 The history of the "longue durée" that informs Braudel's two masterworks therefore offers a contrast to the archives-directed history that arose at the end of the 19th century, and a return to the broader views of the earlier generation of Jules Michelet, Leopold von Ranke, Jacob Burckhardt or Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges.Averil Cameron, in examining the Mediterranean world in late antiquity concluded that "consideration of the "longue durée" is more helpful than the appeal to immediate causal factors.