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Like the great sea of which he writes Braudel's vision transcends
the limits so instinctive to the pigeon-holing mind and moves with a force, a
colour and a depth that carries the study of man beyond its familiar horizons. Perhaps
no historical work published since 1945 has received greater acclaim than this
book. Professor Braudel who acknowledges his own debt to Lucien Febvre and Marc
Bloch has like them gone far to enrich and enhance our conception of history and
to break down the barriers erected by intellectual smallholders in defence of
particular specializations. The focus of the book
is the Mediterranean world in the second half of the sixteenth century. But the
perspective of time stretches back from the age of Philip II to the world of Odysseus
and the foreground reaches to the life of our own time. The same unconcerned,
unconfined mastery reveals itself in the treatment of space. The Mediterranean
is not to be defined in hydrographic terms as a sea, or even as a series of seas;
nor in ecological terms as the area of sea and land that lies between the northernmost
date palm and the northernmost olive. It reaches across to the Americas for the
silver that submerged its price structures; down the Red Sea and across Asia for
the spices that dominated its trade; up to England, Germany, Holland, Russia for
grain and wool and ships and men; down the West African coast or across the Sahara
for slaves and gold and ivory. And in considering
its history it is not treaties and wars and dynastic marriages that claim our
attention but the time it took for a cargo ship to work her way from Alicante
to Alexandria; how much it cost to send a special courier from Madrid to Paris;
how people lived and what they lived on; what happened in the great cities like
Venice, Naples or Constantinople when plague or famine or war intensified an already
furious struggle for existence. Climate, landscape,
diet, rhythms of trade, the operations of financiers and the hard life of the
peasant and the seaman, all the rich variety and colour of this most magnetic
area of human history have their place in a brilliant mosaic. The harmonizing
of individual detail with the broad sweep of description and analysis is achieved
with mastery. The whole work is informed by a sense of the physical presence of
the Mediterranean, its sun and sea and the characteristic landscape of vine and
olive. No true lover of the Mediterranean should be without a copy; no one seriously
interested in Europe and its history could afford to be. | 
