The Longue Durée and World-Systems Analysis

Scholars from history, sociology, and geography advocate overcoming disciplinary isolation, using Fernand Braudel’s concept of the longue durée as a rallying point. In his pathbreaking article “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” Fernand Braudel raised a call for the social sciences to overcome their disciplinary isolation from one another. Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the article’s publication, the contributors to this volume do not just acknowledge their debt to the past; they also bear witness to how the crisis Braudel recognized a half century ago is no less of a crisis today. The contributions included here, from scholars in history, sociology, and geography, reflect the spirit and practice of the intellectual agenda espoused by Braudel, coming together around the concept of the longue durée. Indeed, they are evidence of how the groundbreaking research originally championed by Braudel has been carried forward in world-systems analysis for a more socially relevant understanding of the planet and its future possibilities. The book concludes with a new translation of Braudel’s original article by famed sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. Richard E. Lee is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the editor of Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge, I: Determinism, Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge, II: Reductionism, and Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge, III: Dualism, all published by SUNY Press, and Life and Times of Cultural Studies: The Politics and Transformation of the Structures of Knowledge. He is also the coeditor, with Immanuel Wallerstein, of Overcoming the Two Cultures: Science versus the Humanities in the Modern World-System.