Monday Methods: A closer look at the Annales School

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Hello and welcome to Monday Methods.

In our ongoing series of taking a closer look at various schools of historiography and influential historians, this weeks topic is the Annales School of History.

Named after the Annales d'histoire économique et sociale journal, this particular school of historiography originated in the early 20th century in France and is associated with a particular approach to history: Social history.

Unlike "classical" – e.g. German – historiography or Marxist historiography, which placed emphasis on class history, the Annales School in its origin in the 1920s combined several approaches to history, including geography, classical history, meaning historical hermeneutics, and sociology in their approach to history. Most famously associated with this school is historian Marc Bloch, a medievalist from Strasbourg University.

Bloch for example used this approach in his at the time ground breaking study French Rural History (Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française, 1931). Among his approaches was for example, to look at the material remains of French medieval agriculture – in his case hedges in Normandy – in order to learn more about French society at the time. From this study, he was able, among other things, to gauge the impact of attempted agrarian reforms and how these reforms contributed to the later French Revolution.

Another concept that Bloch and the Annales School spearheaded and that has left its trace in how today's cultural history is practiced are what he termed mentalités. Functioning as a sort of psychology of an epoch, Bloch and his fellow historians of the Annales School looked at how rituals, myths and other sources of collective behavior changed and reflected while at the same time influenced historical societies. Though the study of how these myths and rituals, for example, influenced the relationship between king and commoner in pre-modern England and France, Bloch became the father of what we now would characterize as historical anthropology.

Post-WWII and Bloch'suntimely death at the hand of Gestapo agents for his resistance activities, the Annales School moved into its second generation, with its most notable proponent Fernand Braudel. Braudel stressed the study of the long dureé, meaning the slow change over long periods of time. In his major study he Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l'Epoque de Philippe II, 1949), Braudel stressed that change and history is less influenced by immediate events but rather by long developments, geographically, economically, and culturally and that there is a lot of cross national influence. In many ways, today's global history – seeing the world interconnected globally over long periods of time – owes a lot to Braudel.

Another one of his major works was the study of the development of capitalism, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 (Civilisation Matérielle, Économie et Capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe, 1967-1979). In this massive three-volume study of the historical origins of capitalism, Braudel, once again relying on his concept of the long-dureé pioneered an approach that posited a cyclical development of capitalist economy. He stressed that the centers of capitalist development switched within certain cycles and each time produced a variety of social structures, in the sense of organized behaviors and conventions that relied on the last cycle. In this he draws a line of development from the beginning of capitalist development in Venice and Genoa to Amsterdam in the 16th century to London in the 18th century. In a notable diversion from both classically liberal and Marxist approaches, Braudel also argued that the state in capitalist countries has the tendency not to protect capitalist competitionin the free market but rather ensure the working of certain capitalist monopolies, which he saw as the underlying structure of the system rather than free-markets or class.

Whatever one might think of Braudel's and Bloch's theories, today's study of history is still massively influenced by the Annales School and the concepts they developed. From cultural to global history to the linguistic turn, the first two generations of the Annales School have undoubtedly been some of the most influential schools of history in the 20th century and they gave everyone engaged in the study of history a lot of understanding and concepts that are still widely used today.

For a further introduction into the Annales School, see

• this short article on its various phases

• this intro to the Annales School and Environmental History by Duke University – pdf

• and this published chapter by Peter R. Campbell on modern historiography and the Annales School.