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The Geohistory of Fernand Braudel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Melvin M. Knight
Melvin M. Knight
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

Any historian feels free to shift, enlarge, or contract his spatial or temporal field of attention, but the building of formal conceptions of time and space as flexible is something else. Fernand Braudel's recent book contains many revisions of judgment concerning the economic history of the centuries it treats, and also a way of handling space and time that gives the volume theoretical as well as historical interest. In his title, “the Mediterranean” refers to the region as well as to the sea. His “Mediterranean world” includes various outside areas, some remote, that have been related to the region by the activities of man in society. Peripheral mountains and deserts, for example, are considered in much detail, and four historic corridors (he calls them isthmuses) to northern waters are formally discussed. His “Epoch of Philip II” is in the first third of the book hardly a temporal “home port”; it is touched more frequently in Part II and is much used in the final section.

Type
Review Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , November 1950 , pp. 212 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1950

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References

1 Fernand, Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1949, pp. XV, 1160. Fr. 1800.Google Scholar

2 “Nordwestdeutschland und die Niederlande seit dem Dreissigjahrigen Kriege,” Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial-und-Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Band 23, Heft 2, 1939, pp. 105–47. In similar vein, M. J. Bonn once called late Czarist Russia an economic colony of Germany.

3 Simiand did not identify money with treasure, but broadened his definition of money to fit cases as his attention moved down the centuries from the sixteenth to the twentieth. He summarized his complex theory of development with the minimum of data and no mathematical argument in Les Fluctuations économiques à longue période et la arise mondiale (Paris, 1932), Part I, pp. 1–62.Google Scholar Although not cited, the work used by Braudel was presumably Recherches anciennes et nouvelles sur le mouvement généeral des prix du 16e au 19e siècles (Paris, 1932)Google Scholar. Earl Hamilton's works are too well known to need to be cited in detail here.