Fernand Braudel’s famous article “Histoire et Sciences Sociales: La Longue Durée”, which appeared one year after the Sputnik shock in 1958, contains a little-remarked passage on area studies.1 Introduced into Europe after the Second World War, area studies programs constituted one of the key innovations in the social sciences after 1945, insofar as they represented a new institutional and epistemological category of intellectual work in interdisciplinary and international groups, and so restr...