Of sea and stone and the far horizon: metaphors matter

Fernand Braudel, the 'Anthropocene' and rooting deep in time

Hello, hello on another Friday,

There are weeks that feel just like the one before and others when you want to ask the world to stop so you can hop off and catch a breath. Whichever one this has been for you, welcome back to Coffee with Clio.

Take a break, take a breath, look around and look back. Or do I mean look down?

I’ve been thinking a lot about metaphors for time lately. They aren’t all new thoughts: time is pretty crucial to being a historian! But just as there are Weeks and weeks, there have been moments over the years when I’ve been obsessed with time and others when it sits in the background. Lately, time has come to the fore again.

‘The Distant Past’

I’m pretty sure I’ve talked here and in other places, from classrooms to job interviews and publications, about ‘the distant past’. I’ve never liked the phrase but periods are a perennial problem and sometimes ‘medieval’ or ‘ancient’ or ‘ancient and medieval’ just don’t do the job. That is when I’ve tended to talk about distance, in direct comparison with ‘the recent past’.

What’s wrong with ‘the distant past,’ though?

For any fans of ‘Father Ted’, there is a fantastic scene in which Father Ted, a long-suffering and erratic Irish priest, tries to explain to his comedically dim sidekick, junior priest Dougal, the concept of perspective. Ted sits in a caravan window, holding a pair of tiny toy cows and pointing out of the window.

“Okay, one last time,” says Father Ted. “These [toy cows] are small, but the ones out there are far away. Small. Far away.”

Dougal frowns, brow furrowed in instantly relatable frustration and eventually shakes his head.

“Ah, forget it!” snaps Ted.

The analogy isn’t perfect, but then, analogy, simile and metaphor are often impressionistic. They work because they feel right and can unlock new ways of seeing. They can be dangerous because they feel right even when they don’t really fit.

Anyway, that scene from ‘Father Ted’ is what I think about whenever I say or read or write ‘the distant past’. It makes the people of those times and the lives they lived into toys - small and trivial, to be played with and laughed at, because who is going to care if we get it wrong? Or it makes them faraway - impossible to see properly or encounter in any detail and not really important to anything happening right here, right now.

Both views, to me, seem increasingly flawed the more time I spend with the past.

So, instead of ‘the distant past’ I’ve started using a different phrase: deep history.

Layer Cake

The idea of ‘deep time’ has been around for a while and has become prominent as a result of debates about whether we are now in an ‘Anthropocene’, a geological epoch defined by human impact on the planet.¹

This geological imagining of time appeals to me. Time layers up beneath us. Rather than imagining it as something that recedes behind us, it lies forever deeper and deeper below. We might not think about those strata as we go about our daily lives, but it shapes them nonetheless, just as the unique geology of an area changes what can grow in the soil, the colour of the land and the buildings made from it, and the technological, industrial and cultural possibilities of a particular region.

This is the main street in Haworth, the village, quite close to where I live, where the Brontë sisters grew up and wrote many of their most famous novels. Their books are steeped in the specific landscape of western Yorkshire - the farm fields rising up along the flanks of the valleys to the bleak moorland plateaux above. It is one of the reasons visitors still come to Haworth because the books make more sense in this landscape. When I travel home after journeys away, I mark the point when the buildings and walls around me are all the distinctive creamy grey of Yorkshire stone.

Equally importantly, when we imagine time as layers that we sit upon, rather than places that we have left, it becomes clearer that any disturbance in that deep past - new discoveries, the invalidation of old ideas or the impact of new ones - will have consequences in the present. How we understand the past determines the stability of the ground we stand on in the present. No wonder that, in troubled times, the past - including the deep past - is usually a matter of conflict and uncertainty.

Portraits of Aboriginal Australian figures, Nanbarry, Barangaroo, Pemulwuy and Patyegarang, on the fins of Sydney Opera House on January 26th (Australia Day) 2024. The value and meaning of Australia Day, which commemorates a significant moment in European colonisation of the continent, sits alongside long-running debates about the status and treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia. These debates can be tracked, in part, through the changing policies surrounding education and research into Austrialia’s deep history, including the recent decision by the government of New South Wales to remove 65,000 years of Australian history from large parts of the school syllabus.

A vertical understanding of the past, though, doesn’t depend completely on geological imagery and goes much further back than the notion of the Anthropocene.

In the 1960s, Fernand Braudel released his two-volume The Mediterranean and Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.² His works, and the community of scholars he built up around him, gave rise to what has come to be called the Annales school of history, often associated with the French phrase ‘the longue durée’ or history viewed over the long term.

For Braudel, the Mediterranean Sea itself was his fundamental metaphor for time. In terms of understanding human experiences, time has three levels:

1. The deepest is structural. For the sea this is the geology and geography that determines where water pools and where it doesn’t, the soils and rivers that shape what can be farmed and moved where, the steepness of the cliffs or the smoothness of the beaches that nudge people towards one set of movements not another.

2. The mid-level, in which Braudel was mainly interested, is the sea itself: something changeable and complex but also slow, deep and often predictable. For Braudel, this was the real stuff of history and the goal of the historian - to understand what the ‘sea conditions’ of each distinct age or period were. A period, in this framework, is determined by big changes in these conditions. Within each period, the broad patterns of human life, Braudel argues, have the same qualities as the tides and currents of the sea. They can be stormy and appear unexpected or unique but, if the broad trends and forces are understood well enough, it will become clear why things happened the way they did and why they could not have turned out in quite the way they might have in another age.

3. The uppermost level of Braudel’s framework, and for him the least interesting, is the stuff bobbing on the surface of the sea, what he termed the ‘history of events’. This, Braudel stridently argued, was what historians had been much too concerned with: the distracting, fleeting moments - battles, kings and generals, scandals and eruptions. Though they seem like the important and causal things, they are actually only the symptoms. Their real use is to understand the currents that make the shape of history.

By the time I was a student, Braudel’s ideas were, more or less, part of the furniture. No historian these days would argue that there isn’t a relationship between day-to-day events and the background circumstances of the time, or individual people’s choices and identity and what has gone before in their society. Nobody would seriously argue that the underlying structural forces of the physical world make no difference to human action, even if people might disagree about how much difference they make.

That doesn’t mean that everybody now does history like the Annales school.

As with any big theory that puts forward a radically new way of doing things, it either comes and goes because it turns out not to offer as much insight as it costs, or it seeps into how we do things and blends imperceptibly with a thousand other good ideas. In that process, its extreme expression is softened and transformed, sometimes lost and argued about, often just taken for granted as a new part of how we do things.

Still, I recently found myself reading the introduction of K. N. Chaudhuri’s Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, written in 1985 and explicitly using Braudel as a way to understand the Indian Ocean.³ It was disconcerting and exciting to realise how new and thrilling Braudel’s ideas and terminology had once been.

Implicitly, earlier scholars had never been blind to things like perspective or context, but Braudel provided a new metaphor and a new framework that allowed people to have new conversations, to describe and compare the places they studied and to justify doing new kinds of history.

Back when ‘history’ meant the ‘history of events,’ for example, it would have been much harder to explain the point or the process of studying something like changes in the way that people cooked or married or advertised over the course of decades or even centuries. Braudel didn’t invent or make possible cultural or social history but he played a big part.

Plenty of people since have critiqued aspects of Braudel’s notion of three layers of time. Hardly anybody now does history precisely the way he said we should, but nobody now does history the way it was done before Braudel, either. (And that might be as close to a definition of ‘great historian’ as there is.)

Down, Down, Down or Round and Round and Round?

All of my metaphors for time so far - distant or deep, geological or oceanographic - have been linear. Yet, one of the most common things I hear as a historian from people is some version of ‘well, it’s all happened before, hasn’t it?’

Beyond this homespun idea of history repeating, there are plenty of sophisticated frameworks for thinking about time in cyclical terms, from the vast cycles of destruction and rebirth of the world within Hindu cosmology to the calendars of many peoples in the Americas.

Aztec calendar stone in the Museum of Anthropology, Mexico. A 365-day calendar cycle and a 260-day ritual cycle combine to form a 52-year `century,` sometimes called the `calendar round`.

Rather than a choice between linear and cyclical time, I’ve always tended to see it as a question of emphasis or the right tool for the job. Pretty much every system for thinking about time that I know has some elements that work in straight lines and some that go in circles. They are, after all, ways of trying to describe and make sense of things that actually happen in the world around us.

Some of those things happen in ways that seem to go round and round and round: the seasons of the year, the alternation of night and day, the intergenerational passage of individual people and families and communities, being born, aging, being born… We structure our lives around habits and routines that mark this cyclical passage of time.

Other things happen in ways that suggest lines and journeys, of here to there and beginning to end: an individual life from birth to death, the rise and fall of states and cultures, the reading of a book.

Most often, we slide between linear and cyclical time in ways that only start to get complicated when we try to categorise them. We are grappling with the edges of the historical and the philosophical.

It is instinctively, or casually, fairly easy to understand that, if my habit is to read the same book every few years, the recurring act of reading becomes a repeating, cyclical pattern but each time the reading will be different, informed by unique, singular things that have happened between one iteration and the next.

A soul may be reborn over and over again within Hindu, Buddhist or Jain theology/philosophy but each individual life has its own beginning and end. Very few people are believed to know the details of their previous lives so as to be able to tell when they are meeting the same places or people over and over again.

As a historian, then, I’ve never felt as if I have to make the choice between here-to-there or round-and-round.

I can get lost in trying to understand exactly how people in other times or places made these endless, complex metaphorical switches, but I can also accept that the switching is itself part of the big pattern: wherever you look, people will be working with the simultaneous idea that time recurs and passes by.

For what it is worth, when people tell me that history repeats, I sometimes don’t say anything at all. It isn’t always a question, and people are entitled to make sense of the world for themselves, especially when it helps them and does no harm to others. But, if it is a real question, I’d say, no, it doesn’t. Not quite. But, drawing on Braudel’s three-part framework, the structural and the mid-level elements can often look like recurrences.

Time, I personally believe, is not literally repeating itself. Instead, the same structures and patterns offer similar constraints and opportunities to people who are also, basically, very similar to one another, from the beginning of recorded human history (and, indeed, human existence) to the present.

And that brings me back to ‘deep history’. We’re all working in the same world as the people who came before us, with the same set of embodied tools - the same brains and hearts and arms and legs and needs for food and shelter and community.

One reason why we do not do the same things over and over and over, though, is because we also act in a world changed by the people who came before us. We grow up with the ideas they developed to make sense of it, or rejecting those ideas to come up with our own. We live in the spaces they shaped, using the tools they made, telling the stories they told us and the stories that come to be about them. And the deeper the time we think in, the richer that reservoir of things to use and avoid, to think with or think against.

Time and Tide

Periodically, people have had fantasies about ‘starting over’: a world without history. More often, people have inflicted that fantasy on others, sometimes by accident, often very intentionally.

In Elmina Fort, on the coast of modern Ghana, there is a narrow door, a couple of storeys up. The sign says, ‘Slave Exit to Waiting Boats’. It is often referred to in guide books and by tour leaders as ‘the door of no return’.

Estimates of the number of people taken from West Africa over the roughly three centuries when triangular trade in slaves, sugar and rum was at its height vary but 22 million was the figure our guide gave and fits with subsequent reading I’ve done.

22 million people disappeared through the door at Elmina and others like it. Most were taken during raids - people who might have grown old and told stories, or died of illnesses at home and said final words to their families which would, in turn, have become part of the memory that every community keeps. Instead, they went out and simply did not return.

Beyond the door of no return, on the middle passage, and in slavery in the Americas and Caribbean, the speaking of African languages was often banned, punishable with torture or death. So was the performance of African rituals and domestic practices. Families were broken up, over and over, in systems that recognised no human kinship either between slavers and enslaved or among enslaved people. Names were taken and given as marks of ownership. Much of this was consciously about stripping away existing identities and solidarities, by stripping away the cyclical past of routine and ritual and the linear past of stories and genealogies.

The ‘door of no return’ in Elmina fort, with its narrow, iron-barred exit, two floors up, at the height of a moored boat, and so small that a person, once they began walking through it, could not even turn and look over their shoulder, is one of the most painful things I have ever seen. Its physical reduction of humanness is hard to describe. That is one of the reasons why places matter as sites of memory. They allow us a shadow of an instant in another life through touch and movement and an understanding not rooted only in images and words.

Nevertheless, stories did travel with people. Far from Africa, they were recast and retold. New heroes and tales of struggle and triumph emerged. Habits, foods, songs and dances found their way into Christian practice or alternative spiritualities. In the communities left behind, the same thing happened: stories continued, changed, responded.

I don’t wish to sound blithe. Vast damage was done to the depth of history that is accessible to some parts of the world in comparison with others, and perhaps nowhere more so than Africa, where colonial powers frequently looted artefacts of collective identity at the same time as asserting that the local populations had never had such identities to begin with.

Nevertheless, great efforts to suppress and even destroy a sense of being rooted in the past can be horribly successful and still leave much behind. And the moment those efforts wane, it can be surprising how quickly older histories bubble back to the surface. The recovery of indigenous arts, crafts, songs, languages, stories and habits in places recently conquered by global empires is often a poignant reminder of how much was damaged and lost but also how much persists.

A woven sunhat, for use by a mother and child, created by the Kenyah Badeng people of Sarawak, Borneo, taken by violence under British colonial rule and returned to the community this week by the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Returns like this from museum collections are not only restitution of property or a gesture towards justice but a reminder of the resilience of memories that have maintained and asserted claims after generations of cultural disruption and suppression.

Deep history tells me that we - people - are both more resilient and less powerful than we think we are.

Not everybody needs or wants to think much about the past on which we stand, and that is fine. But within every community, anywhere or anywhen that I’ve come across, some people think about those layers of time and try to understand them and to explain them using whatever tools are available. Myth, legend, memory, information, material remains, logic, metaphor, imagination: the recipes are different from one culture to another. Even among historians, we each have our own specific blend. The ingredients are the same.

That is why these days, I talk about deep history, because it gets to that human need to root - to stretch our communal sense of self into what we think we can best discern about what came before, to explain why or how things got this way.

Being rooted deep doesn’t mean the events don’t matter. Our lives happen in the time of events, the topsoil or the bobbing on the surface of the ocean.

But, being rooted deep means we can see meaning in the patterns around us, or try to. We can have faith that tomorrow will unfold in ways that are not totally unknown, to place the unpredictability of events against the things that come round and round and round and are always (nearly) the same.

Being rooted in the deep past makes us able to imagine the future in more detailed, more realisable forms. Regimes that have tried to foreshorten their past have usually proven brittle in their visions of a new world. A sense of the past full of complexity and contradiction is a good place to start picturing tomorrows that actually work.

Above all, deep history means that we can rely on the adage that this too shall pass, or, as my mother says in times of great change or challenge, and Braudel would no doubt have seen the wisdom in: time and tide wait for no man.

Time passes whatever we do with it. Things recur and things change and deep history tells me that, even if the events seem overwhelming, the patterns are bigger and more powerful and tell much more reassuring stories about people’s ability to survive, rebound, thrive, create, care and find joy.

The deeper the roots you sink, the clearer that pattern becomes. So, here’s to deep history, to the future and to a wonderful weekend. May you find reasons to smile and things to find beauty in.

1. Officially, we’re not. The International Union of Geological Sciences in March this year voted not to accept the Anthropocene as a new period of geological time. There are some fascinating reflections to be had here on how bodies are constituted to decide such things and the fights that inevitably ensue when codification is at stake. Apparently, some objected to the decision on the grounds of ‘procedural irregularities’ in the voting. As a historian, though, I can see the points in favour of and against the Anthropocene as a part of official geological time and, at the same time, it doesn’t make much difference to the fact that historians, archaeologists and other scholars of the human past now routinely make use of the concept as a focus for debate or bringing people together. Ideas can, and should, have resonance in many fields and areas of life, far beyond the ones they were invented for.

2. Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. by Siân Reynolds, 2nd ed., 2 vols (University of California Press, 1966), i

3. Chaudhuri, K N, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, 1st edn (Cambridge University Press, 1985)