Century-based periodization misframes the rhythms of historical process

Evidence

In chapter 6, because we were rehearsing events that assumed their shapes not less than one hundred years or so ago, our historical narrative worked, with the Western convention of centuries as terms of periodization, as a convenient scaffold. However, social processes, that is historical developments, are neither the products of nor meaningfully framed by such evenly measured periodicities. The French historian Fernand Braudel, for one important instance, made this point by extending the sixteenth century—the historical moment of the dawning of the modern capitalist world in the West—much beyond its formal claim of one hundred years. In a different manner, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, just as apposite a figure for our subject here, had earlier confronted such facile assumptions by calling them out as forms of foreshortened chiliasm or millenarianism. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 846

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Braudel’s longue durée and Trotsky’s critique of chiliastic periodization — echoes the Annales school framing the reader may know from other history-of-capitalism reading.