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For Braudel: A Note on the ‘Ecole des Annales’ and the Historiography of Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

W.G. Clarence-Smith
W.G. Clarence-Smith*
Affiliation:
University of Zambia
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Extract

The historiography of continental Europe has been revolutionized since the Second World War by a group of historians generally known as Annales School, from the name of the periodical which has served as their principal forum. Originally a somewhat eccentric group, they have come in the eyes of many to incarnate historical orthodoxy. And yet Africa has scarcely been touched by these profound currents which have so powerfully affected Europe. It therefore seems necessary to attempt a brief sketch of the nature of the Annales movement and to consider how African historiography might benefit from this approach.

Annales historiography derives from a very broad and relatively recent tradition in Europe, which may be characterized as involving the rejection of the centrality of events in history in favor of more unobtrusive but more basic structures. This approach is perhaps most clearly apparent in the work of Marxist historians, but it can be seen more generally in the growing body of social and economic history written from a wide variety of ideological perspectives. Annales thus owes much both to Marxism and to such inter-war historians as Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. In addition, Annales is rooted in the peculiar French academic tradition of treating history and geography as a single indivisible subject.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 4 , 1977 , pp. 275 - 281
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1977

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References

Notes

1. That is, Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations. Two collections of articles from Annales have recently been published: Forster, Robert and Ranum, O., eds., The Biology of Man in History (Baltimore, 1975)Google Scholar and The Family and Society (Baltimore, 1976).Google Scholar

2. A good survey is provided by three articles by Braudel, F., Trevor-Roper, H.R., and Hexter, J.H. under the collective title “History with a French Accent,” Journal of Modern History, 44(1972), pp. 447–539.Google Scholar

3. Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: a History of Climate since the year 1000 (London, 1972), pp. 7-10, 293.Google Scholar

4. Braudel, Fernand, La Mediterranée et le monde Mediterranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (Paris, 1949, rev. ed. 1966).Google Scholar An English translation has recently appeared.

5. Foucault, Michael, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London, 1972) , pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

6. See Althusser, Louis, For Marx (London, 1969)Google Scholar, and Poulantzas, Nicos A., Political Power and Social Classes (London, 1973).Google Scholar

7. “Généalogie du capital, II, l'idéal historique,” Pecherches, 14(Jan. 1974), pp. 71–75.Google Scholar

8. See Fages, Jean-Baptiste, Comprendre le structuralisme (Toulouse, 1968).Google Scholar

9. Foucault, , Archaeology, pp. 6–7.Google Scholar

10. de Certeau, M., “Ce que Freud fait de l'histoire,” Frontières Nouvelles (March, 1971), p. 654.Google Scholar

11. Ibid.

12. Hindess, Barry and Hirst, Paul Q., Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London, 1975), pp. 308–23.Google Scholar

13. See in particular Curtin, Philip D., The Atlantic Slave Trade: a Census (Madison, 1969)Google Scholar; more generally on demography, Moss, Rowland P. and Rathbone, R.J.A.R., eds., The Population Factor in African Studies (London, 1975)Google Scholar, which includes a historical section.

14. An excellent survey of work on the history of disease in Africa is Patterson, K.D., “Disease and Medicine in African History; a Bibliographical Essay,” HA 1(1974), pp. 141–48.Google ScholarPubMed For cattle diseases see Ford, John, The Role of Trypanosomiasis in African Ecology: a Study of the Tsetse Fly Problem (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar, which includes much historical material and a useful bibliography; also van Onselen, C., “Reactions to Rinderpest in Southern Africa,” JAH 13(1972), pp. 473–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the spread of crops Miracle, M., “The introduction and spread of maize in Africa,” JAH 6(1965), pp. 39–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Jones, W., Manioc in Africa (Stanford, 1959), ch. 3.Google Scholar For climate see Poursin, G., “A propos des oscillations climatiques: la sécheresse au Sahel,” Annales 29(1974), pp. 640–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Dalby, David and Church, R. Harrison, eds., Drought in Africa: Report of the 1973 Symposium (London, 1973).Google Scholar There is a scattering of articles on different relevant topics in Farvar, M.T., ed., The Careless Technology (New York, 1972).Google Scholar Lastly, for an overall Annales approach to a specific area see Randles, W.G.L., L'empire du Monomotapa du XVe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Ladurie, Le Roy, Times of Feast, pp. 20–21.Google Scholar

16. This debate can be followed in University of London. Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Collected Seminar Papers, The Societies of Southern Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, vols. 1-6 (London, 1971-1976).Google Scholar

17. Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition (Chicago, 1965).Google Scholar

18. For arguments minimizing this weakness see Person, Y., “Chronology and oral tradition” in Klein, Martin and Johnson, G.W., eds., Perspectives on the African Past (Boston, 1972), pp. 3–16.Google Scholar