‘Longue Durée’, ‘Conjoncture’, ‘Event’: Notion of Plural Time in History

The historian can never get away from the question of time in history. In the nineteenth century historians of law, authors of medical treatises on chronic disease, sociologists studying unemployment or economists tracing long-term movements were familiar with the notion of what Braudel would later conceptualize as ‘longue durée’. He writes that all historical work is concerned with breaking down time past, choosing among its chronological realities according to more or less conscious preferences and exclusions. The practice of traditional history was concerned with the short time span—the individual, the event. Economic and social history put ‘cyclical movement’ in the forefront. Thus along with the old narrative history, there was an account of ‘conjuncture’ which lays open larger sections of the past 10, 20, 50 years or centuries at a stretch for examination. The different temporal conceptions may provide relational keys to interpretation and analysis. We may also look at a different kind of historical construction, as a counterpoint to the long-term view. Historians like Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Levi, and others practised what came to be known as microhistory. They reduced the scale and looked at a village community, a family, an individual, or a particular event. When one looks contemporaneously at a huge phenomenon like the pandemic of 2020, both these approaches may provide useful tools to explore the complex, multi-layered phenomenon, with its local and global ramifications. A very relevant context for studying the pandemic is provided by the history of plague from the very ancient period. The second section of the paper reflects on the various ways historians have dealt with that epidemic.