Fernand Braudel
Publications
"Just like Toynbee, who began as a specialist on ancient and modern Greece and who ended his career with a scholarly work on Hannibal and his legacy, Braudel started out as a historian of the Mediterranean. The second edition (1966) of his book on the Mediterranean World in the sixteenth century arguably remains his greatest work. Braudel reached out to the world rather late, only with his trilogy Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme (XVe–XVIIIe siècles), published in its entirety in 1979 when the author was 77.13 At age 84 he modestly returned to French history with yet another three volume work. Whereas Toynbee offered a key to almost all history, Braudel’s theoretical contribution was much more modest and focused: Firstly, La Méditerranée provided a model of how to analyze a large geographical space where several civilizations coexisted and interacted. Models are always easier to apply and to adapt than theorems and even general laws. This explains why a Braudelian perspective was highly influential and could easily be modified for the study of other seascapes and, in general, vast spaces all over the world."
More information
- An excellent introduction to Fernand Braudel as a world historian is Lutz Raphael, “The Idea and Practice of World Historiography in France: The Annales Legacy,” in Writing World History 1800-2000, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey, Eckhardt Fuchs (Oxford, 2003), 155-71