Sweden to northeastern Brazil to southeast Asia. And while the...
The Semiproletarian Household over the Longue Durée of the Modern World-System
What has capitalism “to do with the humble lives at the bottom of the ladder?” queried Fernand Braudel (1973: 445, 28–29). “Everything,” he responded, because capitalism “incorporates them in its game.” Braudel contended that history is “a succession of landscapes” consisting of two major levels of human existence: the realm of major historical events and “the ground floor and the first story” that lies in “images of daily life” (1981, 1: 559, 29). He argued that the ...
In the Short Run Are We All Dead? A Political Ecology of the Development Climate
The subject of this article is climate change, as an ontological question. By this I mean not simply the overproduction and accumulation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the atmosphere beyond the absorptive capacity of extant natural sinks, but how we address its relationship to human history, now that we realize “our technical capacity to alter the world’s climate massively” (Duncan 2007). I am inspired by Colin Duncan’s assertion that “the fast and vast climate ...
The Longue Durée and the Status of “Superstructures”
The “superstructures” in the title refers to the offhand, but telling, way analysts of many stripes continue to categorize and think about a set of social institutions in relation to the material constituents of the social world, especially those of production and distribution. The particular composition of this realm is generally thought of as including language, literature, and the arts, or what many would assign to the cultural arena along with religion and law....
Nomads and Kings: State Formation in Asia over the Longue Durée, 1250–1700
The destructive power of cannons and gunpowder appeared to be so striking that Marshall Hodgson (1974), William McNeill (1984), and others have argued that the introduction of gunpowder and artillery led to a decline in the importance of the horse, and ipso facto of the nomads, as rulers of sedentary states could effectively use the new military technologies to create strong centralized polities—the “gunpowder empires”—all across Europe, the eastern Mediterranean...
Long-Term Problems for the Longue Durée in the Social Sciences
Five decades after Braudel’s intervention on the longue durée, one can reflect upon the many scholars in various disciplines who have developed research incorporating this concept as an analytical tool.1 But perhaps more important, one can contemplate the myriad obstacles that continue to exist for social science scholars to take the longue durée seriously as a concept, and the significant methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and ultimately public policy implications....
Journalism, History, and Eurocentrism: Longue Durée and the Immediate in Braudel and Wallerstein
The publication of Fernand Braudel’s article on the longue durée in October of 1958 is justly considered a foundational point of reference in worldsystems analysis. But the month of October is also the occasion for a second, intimately related celebration: that of the first appearance of Immanuel Wallerstein’s “Commentaries,” begun in October 1998, as a regular feature of the FBC Web site. Since then, twice a month and with an absolutely amazing regularity, almost 250 ...
E-ISBN-13: 9781438441955
E-ISBN-10: 1438441959
Print-ISBN-13: 9781438441931
Print-ISBN-10: 1438441932
Page Count: 224
Illustrations: 1 figure
Publication Year: 2012
Series Title: Fernand Braudel Center Studies in Historical Social Science
See more Books in this Series
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Longue Duree and World-Systems Analysis, The
