SUGGESTIONS AND DEBATES Peter Burke THE ANNALES IN GLOBAL CONTEXT Fernand Braudel liked to say that historians ought to take a 'global' ap- proach to their work, in other words to see the historical problems on which they were working as part of a larger whole. "La globalite, ce n'est pas la prevention d'ecrire une histoire totale du monde [. .] C'est simplement le desir, quand on a aborde un probleme, d'en depasser systematiquement les limites."1 Braudel himself gave one of the most remarkable examples of this global approach by refusing to limit himself even to the Mediterranean and by placing the history of that sea between the Atlantic and the Sahara.2 Today, sixty years after the foundation of Annales, it is time to see the historical movement - if not "school" - centred on the journal as itself a part of history. In that case we might do well to follow Braudel's example and try to place this movement in a global context. In recent years, it has become customary - in some circles at least - to describe the Annales approach as "the new history".3 In this article I should like to ask the question 'How new is the new history?' and to try to define the contribution of the journal and the movement (which has lasted three generations now) by means of compari- son and contrast. The area chosen for comparison will be Europe and America. The first generation of Annales was marked by the desire for a broader and more interdisciplinary history, breaking the dominance of political history and allowing economic history, social history, and the history of mentalities a place in the sun. The second generation of Annales, that of Braudel, Labrousse, and their followers, was the generation in which French historians made their quantitative turn, towards the study of price and population trends over the long term (I'histoire sirielle), as well as to a serious, analytical history of social structures. The obvious place to begin this sketch is with the third generation of Annales, and to examine its practice over the last twenty or thirty years. 1 F. Braudel, "En guise de conclusion", Review, 1 (1978), p. 245. 2 F. Braudel, La Mediterranee (Paris, 1949). 3 J. Le Goff (ed.), La nouvelle histoire (Paris, 1978). International Review of Social History, XXXV (1990). pp. 421-432 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.226, on 27 Sep 2021 at 10:34:49, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000010063 422 PETER BURKE This practice has been summed up in the volumes cited in notes 3 and 4, with their references to "new objects" and "new methods".4 The French have indeed discovered new objects of historical attention. Thirty years ago, most of us did not imagine the possibility of a history of climate, of childhood, of madness, of death, of dreams, of gestures, or of memory. Today, however, most of these topics have become well-estab- lished objects of research.5 There have also been new approaches, notably the anthropological approach associated with Le Goff and Le Roy Ladurie. However, these topics and approaches are no monopoly of Annales. Not even in France. The "Sunday historian" Philippe Aries was only on the edge of the group.6 Michel Foucault was not part of the Annales circle; his historical inspiration came above all from the history of science, as prac- tised by his teacher Georges Canguilhem and by Gaston Bachelard.7 In any case, new approaches to history - and these new approaches in particular - are not confined to France. Historical anthropology appeals to anthropologists and archaeologists as well as historians. It has been prac- tised widely, from the United States to the USSR. Its inspiration has come from other intellectual traditions besides the French. Aaron Gurevich, for example, has acknowledged a debt to Malinowski, Keith Thomas to Evans- Pritchard, Kirsten Hastrup to Ardener, Anton Blok to Elias, while Orvar Lofgren belongs, despite his innovations, to a Swedish ethnographic tradition.8 Historical anthropologists in many parts of the world, France included, have learned much from the American example, notably that of Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner. It seems fair to say that this particular new approach is polycentric. So is the associated approach commonly known as "micro-history", practised with great panache by Le Roy Ladurie in his Montaillou (1975) but also by Italian, American and other historians.9 4 Faire de I'histoire, J. Le Goff and P. Nora (eds), 3 vols (Paris, 1974). 5 Among the pioneering studies: E. Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire du climat depuis Van mil (Paris, 1967); P. Aries, L'enfance et la vie familiale sous Vancien regime (Paris, 1961); M. Foucault, Histoire de la folie (Paris, 1961); P. Aries, L'homme devant la mort (Paris, 1977); J. Le Goff, "Les reves dans la culture de l'occident medieval", in his Pour un autre Moyen Age (Paris, 1977); J.-C. Schmitt (ed.), Gestures: History and Anthropology, 1 (1984), and P. Nora (ed.), Les lieux de memoire (Paris, 1984-, in progress). 6 P. Aries, Un historien de dimanche (Paris, 1980). 7 J. G. Merquior, Foucault (London, 1985), pp39f., and M. Jay, "In the Empire of the Gaze", in D. C. Hoy (ed.), Foucault: a Critical Reader (Oxford, 1986), pp. 181f. 8 A. Gurevich, "Wealth and Gift-Bestowal among the ancient Scandinavians", Scandi- navia, 7 (1968), pp. 126-138; K. V. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971); K. Hastrup, Culture and History in Medieval Iceland (Oxford, 1985); A. Blok, The Mafia of an Italian Village (Oxford, 1974), and J. Frykman and O. Lofgren, Culture Builders (New Brunswick, 1987). 9 C. Cipolla, Cristofano and the Plague (London, 1973), an early contribution which seems to have gone unappreciated from this point of view; C. Ginzburg, Ilformaggio e i Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.226, on 27 Sep 2021 at 10:34:49, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000010063 THE ANNALES IN GLOBAL CONTEXT 423 Historical anthropology, microhistory and the revived history of mental- ities have been receiving a great deal of attention in the last few years, partly in reaction against the quantitative history of the 1950s and 1960s, now viewed by many as determinist and reductionist. In the development of this quantitative or "serial" history the French have played an important part: the historical demographer Louis Henry, the historical economist Jean Marczewski, the historian Pierre Chaunu, and many others.10 They have been particularly prominent in the exploration of "the quantitative at the third level" (as Pierre Chaunu called it), in other words at the level of culture, from literacy to attitudes to death.11 All the same, from a global point of view it would be difficult to deny the USA the title of the capital of "Cliometrics" as the Americans call it, particularly in the field of the so-called "new economic history" associated with Robert Fogel and his colleagues.12 The same goes for Freudian "psy- chohistory" as opposed to the history of collective mentalities. Febvre's interest in psychology did not extend to Freud, perhaps because his adviser on psychological matters, Charles Blondel, was a severe critic of psycho- analysis. He also seems to have missed the work of Jean Piaget, despite its potential relevance to the interpretation of mentalities.13 Two topics which have been attracting increasing historical interest are the history of the everyday and the history of material culture. In both cases the inspiration of Fernand Braudel has been important - above all that of the volume originally entitled Civilisation materielle et capitalisme (1967) and in its revised version, Les structures du quotidien (1979). All the same it is only fair to say that the construction of these historical topics has been a cooperative venture, international and interdisciplinary. The phrase "the history of the everyday" is best known in its German version, Alltagsgeschichte, and important contributions to the development of this history and to the analysis of the problems it raises have been made by scholars as diverse as Norbert Elias, Henri Lefebvre, and Juri Lotman.14 vermi (Torino, 1976). The term "micro-history (microstoria) seems to have been an Italian coinage of the 1970s, when it was used to introduce a series published by Einaudi. 10 L. Henry, Anciennesfamiliesgenevoises (Paris, 1956); J. V. Marczewski,Introduction a I'histoire quantitative (Geneva, 1965), and P. Chaunu, Seville et I'Atlantique, 12 vols (Paris, 1955-1960). 11 P. Chaunu, "L'histoire quantitatif au troisieme niveau", in Hommage a Fernand Braudel (Toulouse, 1973); M. Vovelle, PUte baroque et dechristianisation (Paris, 1973), and F. Furet and J. Ozouf, Lire et icrire (Paris, 1977). 12 R. W. Fogel and S. L. Engermann, Time on the Cross (Boston, 1974). 13 C. Blondel, La psychanalyse (Paris, 1924). For the American approach, E. Erikson, Young Man Luther (New York, 1958); B. Mazlish (ed.), Psychoanalysis and History (Englewood Cliffs, 1965), and P. Gay, Freud for Historians (New York, 1985). 14 N. Elias, "Zum Begriff des Alltags", in Hammerich and Klein (eds), Materialien zur Soziologie des Alltags, (but cf. his Uber den Prozess der Zivilisation), 2 vols (Basel, Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.226, on 27 Sep 2021 at 10:34:49, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000010063 424 PETER BURKE As for material culture, this has long been the concern of archaeologists, who refuse to confine themselves to what historians call "pre-history".