Longue Durée, Long Wave Theories of Development

The longue durée (or long term) is a theoretical concept used in global economic history that has influenced several schools of thought, including world-systems theory. It is most often associated with French historian Fernand Braudel and the Annales school with which he was affiliated. Braudel attempted to propose a new kind of economic history grounded in empirical research and archival longitudinal data sets from the early Middle Ages until the end of the feudal era.

Although many social thinkers have speculated about the feasibility of the long-term development or modernization of entire societies, often through a series of specific stages from the Enlightenment onward, most major empirical research only started to materialize in the early 20th century. One of the first theorists was Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff (for whom long waves are named, in honor of the work he did in the 1920s at the Conjuncture Institute). Kondratieff became famous for suggesting that economic waves based on a long life span of major investments are intrinsically linked with the modus operandi of the capitalist world economy and that these waves occur at regular intervals with respective A phases (economic upturns) and B phases (downturns) such as in 1789-1814-1849, 1849-1865/18731896, 1896-1929-1945, and so on. Around the same time as Kondratieff, Joseph Schumpeter developed similar ideas about business cycles, focusing on clusters of innovations in a new leading sector brought about by entrepreneurs during a depression, innovations that ultimately bring about a general economic upswing. According to Schumpeter, this cyclical process explained the process of capitalist expansion and contraction in several industrial sectors in the long run.

The Annales school, influenced by these early 20th-century attempts to document and interpret [Page 1091]the material surroundings that constitute everyday life and the fluctuating trade patterns that go along with and influence them, suggested that in order to successfully study commerce, social change, attitudes (mentalités), the long-term impact of geographical or ecological opportunities and constraints, as well as political structures, it was necessary to embrace a more interdisciplinary way of doing research. One had to enlarge one's temporal as well as geographical unit of analysis beyond the traditional focus on the nation-state (as most nation-states are a fairly recent phenomenon). Braudel did all of this by highlighting long-term developments as well as discontinuities in several influential studies, including his book The Mediterranean, focusing on the longue durée of an entire region. For him, mere political or military events or micro-processes could be characterized as “dust” that prevents people from seeing what really matters: underlying long-term secular trends (longue durée) as well as less prolonged cyclical patterns (also called conjonctures). Braudel's later work suggested examining civilization and capitalism across the world over several centuries so as to make sense of global history. This, in turn, had a profound impact on how the longue durée was conceptualized by proponents of world-systems theory, as developed by American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein.

World-systems theory emerged in the 1970s when belief in linear development and the modernization of newly independent ex-colonial states gradually dissipated during the economic crisis (some would argue a Kondratieff B phase). According to the theory, waves of geographical as well as sectoral expansion and contraction occurred simultaneously in an ever-expanding capitalist world economy that emerged during the “long 16th century” (1450–1650) in which the colonization of the Americas and the decline of feudalism in Europe played a major role. It is precisely in this context that Wallerstein attempted to create a model of the capitalist world economy in which capitalism, as a specific socioeconomic system, is characterized by an axial division of labor resulting from intense yet unequal bulk trade linkages between three different zones: the core, periphery, and semiperiphery. This capitalist world-system expanded from 16th-century Europe by incorporating more and more areas of the globe into its trading nexus precisely because of the pattern of cycles that gave rise to prolonged economic crises. The spatial expansion of the modern world-system during the era of colonialism and imperialism between 1492 and the early 20th century—when every region of the world became integrated into the capitalist world economy—implied that as the entire world became interlinked through trade patterns constitutive of unequal exchange, more regions of the world would feel the impact of upturns and downturns caused by long waves. By emphasizing the significance of long waves as well as the commodity chains of leading sectors, world-systems theorists suggested that the respective upward and downward social mobility of specific nation-states was possible (the cases of Taiwan, Spain, and South Korea are often cited).

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