FERNAND BRAUDEL AND GLOBAL HISTORY1

The Life and the Man

Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) was one of the great historians of the twentieth century. He published
his great work on The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World of Philip II in 1949. His other
major later work, the three volumes of Civilization and Capitalism, was published in 1979.
Throughout his later life he exerted a great influence not only through his writing but also as
Director and Editor of Annales, the journal founded by Bloch and Lucien Febvre. He was also
president of the sixth section of the Ecole Des Hautes Etudes and founder and administrator of the
Maison Des Sciences de L’Homme and a Professor at the College de France.

Braudel was clearly a man of immense creative energy, his five volumes on the Mediterranean and
Capitalism, comprised nearly three thousand pages, but were only two thirds of his printed output.
He was also a considerable linguist, reading in original languages in the archives in Spanish, French,
Italian and other languages.

. By the age of 36, Braudel had deep experience of three different civilizations, his own French
attachment to Lorraine, the Islamic/North African experience of teaching in Algeria for about ten
years, and the Portuguese/South American experience of teaching in Sao Paolo for three years. This
had an opening effect which may explain his realization of long-distance links and interest in world
history. It also gave him a sense of curiosity about his own world. He emphasized in his work that it
was important to feel ‘surprise and distance - those important aids to comprehension are both
equally necessary for an understanding of that which surrounds you - surrounds you so evidently
that you can no longer see it clearly.' 2

Like some latter-day shaman, he underwent a conversion experience accompanied with a long
period of seclusion. When he reacted against diplomatic and short-term political history in the
late 1930's, and had gathered most of the data, he then found himself in a German concentration
camp at Lubeck for five years. It is tempting to speculate that this allowed him to fuse his
thought and send it in a different direction. His shame, helplessness and remorse at the defeat of
his beloved France seems to have set in his blood his most famous contribution to historical
method, the distinction between the three levels of time.

All these occurrences which poured in upon us from the radio and the newspapers of our enemies, or even the news
from London which our clandestine receivers gave us - I had to outdistance, reject, deny them. Down with
occurrences, especially the vexing ones! I have to believe that history, destiny, was written at a much more profound
level.3

He explained that

In the course of a gloomy captivity I fought hard to escape from the chronicle of those difficult years. To reject the
events and the time of events was to put one's self beyond them, in a shelter, to look at them from a little distance, to

1
This is an expanded version of a talk given on 1st February 1996 at the Institute of Historical Research at a
seminar on global history organized by Patrick O’Brien. I have not altered the contents except minimally to improve
style and grammar and to expand the notes into a full text.
2
In ed. Burke, Economic,24.
3
In Mayne preface, History of Civilizations, xv.

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 judge them better and not too much to believe in them. From temps court to pass to temps less court and temps
very long...'4

The outcome of his work is indeed impressive. Lucien Febvre described Braudel’s
'Mediterranean' volumes as 'this perfect historical work...more than a professional masterpiece. A
revolution in the way of conceiving of history...'5 The usually acerbic J.H.Hexter, despite small
criticisms described it as 'a miracle of historical scholarship that shames both my narrow vision and
my narrow learning'. The English chronicler of the Annales School, Peter Burke, 'has a good claim
to be regarded as the most important work of history of the century'.6 As for his influence, we are all
heirs of Braudel, whether we like it or not. He is part of the air we breathe. Again quoting Burke,
'...his contribution to the renewal of historical studies in our time was greater than that of either
Marc Bloch or Lucien Febvre, and possibly greater than that of the two scholars together.'7

What Braudel created; a tour round the Braudelian museums.

Throughout Braudel's work there are metaphors and they particularly cluster around the idea of
levels. In his famous divisions of subject and time into

He made a famous division of subject and time into the following:

structure - longue duree (thousands of years; geological time; geography, culture etc.; for example
long-term climatic changes)

conjoncture - moyenne duree (decades or hundreds of years - economic and social time; for
example the industrial revolution)

evenement - courte duree (days, weeks, a year; political and diplomatic time – for example the
Battle of Lepanto)

Three metaphors appear to represent the 'levels'. The first is of the ocean; the deep, unmoving water;
the second is slow movement of the tides; the third is the froth of the waves. Thus, in a famous
image he described events as mere ‘crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong
backs’. 8 A second metaphor is geological: the deep rocks, the middle soils, the surface stones and
flora and fauna. A third metaphor is architectural, a building with floors or levels. For instance, he
writes that the great fairs of the sixteenth century 'can be viewed as a sort of penthouse to the
structure, a superstructure and therefore as ballooning out of this superstructure...'9

In this sense of implying levels of structure, Braudel is part of that wider structural movement that
dominated all of the social sciences in the middle of the twentieth century. Braudel explicitly
acknowledges this. In the last lines of the Mediterranean he declares, 'By temperament I am a
structuralist, little attracted by events and only partly by conjoncture, that grouping of events
carrying the same sign."10

The third, architectural, metaphor gives us a way of approaching his two great works, for they may

4 
Quoted in Hexter, On Historians, 104.
5 
Hexter, On historians, 111.
6 
Burke, Sociology and History, 26.
7 
In Dict. of Historians, s.v. Braudel.
8 
Quoted in Burke, Dict. of Historians, 50.
9 
Braudel, Afterthoughts, 25.
10 
Quoted in Hexter, 97.

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be regarded as museums of the mind, each on three floors, and each holding a number of rooms
(chapters) divided into sections. What did the two museums look like? By seeing their organization
and content we will begin to approach his strengths and weaknesses.

The Museum of the Mediterranean World

This was a museum for which Braudel collected objects over the period 1925 to 1939 and which he
laid out in paper during his incarceration between 1940-5.

[Below is a rough representation of how the mental museum looked]

3
4
He peopled the rooms with amazing materials. Reading his two volumes takes us on a fascinating
and enormously rich journey where we see, feel, hear and sense the great Mediterranean world
through the century through Braudel’s personalization of natural forces, society and ecology. It is
dazzling and enchanting, like a great tapestry or painting, like a majestic work by Breughel or
Bosch. Hexter describes Braudel with his 'inexhaustible delight in piling up concrete details - details
for detail's sake', Braudel 'is a picaresque, a wanderer with the whole Mediterranean world in the
age of Philip II to roam in...'11 He is a writer in the tradition of Rabelais, with a gargantuan appetite
for 'facts'. He has collected a vast number of 'exhibits' for us and arranged them well. We are
delighted and overwhelmed. On the whole, the Museum of the Mind works very well and gives a
superb picture of an age.

The Museum of Capitalism and Civilization

The first Museum was opened to the public in 1949 with the publication of the first edition of
Mediterranean. Braudel almost immediately started on the second in 1950, which was originally
envisaged as one volume, to complement volumes by Lucien Febvre and others, but ended up,
twenty-five years later, as a massive work of 1750 pages in 3 volumes.

[Below is a rough representation of how the second museum looked.]

11 
Hexter, On Historians, 122, 127.

5
6
Let us go round this Museum, which is also planned on a three-level principle, though the categories
are now somewhat different. At the base is 'Civilization materialle', on floor 2 is 'vie economique',
that is the universal world of markets and commerce, on the top floor is 'high capitalism'. This
second effort is less satisfying. Again, many of the individual rooms are great fun, and a storehouse
of treasures, but somehow it does not work as well as the Mediterranean.

There are some obvious personal reasons for this. The first museum was integrated within the
personality of one man, fused in the Lubeck concentration camp. The second museum is constructed
by a team of workers, supervised by Braudel, with all the all the inevitable compromises and
discontinuities which teamwork tends to entail.

The first Museum was created in a period of slow growth in historical knowledge and helped to
found a new discipline. The second construction occurred while the world of social and economic
history was expanding exponentially.

Furthermore, Braudel himself was getting tired. In his 'Afterthoughts' to the project, Braudel writes:

'Yet, even though it is limited chiefly to economic history, Civilisation materielle et capitalisme
has posed many problems for me. There has been a vast amount of documentation to absorb...And
so the years have passed. I have despaired of ever reaching the harbour.' He feels the twenty-five
years spent on it, is 'no doubt' 'much too long'.

For instance, he admits that there are too many exhibits, placed there just because they were
collected. 'In the first chapters of vol. 2 … I may have taken too much pleasure in these details, and
some readers may find me a bit long-winded.' He then tries to justify this with a piece of naive
empiricism: 'But is it not a good thing for history to be first of all a description, a plain observation,
a scrutiny, a classification without too many previously held ideas?' 12

But the problems are deeper than tiredness and too much data, and they afflict the first Museum as
much as a the second, although we overlooked them there. Let us now go over the exhibitions again
with a critical eye of a museum designer.

Missing floors and missing rooms in the Museums.

It is well known that Braudel's project was to write 'total' history, that is history that encompassed
everything that shapes humankind's destiny. 'Histoire globale, histoire total', that is total in coverage
in space, and total in its subject matter. 'Faithful to the teaching of Lucien Febvre and Marcel Mauss,
the historian will always want to seize the whole, the totality of the social.' 13

But when we look at the two museums there are some important missing areas. In each one, in fact,
two whole floors are missing. One is the world of thought and belief, in particular religion. As
Hexter put it, 'Of the religious structures, Christianity and Islam … we see nothing from the inside.
They are recurrent names, but what gave them life - their interlaced institutions, practices and beliefs
is nowhere to be found.'14 When he moves outside Europe, the same is even more true of the other
world religions.

It is this missing floor which perhaps explains why Braudel is so cavalier with Max Weber,
trivializing his ideas and never realizing how close he got to solving many of Braudel's questions.
For instance, if he really believed, as he wrote that 'For Max Weber capitalism n the modern sense
12 
Braudel, Afterthoughts, 20-1.
13 
Quoted in Hexter, On Historians, 107.
14 
Hexter, On Historians, 119.

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of the word was no more and no less than a creation of Protestantism, or, to be even more accurate,
of Puritanism',15 it is not surprising that he should have overlooked Weber's power and subtlety.

Part of this floor could also have been devoted to the history of philosophy, science, literature and
'ideas' in general, compensating for the heavy bias towards the material and the economic.

The other missing floor is the whole world of the institutions of power. Though there is some
attention to taxation and some branches of administration, the complexities of political structures are
never fully addressed. Even more important is the omission of law and custom; as Hexter writes,
'Routines imbedded in custom and law receive less attention or none'.16

As well as two missing floors, there are rooms which are too small; for instance in the
Mediterranean, as Hexter says, 'on agriculture and industry there are only a few pages’, 17 though this
is made up in the later Museum. And other sets of exhibits, for example the whole world of family
life and marriage, or the whole world of art, aesthetics, morals and etiquette tends to be scattered
rather thinly over the museums.

None of this would matter if the standard had not been raised so high.

The missing logic; or ‘What is the Question?’

As a friend of Lucien Febvre and his insistence on avoiding 'un question mal posee', Braudel was
aware that books, like Museums, need a good problematique. For instance, Braudel wrote that 'The
region is not the framework of research. The framework of research is the problem, selected with
full independence and responsibility of mind...'18 But does he practice what he preaches? One sign
that he does not do so is given by his admirers.

Thus Hexter writes, having searched for 'the problem' in vain in the preface to Mediterranean, 'Not
really histoire probleme at all, La Mediterranee. Rather histoire totale....19 Another sign that the
problematique or logic is shaky is in the advice given by Hexter, which is basically that the
Mediterranean Museum is one which we can 'read'/'visit' in any order. He advises us, 'Do not
earnestly (as I did) start at the beginning go to the end, then stop. Rather open at random, find the
beginning of a sub-section, and start there. If what you read does not interest or please you, close
and open at random again'.20 A Museum which has no internal logic, leading from room to room, is
a certain kind of museum, but it does not sound like one based on an over-arching problem.

In fact Hexter shows well that there was a tension between Histoire probleme, which 'marches under
the standard of elegance' and histoire total under the 'standard of abundance'. Braudel with his
'torrent of words' belongs to the latter.21

There are numerous signs that Braudel himself realizes that he has become lost in the woods of
delightful data. After writing the massive 'Civilization and Capitalism' he meditated on the work in
his 'Afterthoughts'. The three volumes themselves had failed to come to any definite conclusions. In
the first volume, two pages of conclusions were appended to the 561 pages of text. In the second
volume, there were one and a half pages of conclusion after 599 pages of text. At the end of the third

15 
Braudel, Afterthoughts, 65-6.
16 
Hexter, On Historians, 118.
17 
Hexter, On Historians, 133.
18 
Quoted in Hexter, On Historians, 105.
19 
Hexter, On Historians, 133.
20 
Hexter, On Historians, 128.
21 
Hexter, On Historians, 144.

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volume there were 619 pages of text, with thirteen pages ‘By Way of Conclusion’. In all, 17 pages
out of 1750 were conclusions, and most of the conclusions themselves are rather vacuous.

In both Museums, the exhibits crowd out the rooms and there is no room for conclusions as we
hurriedly move up the spiral staircases between floors. In 'Afterthoughts', a set of lectures in
America, Braudel tries to draw together his ideas. Yet we are still left hanging in the air and at the
end of it all Braudel sadly admits that 'Here I am, at the end of the puzzle. I am not sure that I have
convinced any of my readers along the way.' Nor, in fact, has he convinced himself, admitting that
'The historian has less trouble seeing the hows than the whys...'22

The difficulty is that if you ask of each exhibition, ‘this is the answer, what is the question?’ you
come away with only a partial reply. At least with Mediterranean it is roughly an answer to the
question, 'Can one person provide a brilliant description of a part of the world', to which the answer
is ‘yes’. With the second volume, it is impossible to formulate the question - though it seems to lie
somewhere in the general region of the development of 'civilization', undefined, and 'capitalism',
vaguely and often inaccurately defined, over a period of three or four centuries.

This takes us to one root of the problem in the later museum. Although the three volumes are all
about 'capitalism', we never receive any firm guidance on what 'capitalism' is. Having rejected Marx
and Weber, Braudel puts nothing in their place, except fairly vague remarks such as 'Capitalism and
towns were basically the same thing in the West'.23 He has tremendous problems at this level. He
simultaneously argues that there was something dynamic and changing in his period, and that
structurally nothing changed; for instance, attacking Weber and the argument of a northern
capitalism, he writes 'They invented nothing, either in technology or in business management … a
shift of the centre of gravity of the world economy for economic reasons that had nothing whatever
to do with the basic or secret nature of capitalism.'24

Again, if capitalist instruments are very old and market economies universal for a thousand years or
more, what is 'capitalism' at all? He is reduced to an unsatisfactory set of differences or levels, which
informs the second museum, namely:

'economic activities that are carried on at the summit' - which is 'capitalism' and expanding.

'market economy' - which is universal

'material life' - which is universal

There are great problems with this. For instance it leads into a topsy-turvy and lop-sided view that
'in the end, it was at the very summit of society that capitalism unfolded first...' (for example the
Fuggers) .25

One has sympathy for Braudel. Even if he knew what the question was in 1950, it would be unlikely
to be the same one in 1960, 1970 or 1975. Questions change over time and many of the great
intellectual syntheses over long periods, from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, through Frazer’s
Golden Bough to Needham’s Science and Civilization in China suffer from the same feeling of
exhaustion as the writers try to keep up with new information and changing world views over a long
period.

22 
Braudel, Afterthoughts, 111,80.
23 
Braudel, Capitalism, 400.
24 
Braudel, Afterthoughts, 66-7.
25 
Braudel, Aftethoughts, 63.

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The missing connections

At one level, as we have seen, Braudel was a structuralist, believing in different levels of structures.
But there is another element of French structuralism which is missing, all the odder for the fact that
it would have helped to create a better 'histoire sociale totale', this is the relational aspect of
structuralism. In other words, that meaning does not lie in things in themselves, but in their relations
and the 'relations of relations', as his colleagues such as Levi-Strauss or Louis Dumont must surely
have been telling him, or he would have learnt from Marcel Mauss.

Let us look at this again in the Museums. They are laid out on three floors, with a narrow staircase
attaching them, but not only are different rooms on the same floors not open to each other, but worse
still, the three floors are hardly connected.

This defect, namely that there is very little articulation between structure, conjuncture and
evenement, has been widely recognized from the first, even by his most enthusiastic critics.

Stuart Hughes wrote that 'In Braudel's work the three major sections...never quite came together.'
Felix Gilbert commented that 'Braudel's emphasis on the importance of factors of longue duree has
made the gap between structure and event almost unbridgeable...' Bernard Baylyn observed that 'The
parts of his "world" are all there, but they lie inert, unrelated, discrete.'

Braudel himself recognized, after the end of his second effort, that 'Breaking down the problem in
order to understand it more fully dividing it into three levels or stages, amounts to mutilating and
manipulating a much more complex economic and social reality.' He is well aware that 'In truth we
must grasp the whole in order to grasp at the same time the reasons for the change...'26 Yet he is
unable to do just that.

There are many reasons for this failure, among them his deep emotional dislike for the 'event', born
out of a double rejection - the rejection of 'one damned thing after another' of the Rankean tradition
of early C20 political and diplomatic history, against which he was reacting, and his personal
experience of the terrible 'events' after 1939.

As a result, the possibility that he would be able to move easily from event to structure was ruled
out. For instance, he wrote 'Can a phenomena of the longue duree be derived from little causes? I
doubt it'.27 In the days of chaos theory, we know that he was wrong, and the 'Cleopatra's nose' theory
of history, while it can be overdone, cannot be dismissed so cavalierly, as many great historians,
including Montesquieu, have recognized.

Another difficulty is that most phenomena operate at all three levels, and the easy equation, for
instance, of politics with 'evenements', is mistaken - monarchy is an institution at the middle level,
some components of climate, such as hurricanes, are 'events' and so on.

Of course, it would be unfair and untrue to argue that he sees no links. But the tendency of his
method is to keep the levels apart. This is a pity for there are hints in his later work, and particularly
in Afterthoughts, that he was aware that the solution to the central problem of the emergence of
modernity does not lie in any particular room or floor, but in their interrelations.

In an interesting passage he admitted that the secret of the growing dominance of 'capitalism' lay not
in itself, but in its relations to other things. It partly lay in its relations to politics; 'capitalism only
triumphs when it becomes identified with the state, when it is the state'.28 It partly lies in its relations
26 
Braudel, Afterthoughts, 116.
27 
Braudel, On History, 149.
28 
Braudel, Afterthoughts, 64.

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to religion; religion is usually conservative and opposes capitalism, but sometimes it makes an
accommodation.29 It partly lies in its relation to the social structure, and particularly hierarchies,
which are permeable, yet allow long-term continuities and the accumulation of wealth in instituted
bodies such as families.30.

Thus he realizes that 'the growth and success of capitalism requires certain social conditions. They
require a certain tranquility in the social order and a certain neutrality, or weakness, or
permissiveness by the state...'31 He realized that this set of inter-relations was propitious in the West
and in Japan, but not elsewhere.

If he had pursued this relational approach more thoroughly and earlier, following the hints of
structuralist anthropology and Max Weber, De Tocqueville and others, he would have reached
further, a fact which he implicitly recognizes in his long and 'curious' aside on Norman Jacobs at the
end of The Wheels of Commerce. He recognized that by adopting a Weberian perspective,
Jacobs, in a book of 220 pages published in 1958, had made more progress towards understanding
the development of capitalism than Braudel in his more than 4000 pages.

Demographic history as a test case.

Many of the above remarks are sweeping and general. To end I will just take us into one part of the
display in each exhibition, dealing with a particular facet of his problem. This will give us a concrete
chance to look at his methods in practice and to show their strengths and weaknesses. The area is
one which interested Braudel considerably namely the questions of population and the escape from
the Malthusian trap.

In the 'Mediterranean' Museum, the subject of population is mainly dealt with in two places, under
'Towns' on the first floor, and under 'How Many People' on the second. Braudel is well aware of the
importance of the ebb and flow of populations. 'The increase in population was a fundamental
characteristic of the "long sixteenth century" both in Europe and the Mediterranean, the basis on
which everything or almost everything else depended.'32 He suggested tentatively that there was
possibly a doubling of the population between 1500 and 1600. He described the background of
epidemics, particularly plague and typhus, and he described the famines in towns and countryside.
But there is no attempt to explain either why population rose in this period or what happened later.
The nearest we come to a theory is in the patently false idea that 'Everywhere in the C16 man was on
the increase, suggesting once against that Ernst Wagemann was right to insist than any large
population must increase simultaneously throughout entire humanity.'33

Thus, in the Mediterranean World a problem - the increase in population - is hinted at, but not
solved. Instead we have considerable material on the difficulties of life. The model of perennial high
mortality and fertility is accepted: 'This was the world of precarious existences, and at birth life
expectations was low'.34

In 'Civilization and Capitalism' the subject is dealt with in the very first chapter called
'Population'. This is partly a recognition by Braudel that population is of the utmost importance. His
account of the subject does highlight what the problem reasonably.

29 
Braudel, Afterthoughts, 65.
30 
Braudel, Afterthoughts, 67.
31 
Braudel, Afterthoughts, 74.
32 
Braudel, Mediterranean, i, 326.
33 
Braudel, Mediterranean, i, 402.
34 
Braudel, Mediterranean, I, 413-4.

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 Firstly, he recognizes the importance of the growth of population. The demographic ebbs and
flows are the central fact. 'These basic facts make almost everything else seem secondary. Clearly,
our starting point must be the people of the world.'35 World population, he thought, doubled between
1300 and 1800. 'This is indubitably the basic fact in world history from the C15 to C18 ... the most
important and disturbing fact that we will record in this book'.36 He recognizes that the battle with
disease is one of the central events of history. 'Is this mighty struggle at some deep level the
essential history of mankind?'37

Not merely does he recognize the problem in general, but he realizes that the central question is
how humankind escaped from what he terms the 'biological ancien regime', but which I term the
'Malthusian trap'.38 Building on his earlier accounts, he gives us a strong picture of this 'biological
ancien regime', which consists of universal famines, epidemics and wars. It is a world where birth
and death rates were characteristically high and balanced, with crude rates of about 40/1000. There
seemed no escape from this. 'Until the eighteenth century, the population was enclosed within an
almost intangible circle'. Or again, 'Not before the eighteenth century were the frontiers of the
impossible crossed and the hitherto unsurpassable population ceiling exceeded.'39 Only in certain
restricted areas and from the eighteenth century, did parts of the world 'break free' of these
pressures.40

His image of escape from a set of restrictions is well put as follows. 'What was shattered in both
China and Europe with the C18 was a biological ancien regime, a set of restrictions, obstacles,
structures, proportions and numerical relationships that had hitherto been the norm'. 41 Until that
time, humans had been trapped in a cyclical demographic situation, the last phase of which had
occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 'Man's increase itself became a burden and
again brought about his poverty. From 1560 or 1580 onwards in France, Spain, Italy and probably
the whole Western world population again became too dense. The monotonous story begins
afresh...'42

This is indeed a problem - to explain the population rise that occurred within this regime, for
instance in the sixteenth century, and then in the C18. And we should add that it is a problem that
no-one has yet fully solved. But how far does Braudel get?

He starts by considering the two major theories which existed in the middle of this century,
namely that there were advances in medicine and the treatment of the environment, including
sanitation and drinking water, which could account for the changes. He accepts that there may be
some truth in both, but without examining either in any detail, more or less dismisses them on rather
curious grounds. Drawing on Wagemann again, he points out that there was an equally great
increase in population in China and Russia as there was in Europe. Since he believes that the
medical and environmental changes could not also have happened there, he argues that they cannot
be the root cause.43 There are, of course, all sorts of logical errors here, even if his facts are right.
The same effect can have different causes in different places.

35 
Braudel, Structures, 31.
36 
Structures, 41.
37 
Structures, 88.
38
39 
Braudel, Afterthoughts, 9.
40 
Braudel, Structures, 91.
41 
Braudel, Structures, 70.
42 
Braudel, Structures, 33.
43 
Braudel, Structures, 47.

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 If it was not medical change or environmental improvements, what was it? Here he reaches for
two extraneous causes. He describes certain climatic changes in the thirteenth to eighteenth
centuries which might have effected population, such as the little ice age. Yet he never worked out
in detail how the two fitted causally. It is clear that Braudel himself is only half-convinced.44 While
it might be plausible to explain rising mortality in the seventeenth century in this way, it is difficult
to see how it would account for the 'escape' in the eighteenth.

His second explanation is changes in epidemic disease due to changes in micro-organisms. He

writes that 'Historians of medicine have suggested, rightly in my view, that every pathogenic agent
has its own history...Here lies the cause of the complicated advances and retreats of disease, the
surprise appearances...' He illustrates this with the case of influenza.45 It is an idea worth developing.
But in order to be convincing, one would need to examine the complicated history of each of the
major diseases, water-borne, vector-borne and air-borne. He does not begin to do so. If he had, he
would have found that this explanation only gets one a little way, with certain diseases. His failure
to do so probably lies behind his admission that 'These comments only take us to the threshold of
the basic problems of a history of population.'46 It also means that he ends up with affirmations
which disguise the ultimate futility of his attempt, for example that 'This difficult and miraculous
long-term rise was the triumph of the force of numbers, on which so much depended.'47

What is sad is that, with his width of knowledge and desire to see things 'in the whole', he was
better placed that almost anyone else to have made a real contribution to solving some very difficult
problems in this area.

His failure stems from several weaknesses. Firstly he lumps all of the 'ancien regime' together -
not recognizing the huge variations between regions. His picture of a high mortality and high
fertility regime only fits parts of Europe at certain times. Secondly, his dependence on Wagemann
and refusal even to discuss Malthus (because, as Braudel claims, he had been too much discussed)
cuts him off from certain solutions. Thirdly, his failure to link the population room to all the other
rooms - for instance to the next rooms on foodstuffs and food and drink, and houses and clothes and
technology, leaves us with rather barren solutions.

Ultimately his failure reflects the fact that he is more interested in descriptions than in solutions.
That is fine for a certain kind of Museum. Yet we need to recognize the limitation if we are to learn
from him. Thus we can pillage his Museum for nice examples and figures, and even receive some
marvelous overview insights. But the solutions to problems are not there.

What do we learn?

We learn from this project that there is a contradiction between 'histoire totale' and 'histoire
problematique'. We are reminded that we should constantly be asking oneself what one's question is.
We are reminded that the inter-actions between spheres and between levels are as important as the
things themselves. We see that it is important to set up a simple model or 'normal' state, but always
to remember that it is artificial, and almost all actual cases deviate from it.

Braudel’s emphases remind us that there is more to life than material and economic factors; that the
world of ideas, sentiments, beliefs is intermingled with them. In this respect, Weber is a better guide
than Marx. We see, as with other great intellectual enterprises, both that the world is too complex
for any single mind to encompass, but also that much of interest is generated from the attempt.
44 
Braudel, Structures, 49.
45 
Structures, 89.
46 
Braudel, Structures, 61.
47 
Braudel, Structures, 92.

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We are reminded of a remark attributed to Rousseau that 'One needs to look near at hand if one
wants to study men; but to study man one must learn to look from afar: one must first observe
differences in order to discover attributes'. In this respect, Braudel was a great historian. He looked
from both near and afar and despite his failings we are deeply in his debt.

Braudel's great achievement can be indicated if we apply what one might call the 'Das Kapital' test.
'When Karl Marx was living in London, he received this letter from his Leipzig publisher: "Dear
Herr Doctor: You are already ten months behind time with the manuscript of Das Kapital, which
you have agreed to write for us. If we do not receive the manuscript within six months, we shall be
obliged to commission another author to do this work."'48 No other author could have written the
Mediterranean World', but I suspect that this is not true of Civilization and Capitalism.

48 
Quoted in Kenneth Atchity, A Writer's Time (1986), p.135.

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