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This is the first of three fascinating volumes in which Braudel,
the renowned historian and celebrated author of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World, offers what is in effect an economic and social history of the world
from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. Like everything he writes,
it is new, stimulating and sparkles like champagne. Braudel's
technique, it has been said, is that he is a pointilliste. Myriads of separate
details, sharp glimpses of reality experienced by real people, are seen miraculously
to orchestrate themselves into broad rhythms that underlie and transcend the excitements
and struggles of particular periods. Braudel sees the past as we see the present
-- only in a longer perspective and over a wider field. The perspective is that
of the possible, of the actual material limitations to human life in any given
time or place. It is the everyday, the habitual -- the obvious that is so obvious
it has hitherto been neglected by historians -- that Braudel claims for a new
and vast and enriching province of history. Food and drink, dress and housing,
demography and family structure, energy and technology, money and credit, and,
above all, the growth of towns, that powerful agent of social and economic development,
are described in all the richness and complexity of real life. The
intensely visual quality of Braudel's understanding of history is brought into
sharper focus by the remarkable series of illustrations that of themselves would
make this book incomparable. Fernand Braudel was
born in 1902, received a degree in history in 1923, and subsequently taught in
Algeria, Paris, and Sao Paulo. He spent five years as a prisoner of war in Germany,
during which time he wrote his great thesis The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Philip II, which was published in 1949. In 1946 he became
a member of the editorial board of Annales, the famous journal founded by Marc
Bloch and Lucian Febvre, whom he succeeded at the Collège de France in
1949. He has been a member of the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes and since
1962 has been chief administrator of the Maison des Sciences de l`Homme. Professor
Braudel holds honorary doctorates from universities all over the world. |
