Longue durée

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The longue durée (French pronunciation: [lɔɡ ̃ dyʁe]; English: the long term) is an expression used by
the French Annales School of historical writing to designate their approach to the study of history.[1] It
gives priority to long-term historical structures over what François Simiand called histoire
événementielle ("evental history", the short-term time-scale that is the domain of the chronicler and
the journalist), concentrating instead on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures, and
substitutes for elite biographies the broader syntheses of prosopography. The crux of the idea is to
examine extended periods of time and draw conclusions from historical trends and patterns.[2]
The longue durée is part of a tripartite system that includes short-term événements 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[3] into general history, was pioneered by Marc Bloch[4] and Lucien Febvre in
the Interwar period. The approach was carried on by Fernand Braudel,[5] who published his views
after becoming the editor of Annales in 1956.[6] 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".[7] Among the works which
Braudel remarked on as examples of the longue durée was Alphonse Dupront's study[8] of the long-
standing idea in Western Europe of a crusade, 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.[9] 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."[10] 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.[11]
The history of the longue durée that informs Braudel's two masterworks[12] 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, Leopold von Ranke, Jacob Burckhardt or Numa
Denis Fustel de Coulanges.[13]
Averil Cameron, in examining the Mediterranean world in late antiquity concluded that "consideration
of the longue durée is more helpful than the appeal to immediate causal factors."[14] Sergio
Villalobos also expressly took the long view in his Historia del pueblo chileno.

Contents

 1Settler colonialism
 2See also
 3Notes
 4Sources and further reading

Settler colonialism[edit]
Academics often apply Braudel's underlying logic of the longue durée to examine settler colonialism,
an imperialistic style of colonization with a fixation on land, not resources. The notion, as outlined by
historians, is supported by the claim that Manifest destiny, the impetus to British Imperialism,
resulted in the