Serial History

Serial history, histoire serielle, is the historical method that takes as its object not the unique event but the series: a long, homogeneous sequence of comparable facts, such as grain prices, baptisms, burials, marriages, notarial acts, or wages, recorded at regular intervals. Theorized above all by Francois Furet and practiced by Pierre Chaunu, Ernest Labrousse, and others in the orbit of the Annales school, it grew from Fernand Braudel's call to attend to the slow rhythms of history and from the conviction that the proper data of history are repeated, measurable facts rather than singular happenings. By constructing such series and analyzing their movements, trends, cycles, and fluctuations, the serial historian reconstructs the economic and demographic structures and conjunctures within which events occur. The decisive methodological requirement is homogeneity: the units must be defined and measured consistently across the whole span, so that change in the numbers reflects change in reality rather than in the recording.