Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations at Binghamton University was founded in 1976 by Immanuel Wallerstein. It brought together scholarship in sociology, anthropology, history, and economics. The activities of the Center fall loosely into four categories: hosting international scholars, sponsoring major conferences and scholarly meetings, initiating and supporting research working groups, and carrying on an active publication program.

The Braudel Center's former website included a philosophy statement: "We operate on two assumptions. One is that there is no structure that is not historical. In order to understand a structure one must not only know its genesis and its context; one must also assume that its form and its substance are constantly evolving. The second assumption is that no sequence of events in time is structureless, that is, fortuitous. Every event occurs within existing structures, and is affected by its constraints. Every event creates part of the context of future events... We therefore do not separate the study of historical sequence and the study of structural relationships. We believe that the problem is not to find an interdisciplinary meeting ground of the study of historical sequence (history) and the study of structures (anthropology, sociology, and other social sciences). It is rather to perceive our study as an imbricated whole within which different scholars will of course emphasize different immediate concerns and therefore frequently use different approaches, emphases, methodologies. We are further uncomfortable with the traditional divide of the humanities versus the (social) sciences. At least at the level of explaining large-scale social change over time, we find that it is not very meaningful to distinguish between a humanistic and a scientific approach. We wish primarily to explain systematically and coherently what is fundamentally a single occurrence, the development of the modern world-system."

The State University of New York at Binghamton granted the Center an annual budget which payed for a small support staff. The researchers were primarily faculty and graduate students of the university, but the Center also had three to seven Visiting Research Associates annually coming from other countries. The Center received significant research grants from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the World Society Foundation.

Research Working Groups (RWGs) created by the Braudel Center included World Labor, Trajectory, Comparative Hegemonies, Economic Development in the Americas, East Asia in World Historical Perspective, Structures of Knowledge, Methodology across the Disciplines, Built Environments of Atlantic Slavery, Cultural Forms in the Modern World-System, Utopistics, Crisis in the World-System: Options and Possibilities, Categories of Social Knowledge, Structural Trends of the Capitalist World-Economy, and Waves of Antisystemic Movements.

Review was founded in 1976 by Immanuel Wallerstein as the official journal of the Fernand Braudel Center. Richard E. Lee took over as editor in 2006. Review was "committed to the pursuit of a perspective which recognizes the primacy of analyses of economies over long historical time and large space, the holism of the socio-historical process, and the transitory (heuristic) nature of theories." The journal addressed mainly a readership in the social sciences and the humanities, and this international readership extended to six continents. Review also created special issues, put together by a guest editor around a specific theme or published as results of a research project. In general, articles were in English, but Review sometimes published articles in other languages. Review's last issue was published in 2016.

The Braudel Center co-sponsored a publication series "Studies in Modern Capitalism" with the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, starting in 1979. They had a second series from 1982-1985 with Sage, "Explorations in the World-Economy." Fernand Braudel Center's Studies in Historical Social Science series through SUNY Press was published 2010-2019. The Center also co-sponsored the Harpur College Dean's Speakers Series from 2009-2015.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Professor of Sociology and originator of world-systems theory, was the director from 1976 to 2005. Richard E. Lee became director in 2006 with Dale Tomich as Deputy Director. The Braudel Center closed in 2020.