Compare methods

	Conjunctural History	Longue Duree Analysis
Field	Economic History	Historiography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1944	1958
Originator	Ernest Labrousse	Fernand Braudel
Type	analytical-framework	analytical-framework
Seminal source	Labrousse, E. (1944). La crise de l'economie francaise a la fin de l'Ancien Regime et au debut de la Revolution. Presses Universitaires de France. ISBN: 9782130436201	Braudel, F. (1958). Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue duree. Annales. Economies, Societes, Civilisations, 13(4), 725-753.
Aliases	Conjoncture analysis, Cyclical economic history, Price-history of cycles, Labroussian conjunctural method	Annales structural history, History of deep structures, Geohistorical longue duree, Braudelian time-scale analysis
Related	3	3
Summary	Conjunctural history studies the medium-term cyclical movements, the conjoncture, that occupy the middle layer of Braudel's tripartite time scheme, between the near-immobile longue duree and the rapid surface of events. Pioneered by Ernest Labrousse in his studies of eighteenth-century French prices, the method reconstructs decade-scale fluctuations in prices, wages, harvests, and production, then asks how these economic rhythms reverberate through society and politics. Labrousse showed that interlocking cycles of grain prices and agricultural revenue could converge into acute crises that strained the social order, contributing to the conditions for revolution. The conjoncture is thus neither the slow structure nor the fleeting event but the oscillating economic mood of a period. By charting these waves with quantitative series and linking their peaks and troughs to social tension, popular unrest, and political rupture, conjunctural history offers a bridge between economic measurement and the explanation of historical change.	Longue duree analysis is the signature method of Fernand Braudel and the Annales school, organizing historical inquiry around the deep, slow-moving structures that shape human possibility across centuries rather than the rapid succession of political events. Braudel famously distinguished three temporalities: the near-immobile time of geography and environment (the longue duree), the medium-rhythm time of economic and social cycles (the conjoncture), and the fast, deceptive time of events (l'histoire evenementielle). The longue duree foregrounds mountains, seas, climate, trade routes, demographic regimes, and collective mentalities as the durable scaffolding within which short-term action unfolds. By privileging structures that change so slowly they appear almost static, the method reorients explanation away from kings and battles toward the material and mental constraints that condition entire civilizations. It demands sources and chronologies measured in centuries, treating the present as a thin film atop vast geological and cultural sediment.