|
This concluding volume triumphantly completes Braudel's great
trilogy on the social and economic history of the world from the Middle Ages to
the Industrial Revolution. Following his highly praised The Structures of Everyday
Life and The Wheels of Commerce (winner of the 1983 Los Angeles
Times Book Award for History), Braudel now charts the growth of the world
economy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Most
of the usual matter of history -- politics, wars, dynastic rivalries, conflict
of religious beliefs, and secular ideologies -- is left out. What is rendered
here with the eye and brush of a master is the human activity that underlies the
business of life: the bustle of the market, the calm of the great manipulators
of capital, the labor of the slave, the peasant and the factory worker of the
early industrial age; the fashions of the rich, the rise of the great cities and
financial centers -- Genoa, Venice, Amsterdam, London -- and the character and
development of the trade routes that nourish them; the movements of population,
the ebb and flow of wealth, the slide into poverty and decay. The
sharply drawn, freshly colored glimpses of individual lives and fortunes that
compose this vast moving tapestry reflect the extraordinary vivacity of a historian
whose reach of mind is matched by his power to put history under the microscope. The
visual impact of his work is not confined to the writing. Maps and graphics are
used with characteristic skill to illuminate a point or to demonstrate an argument.
The text is profusely illustrated with contemporary prints and drawings from around
the world. The translator, Sian Reynolds, who won
the Scott-Moncrieff Prize for her rendering of Volume II (The Wheels of Commerce),has
once again reproduced in English the speed, vigor, and ease of a great stylist. Fernand
Braudel, was born in 1902, received a degree in history in 1923, and subsequently
taught in Algeria, Paris, and Sao Paolo. He spent five years as a prisoner of
war in Germany, during which time he wrote his grand 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 Lucien 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. |
