ABSTRACT

What distinguishes history from the other social sciences is its concern with human societies as they develop through time. To construct the temporal dimension essential to historical representation, the passage of time needs to be measured. Indeed, Claude Lévi-Strauss asserts that without dates history would cease to exist: “Dates may not be the whole of history, nor what is most interesting about it, but they are its sine qua non, for history’s entire originality and distinctive nature lie in apprehending the relation between before and after, which would perforce dissolve if its terms could not, at least in principle, be dated.”1 Historical thought is, then, fundamentally diachronic, and even the slowest of histories of long duration (concerning seemingly permanent social, technological, or economic situations or even climatic conditions) never achieve a true synchronic analysis because their subject is, at its root, the study of social transformation over time.