Lecture 2

Braudel

• Venice + Italy: developing of market economy
• Trend in history and social sciences in the past
  • Event-based history: discrete political events, wars
  • Should not focus on events → mass of individual facts
  • Doesn’t tell you much about history
  • Lack of specificity
  • How to stitch them together? What is truly important?
• Must zoom out and look at long-term trends/patterns!
  • Most particularly in sociology
• We must talk about time in the social sciences

Periods of social time

• Short-term

  • Ex: GDP calculations

• Medium-term: economic

• Long-term/longue durée: relatively stable social structures

  • 500-600 years
  • Advantage: longer scope → more info → more accurate predictions
  • Looking at the broader context
  • Combine short-term + long-term

• Longest durée: 5 000/10 000 years

• Economic equilibrium: prices will stabilize over time

• Short-term event-based history

  • Synchronic matter: nature of a system event
  • Ex: structure of gendered labour now
  • 2008 crash housing patterns
  • Diachronic matter: over a long time frame - Braudel
  • Ex: structure of gendered labour from 1800 - now
  • Why did the 2008 crash happen?
  • How do patterns develop?

• ^^Papers:^^

  • Methodology sentence in papers: Here is the theory I am using, how it relates to what we are studying, here is why it is useful for my point of view
  • Specify the time period

What is globalization?

• 600 years long process - apply longue durée

  • Discrete enough to study it

• Single trend

• Profits, colonial system, states classification, specialization + division of labour between states, pattern of continuous connection

• Start: Western Europe accumulates capital and never lets it go

  • Get a massive advantage

Importance of economic analysis

• According to the prof, units of time should be based on the economic system
• Patterns of colonialism, extraction: start at a particular point in time → 1450
  • Economy of Europe and the world = started changing at this time

Globalization

• The economy must:

  • Make it possible for globalization to happen
  • Provide the motivation to undertake globalization

• Globalization: sense of interconnection

• Economy: should take into account reproductive labour

  • Reproductive labour: need workers, habits (keep workers alive until working age), structure (ex: schools)

• Structures:

  • Material: bridges, ports, railways, industrial capacity → infrastructure
  • Social: patterns of behaviour, practices

How did the modern world form through globalization?

• Profit and profit motive
• Capital has to expand, it cannot sit still if you want to grow → capitalism
  • Due to competitors
• Transition to a market economy
  • Different classes created (some are political leaders, some produce goods)
• Constant accumulation of capital (infrastructure) by core states at the expense of peripheral states
• Money
  • Gold + silver brought to Europe → more money → more infrastructure accumulated

About other world economies…

• Other world systems (ex: Asia)
  • We shouldn’t focus on them because they didn’t expand to the whole world (like Europe)
• Other world systems: had many problems, so they didn’t expand

Motivation for globalization

• Need for constant profits
• Search for trade routes
• Accumulation of resources

Why globalization fits the longue durée?

• Evolution of capitalism: don’t look at it as a series of ruptures

• Omnipresent inertia: uniform, inertia! Continuation of the same process: accumulation of capital + requirement of profits - Braudel

• Problem: people are trying to make profits, and this can only happen through expansion

  • They thus decide to fund overseas expeditions → people sent there bring back gold → profits

• All institutions (state companies) are competing over resources → increased profits → expansion

• What theory fits this idea and the longue durée? World Systems Theory

  • Emergence of the capitalist world
  • Wallerstein: this is not only defined by the wage-labour relations → colonialism, enslavement…
  • Everything in the Americas was motivated by profit
    • This is why it makes sense to study this based on the economic system