No rational human being will confuse a city of a fast developing country in 2011 with a Mediterranean village in 1500s. With the progress of technology, nature cannot restrain human activities as it did five hundred years ago. At the close of the twentieth century, the invention of internet revolutionized the way people shared information and catalyzed further technological advancement. Will these radical changes affect future historians’ understanding and practice of historiography? This question puts the Annales School of history under the scrutiny and debates of many modern historians.
The Annale School of history was started by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. The name Annale comes from Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, which was a journal Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre founded in 1929. The Annale School emphasized on a comprehensive understanding of history, which requires interdisciplinary study involving sociology and anthropology, demography, geography, economics, psychology, linguistics, and art history. The journal gained most of its influence under the leadership of Fernand Braudel. Braudel's particular contribution to the Annales School is his “geo-historical structuralism”, this structuralism is a three-tiered conception of historical time: structure (long-term) at base, then conjuncture (medium-length units) and finally évènement (short-term or event). Braudel regards the évènement as having the least importance in understanding history. His denigration of the évènement came from his mistrust in traditional history, which just chronically records important events that took place. The traditional historians heavily rely on documentary authenticity as they believe that good historical documents are self-sufficient. Braudel, in contrast, does not only question the authenticity of documents, but also criticizes them for being short-sighted. Braudel’s geo-historical structuralism and the custom of interdisciplinary study provide Annalistes historians a framework to adapt “serial, functional and structural approaches” to understand history. The Annale School was never free of criticism. Historians of other schools are bitter about the Annalistes’ intentional disregard of the historical events. Therefore, the Annales paradigm cannot directly analyze changes, revolutions and ruptures. This problem is becoming urgent for the Annale School because the world is undergoing some radical changes that never took place in a Mediterranean village in 1500s. A major city in a fast developing country will look very different than it was ten years ago. The progress of technology enables humans to overcome some natural barriers like mountains, oceans and the sky. These radical changes undermine the importance of Braudel’s long-term effect (structure) and regard humanity itself as the only driving force in history. Will a future Annaliste historian be able to use Braudel’s geo-historical structuralism to write a book about New York or Dubai? For the rest of this paper, I am going to defend the relevance of Annale School in studying of 21st century history.
Many historians who criticized Braudel’s conception of historical time misunderstood this conception by taking it too literally. When Braudel first mentioned the conception of time, he defined the structure as an impersonal force (geographic, climatic, biological, etc.) that would defy alternation for millennium. The conjuncture including technology, price gyrations, cumulative population changes, and mental or cultural shift has a half-to-full century cycle. The évènement are events that usually affect human society for about 5 years. As Braudel’s critics claim, with the radical changes frequently take place in 21st century societies, the life-cycle of the structure, conjuncture and évènement will sharply decrease, looking at the impersonal forces for millennium will lead to inaccurate conclusion. However, those critics failed to notice that the time Braudel provided should be treated as relative rather than definitive. The time length that is relevant in Braudel’s world may become irrelevant in the contemporary world due to these radical changes. A good historian should adapt a new time length based on his own judgment rather than superficially take Braudel’s claim in its literate sense.
Misunderstanding Braudel’s conception of historical time will also lead historians to a fetish obsession with historical event since they believe that radical changes within a society will liberate évènement from the influence of the structure. Historians who believe in independence of historical events tend not to believe in the continuality in history, which differentiates them from the Annalistes. According to Annalistes, every event has its causes and effects. These causes and effects enable an event to dominate a time period that is beyond its regular bonds. It can even approach infinity, link itself to a whole chain of events and finally to the impersonal force that initiated the first event. If we think Braudel’s conception of time as a chain that connects the structure and évènement on its two ends, any or the entire middle part of the chain can become conjuncture. Some historians cannot find the connection between the structure and évènement either because they have ignored the conjuncture or they do not understand how structure, conjuncture and events causes each other. The study of “collective mentality” is the study of conjuncture. The study of collective mentality is the study of the whole processs. When humanity starts, collective mentality starts too. Similar to events, collective mentality has its continualty too. The early collective mentality can more directly reflect the restrain nature puts on us, with more technology advancement, this restrain may become less obvious, but the effect of events with mild or radical change will affect the mentality and on the other way, According to the Annalistes, the change/event will not happen unless there is a social background behind it. A dramatical shift in mentality can usually indicate a radical change. If one cannot see the connection between the impersonal forces and the dramatical change, that is because the chain is too long, but if we trace back the collective mentality, we will always see it, and the disconnection is usually caused by dramatical change too. The Annale School is not only theoretically capable of addressing radical changes that may take place in the 21st Century; it is also beneficial for historians, economists and scientists from other fields to solve practical problems. In the previous paragraph I mentioned Braudel’s contempt at traditional historians’ fetish obsession with facts, but if there is such a thing as the sin of “eventism”, traditional history is not the only guilty defendant. Many economists and demographers rely on data as much as some traditional historians rely on events. It is true that both fields have developed very sophisticated systems to help scientists in the field get the most accurate data. However, this addiction to data in the 21st century will exhaust these social scientists in trivial matters, enslave them to pursue contemporary information and eventually destruct these social sciences. One of the few privileges enjoyed by the social scientists in the 21st century is the abundance of information, but this privilege is also a double-edged sword. The invention of internet at the close of the 20th century exponentially enlarged social scientists’ access to information, but this may also lead them to countless directions through the fields of their study. One way to save these social scientists from struggling in the ocean of information is to make them treat their data the same way as the Annales historians treat their sources. The Annales historians do not value the importance of any events but focus on the interrelationship between events and the causes and effects of them. If social scientists pay more attention to the connection between different data than the data itself, they will develop a better understanding of the big picture. The adaption of this systematical study by the social scientists will also save them from being misguided by the outdated information. The radical changes that may take place in the 21st century require social scientists in certain fields to have the most current information. Some social scientists only study contemporary topics because the purpose of their research is to serve the immediate present. The short lifespan of information makes these social scientists become the slave of information rather than the master of it.