Fernand Braudel Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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French historian Fernand Braudel taught in Algeria and Brazil, and from 1937 at the Ecole Practique d’Hautes Etudes of Paris. In 1947 he entered as faculty in the College de France and became one of the most relevant figures of the socalled French Annales School of History, named for the journal Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale, continuing the tradition pioneered by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, who together founded the journal in 1929.

Braudel’s most important work is The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (first published in French in 1949 and considerably expanded in the second edition of 1966). The Mediterranean (written while Braudel was in a German prisoner-of-war camp) offers an innovative view of history articulated in three movements, characterized by different evolutionary rhythms. First, in what he called the Longue Duree, was the history of the slowly unfolding relationships between the humans and their geographical environment. This part owed much to the world on French regional geography of Vidal de la Blache that had come to Braudel through the work of Lucien Febvre and was profusely illustrated by maps. On top of this “geohistory,” Braudel placed an economic and social history of people and their relationships (mostly based on circulation and not on production), and finally, he situated political history, in which individual figures acquired more protagonism. Braudel thus reunited Vidal de la Blache with Durkheim and Weber, and with the more conventional history of great individuals.

The first part of The Mediterranean offers a prime example of a classical interpretation of the geography of this sea and its peoples, emphasizing the common elements (physical and human) of a Mediterranean environment, especially the relationships between mountains, valleys, islands, and the people inhabiting them. Braudel shows how on some occasions, the Mediterranean islands are insular, but on others, they open up to foreign influence and actively participate in the progress of commerce and politics.

Braudel’s approach and that of the Annales School in general had wide appeal because it represented a well-articulated alternative to historical materialism. In fact, Braudel was highly critical of Marx and Marxist historians, whom he defined as determinists. For Marx, Braudel would say that history is flat, whereas for Braudel, history has a temporal and geographical thickness. However, Braudel always refused to enter into the study of economic relationships.

Between 1967 and 1969, Braudel published another ambitious work, the three-volume Material Civilization, Economy and Capitalism: 15-18th Centuries. The first volume, The Structure of Everyday Life, focused on demography and the conditions of livelihood. The second centered upon The Wheels of Commerce and the third on The Perspective of the World, or the time in which Europe unified the world to its profit. The concept of the world economy was later developed by Braudel’s disciple Immanuel Wallerstein. His final work was The Identity of France (published posthumously in three volumes). The first volume, titled History and Environment, uses again the geohistorical approach of The Mediterranean, and geography is brought in to explain the French identity.

Bibliography:

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature (Simon & Schuster, 2002);
John A. Marino (ed.), Early Modern History and the Social Sciences: Testing the Limits of Braudel’s Mediterranean (Truman State University Press, 2002);
Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the TwentyFirst Century (University of Minnesota Press, 2001).