Universidade de São José (USJ)

FERNAND BRAUDEL AND CHINA

A DISSERTATION
Presented to
the Academic Faculty

by

Sonia Lau, Nga Lai

(158324)

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

MASTER IN HISTORY AND HERITAGE STUDIES

in the School of Arts, Letters and Sciences

2011
@ Sonia Lau, Nga Lai
 Abstract

This Master Dissertation is basically a research on Fernand Braudel’s

historiography aiming to critically discuss is theory on the history of Chinese failure to
develop towards Capitalism in the modern period. Although revisiting several
Braudel’s titles, the core of the research deals with the most influential book
published by the famous 20th century French historian: Civilization and Capitalism,
three volumes that can be also summarized as a history of Modern Capitalism. The
dissertation researches these three volumes as sources for understanding an
ongoing historiography analysis widely shared stressing the lack of capitalism
dynamics in the modern and early contemporary history of China, from 15th to early
19th centuries.
After the reconstruction of Braudel main arguments regarding China position
in the modern history of the world, it seems clear that the French historian tried to
build up a theory criticizing the limitations of Max Weber classic studies on Chinese
religion, adapting his famous connections between Protestantism and Capitalism to
emphasize the leading role of Confucianism in the reproduction of a Chinese
patriarchal and despotic imperial system. The Braudelian analysis on China was
grounded in countless subjects and debates, as well as within an original framework
merging his ‘longue durée’ seminal theory with his key concept of ‘world-economy’.
Through these concepts, Fernand Braudel explains the main Chinese capitalist
dysfunction: the absence of an economic leading position in the world trade and
economy from 15th to early 19th centuries.
This dissertation was not organized through primary research, but follows up
a process of gathering, selecting and summarizing available written and web
resources, then cored in the main project goal of understanding the modern history
of China within Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism theory.

Keywords: Fernand Braudel; Capitalism; World-Economy; China.

1
 I certify that this report is solely my
work, and that it has never been
previously submitted for any
academic award:

I, the supervisor, believe that this

Dissertation is ready for
assessment, and reaches the
accepted standard
for the Master in History and Heritage Studies:

Prof. Ivo Carneiro de Sousa

2
 1. INTRODUCTION

As the leading representative of the second generation of the referential

French Annales School, Fernand Braudel’s historical ideas and historiography were
as copious as innovative. On one hand, he inherited from the pioneer founding
fathers of Annales School, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, the epistemological
perspective of an anti-positivist history, rejecting the fact to stress the process,
namely the socio-economic processes that framed the human past; on the other
hand, Braudel was an academic innovator being able to build up a new
interdisciplinary conception of history largely regarding history as the set of social
sciences studying the times and spaces of the past. Braudel contribution changed
even the academic journal at the center of the new French historiography, shifting it
from the ‘Annales’ of social and economic history created by Bloch and Febvre to the
much more alluring label of ‘Annales’ Economies, Societies and Civilizations.
Fernand Braudel was an epistemological innovator, and set up a new key
theory of historical time. Dividing historical time in three different tri-portions, Braudel
highlighted the huge difference between short-time linked to facts, medium-time
related to structures, and the long-term time dealing with civilizations. Fernand
Braudel rightly acknowledged that nothing important in history changes through the
time of facts, of short events. The time of structures can change a political regime or
some economic foundations but hardly affects or shifts long term civilizations.
Therefore, for Fernand Braudel, the most important time in history is always the time
of civilizations, the time of the lasting balances between populations and landscapes.
Civilizations last while structures can change and events are conjectural.
Civilizations are always the basic infra-structures shaping Man and Territory, History
and Geography the two main axes of the ‘Annales’ historiography revolution since
Bloch and Febvre.
This simple but at the same time very complex theory on historical time not
only rebuilt the ‘Annales’ historiography, generating a wider movement then labeled
as ‘Nouvelle Histoire’ (New History), but made it enter into a new era – Braudel’s
Era. The theory applied in Braudel first referential book, ‘The Mediterranean and the

3
Mediterranean World in the Age of Philippe II’, set up a new bridge between History
and other social sciences – geography, sociology, anthropology, and Psychology – in
order to promote the development of a dominant interdisciplinary history research. 1
In consequence, the fields of history shifted from the local-regional previous contexts
to embrace a world history in space, subjects and problematic. Fernand Braudel
referred several times to the need to create a ‘histoire totale’ (total history) sought to
establish a link of the different aspects of the history all over the world. In this
Braudelian process to build up a true global, planetary history, his seminal theory of
‘world-economy’ crossing Imannuel Wallerstein new insights on world systems
became an excellent theoretical and methodological framework to compare
civilizations, societies, economies and demography world-wide, being a major
instrument of Braudel analyzes of modern China and its position in world history from
15th to early 19th centuries. Moreover, the world-economy theory changed the
perspective of the role of specific regional or continental histories into a world history,
and strengthened the research dialogue between history and culture. 2
Why did Braudel’s historical ideas spread widely? The key factor was that the
two main Braudel’s theories on historical time and world-economy were not intended
to implement any new ideologies, doctrines or history philosophies, but rather to find
new global problematic and methods to achieve a ‘histoire totale’. It was not to limit
the history to a single cause-effect, linear and mechanic theoretical framework, but
rather to develop a new vision of the historical process centered on systems and
complexity. Furthermore, Braudel thought that the revival of history was not only
grounded on theory, but required also a new historiography interdisciplinary practice.
Is the idea of a new practice of history that Braudel implemented after Lucien Febvre
death, in 1956, through the direction of both the École Pratique and the
journal Annales. In the first institution Braudel gathered one of the most extraordinary
collections of talents in the twentieth century history and social sciences: historians
as Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Maurice
Aymard; philosophers like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault; the psychologists

1
BRAUDEL, Fernand. La Mediterranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II
(1947-1949). The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
2
The world-economy is a dynamic sum of individualized spaces, economic and non-
economic, gathered in a wide coherent space in a certain era and area of the globe,
surpassing the limits of other massive groups of history (BRAUDEL, Fernand (1985).
Civilization and Capitalism, III. The Perspective of the World. London: William Collins Sons.)

4
Jacques Lacan and Georges Devereux; the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu; the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss; and the classical scholars Jean-Pierre Vernant
and Pierre Vidal-Naquet that changed profoundly the history of Greco-Roman
cultures. Braudel worked hard to create a separate institution where all his
colleagues could work together, and where a succession of foreign visitors could be
invited as associate professors; this idea begun about 1958, but did not achieve
physical shape until the opening of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in 1970.
And it was only after Braudel retirement in 1972 that the VIe Section finally
metamorphosed into its present status as a new and independent teaching
institution, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. 3

In and through Annales Braudel sought to promote and defend his conception
of history. For thirty years the great debates on the nature of history took place in its
pages. The first and most important debate was provoked by the anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss's claims that the theory of structuralism offered an explanation
of human social organization in the past much more important than any historical
approach. Braudel had been possibly the first historian to use the word structure in
the pages of ‘The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philippe
II’, but he saw that the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss was fundamentally anti-
historical, in that it sought to explain all human societies in terms of a single theory of
structures. The notions of difference and of change that are basic to all historical
thought were simply dismissed as irrelevant to the search for a universal underlying
structure. Against this, in a famous article in Annales (1958) on the "longue durée,"
Braudel explained his own historical conception of the varieties of underlying forces
influencing human society, which he had already formulated during the writing of his
thesis in relation to the static forces and the slow movements behind the ephemeral
history of events. Braudel's conception of the longue durée (usually translated rather
misleadingly as "the long perspective" or simply “long term”) is not easy to express in
non-historical terms as a theoretical concept; it is the recognition that human society
develops and changes at different rates in relation to different underlying forces, and
that all the elements within any human situation interact with one another. There are
underlying geographical constraints; there are natural regularities of behavior related
to every activity, whether climatic or seasonal or conventional; there are social

3
Memory and the Mediterranean, retrieved at http://www.randomhouse.
com/knopf/authors/braudel/

5
customs; there are economic pressures; and there are short-term events in history
with their resulting consequences – battles, conquests, powerful rulers, reforms,
earthquakes, famines, diseases, tribal loves and hatreds. To translate the messy
complications that constitute the essence of history into a general theory is
impossible, and this fact represents the ultimate problem of trying to subsume history
within any abstract theory, from whatever philosophical or sociological or
anthropological source it is derived. 4

The second debate concerned quantitative history: after the research and
publication of The Mediterranean, Braudel became more and more attracted to the
idea of quantification in economic history, the notion that history could become
scientifically respectable through the use of graphs and tables and the collection of
hard quantifiable data. It took the example of his disciple Pierre Chaunu, who sought
to surpass Braudel with his immense work of 7,800 pages on Seville and the Atlantic
trade (finally published in 1963) to convince Braudel that something was missing
from this type of statistical history. History was something more than the effect of the
fluctuations in the Spanish-American trade or the economic boom and decline of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was in response to this debate that Braudel
wrote his second great work, translated as Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th
Century (1982). The first volume of this work was originally published in 1967 and
translated into English as Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 (1973). It
presented a vivid picture of social life and its structures before the Industrial
Revolution, in terms of population, bread, food and drink, fashion, housing, energy
sources, technology, money, cities and towns. This was revised and incorporated
into a three-volume work with a one-word addition to the title: Material Civilization,
Economy and Capitalism (1979). The work now approached the whole question of
the origins of modern world capitalism. The second volume dealt with the
organization of commerce, manufacture and capitalism, the third with the growth of a
world economy and world trade. His conclusion was both historical and practical: it is
small-scale business and freedom of trade that both produces and sustains
capitalism, not state enterprise or large-scale capitalism. Without the independent
small artisan and the merchant-shopkeeper no economic system can survive, and
these smaller entities are embedded in the social fabric so that society and economy

4
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/braudel/.

6
can never be separated from each other. His work stands therefore as a refutation
through the study of history of both communism and capitalism. 5

The third debate with which Braudel was involved was a consequence of his
growing distance from the most talented historians whom he had called to join him in
the management of Annales. The new history, Nouvelle Histoire, of the sixties turned
away from the certainties of economic and descriptive social history, and explored
the "history of mentalities." The historical world was created out of perceptions, not
out of events, and we needed to recognize that the whole of history was a construct
of human impressions. The crucial problem for a history that still sought a degree of
certainty and an escape from arbitrariness or fiction was to analyze the mental world
that created an age or a civilization. It was the medieval historians Georges Duby
and Jacques Le Goff along with the close Braudel disciple Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie who pioneered this approach from 1961 onward opening up the ground for a
histoire des mentalités; it meant a whole-scale return to the old German conceptions
of cultural history, and to the use of literary and artistic sources alongside archival
material. This was perhaps one of Braudel's blind spots: to him, it was the realities of
peasant or merchant existence that mattered, not the way that they might be
expressed in artistic or literary form. He was also more and more interested in the
global sweep and saw the detailed studies of the mental world of small communities
undertaken by his colleagues as a betrayal of the grand vision. As he said to Ladurie
in relation to his famous book Montaillou, "We brought history into the dining room;
you are taking it into the bedroom." His disapproval of these trends cost him the
direction of his journal, and by 1969 he had abandoned Annales, sidelined by those
whose careers he had started and whom he had originally invited to join him. 6

Braudel's reply to this development was long in coming and remains

incomplete; it was his last great projected work, The Identity of France. 7 Three
volumes were published before his death, comprising the first two parts on
geography, demography and economy: these were for him the traditional territory.
With the third and fourth volumes he would be entering a new territory by writing
about the state, culture, and society, and in the fourth about "France outside France."
Fragments of the third volume were published in 1997. They suggest that in this last

5
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/braudel/
6
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/braudel/
7
BRAUDEL, Fernand (1989). The Identity of France. New York: Harper & Row.

7
work he intended to confound his critics by proving that the "mentality" of France was
contained within its physical, social and economic history. The peasant was the key
to the history of France, and a true history of mentalities could only be written in
the longue durée and from a long perspective. History must do more than study
walled gardens. 8

The difficulty of translating longue durée with the phrase "the long
perspective" or “the long term” reveals another problem that was perhaps to emerge
in the later debates with Michel Foucault. Braudel never claimed that his categories
were absolute. They were only means of organizing the explanatory factors in any
situation, but equally he was not prepared to see them simply as constructs
fashioned by the observer for his immediate purposes. However indeterminate and
changeable, they did possess a real existence as forces in the field of history. This
was challenged by the theories and methods of Foucault in his Words and
Things (1966), and mainly through The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). The idea
of historical relativity introduced in these works and adopted by postmodern
historians took one step beyond the history of mentalities. Not only did the
uncertainty contained in the study of history rest on its derivation from a set of human
impressions rather than facts: the crucial role in this process belonged to the
historian as interpreter. Indeed, the whole organization of knowledge could be seen
as a construction designed to control the world. History, like all the social sciences,
was an aspect of power, so that history was both the history of forms of control and
itself a form of control, not an innocent activity. All this is still highly controversial
today, but it was of course one step worse for Braudel than the history of mentalities.
The historian was no longer the innocent observer but himself was an actor in
society's attempt to marginalize groups such as the women, aboriginal peoples, the
mad, criminals, and homosexuals and through its control of the psychology of
humanity to construct mechanisms of social power. Moreover, Foucault singled out
the Braudelian conception of history for special attack: it was ideas and the sudden
rupture created by them (exemplified in his own books), not the long perspective,
which mattered in a history dominated by random change, by discontinuities instead
of structures. 9

8
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/20/books/books-of-the-times-braudel-monument-to-a-
love-affair-with-france.html
9
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/braudel/

8
 This theoretical debate had just begun in 1968. Braudel was giving a lecture
series in Chicago when he was recalled to face – at the age of sixty-two – the
revolutionary student movement. Like many radical professors he was sympathetic
but uncomprehending of the anarchic streak in youthful protest; his interventions
were paternalistic and not well received, and later he condemned the revolution
because it made people less rather than more happy. He could not understand the
desire to destroy everything that he had personally tried to build outside the
university system of which both he and they disapproved, or their contempt for facts
and research in face of neo-communist, Maoist and anarchist ideas.
More dangerous still for Braudel was the reaction, which brought the
conservatives under Pompidou to power, and which placed the blame, not on their
own resistance to change, but on those who had tried to encourage change. Had not
the "events" of 1968 proved the importance of the history of events? Where now was
the longue dureée? Either the new history (whatever it was) was responsible for the
"events," or it was disproved by them. As a conservative you could have it both ways,
and both implicated Braudel along with all his intellectual opponents. This was of
course the same as to accuse the Enlightenment of causing the French Revolution,
but the claim was successful in blocking Braudel's access to government circles
almost for the first time in his career. The university conservatives had indeed lost,
and the old Sorbonne was swept away, but they also had their revenge on the man
who was most responsible for establishing their irrelevance to modern life. 10
Braudel ended his life as he began it, as an outsider, but not unhappy with this
fate. He had always believed in the importance of accepting reality and the relative
powerlessness of the individual in the face of his circumstances, even though he had
himself ruled French intellectual life "as a prince" for a generation. Above all, despite
his recognition of the importance of the grand vision and the power of the longue
durée and of structures, he had always upheld that crucial historical value, the
centrality of the individual as the subject of history; not the individual great man but
the anonymous yet real peasant, the ordinary unknown man. In this sense he
remains more truly revolutionary than any of his opponents on the left or the right.
Moreover, is last writings, in early 1980’s, and his monumental unachieved
masterpiece on The Identity of France reveals a unique thinker that should be

10
Memory and the Mediterranean, retrieved at http://www.randomhouse.
com/knopf/authors/braudel/

9
convoked as a true classic even for understanding the present day astonishing
speed of the process of globalization. In fact, Braudel explained in The Identity of
France that individuals and national states have become too slow for a society in
which speed leads us to devise a new social and global syntax, something which he
tried to explore in his Grammar of Civilizations, known in English as History of
Civilizations. Searching an alternative “Grammar”, Braudel stressed that “historical
time is lastingly distorted”, suggesting a large civilizational shift: “What is taking
place is a reversal of time whereby time itself (biographical and historical) undergoes
a qualitative change.” Braudel suggested a “new humanism” able to build up new
“social syntax” for a new enterprise, a global world.
It is in this context and through this itinerary that we can research critically
Fernand Braudel’s positions regarding the Modern and Contemporary history of
China. The great French historian never visited China, but kept a genuine scientific
interest by the history of the middle empire. It is more than enough to consult the
indexes (V. Appendix) of the three volumes of Civilization and capitalism to discover
a wide research on the most important fields of Chinese society, economy, religion
and material culture from 15th to 18th centuries.

10
 2. THE LIFE AND WORKS OF FERNAND BRAUDEL

Fernand Braudel’s reputation as a new and world historian is strictly related

with his research and publications, starting with his doctoral thesis on the “The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philippe II”, published
originally in 1949. His prestige and fame are not driven by a special biography, and
the most dramatic personal events in his life are also related with this key book.
French soldier during the II World War, Braudel was imprisoned in a German
detention camp for almost three years where he finished his book which was also his
doctoral dissertation. The rest is a life of a young teacher of History very critic of the
French higher education system that embraced and refined the ‘Annales’ project until
transforming it in the most important 20th century historiography movement. 11
In 19th century, the leading German historian, Leopold Ranke, founded the
Historical Language Philology School (Historisch-Kritische Philologie), and
suggested to rebuild history as a science of documents, gathering and criticizing data
mainly from historic written records through a set of critical tools based on
paleography and diplomatic. This factual and positivist Rankean idea of history
became dominant until the early 20th century spread of new social sciences, from
Emile Durkheim sociology to Freud psychoanalysis, passing through the new human
geography of Vidal de La Blache who played an important influence in the first
generation of the ‘Annales’, namely on Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. Durkheim
worked for the development of sociology, pointed out that it was possible to analyze
human beings as social facts, and scholars thoroughly analyzed the factors of the
society, in order to understand what was the “human’s being” social framework. The

11
This chapter summarizing Fernand Braudel’s life and bibliography is not based in original
primary research, and follows up the main available written and web resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernand_Braudel;
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/77993/Fernand-Braudel; Memory and the
Mediterranean, retrieved at http://www.randomhouse. com/knopf/authors/braudel/;
http://conservapedia.com/Fernand_Braudel; BRAUDEL, Paule. “Les origines intellectuelles
de Fernand Braudel : un témoignage ». in : Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Année
1992, Volume 47, Numéro 1, p. 237 – 244; BURKE, Peter (1990). The French Historical
Revolution. The Annales School 1929-1989. Cambridge: Polity Press.

11
foundation of the Annales d’ histoire economique et sociale by Marc Bloch and
Lucien Febvre in 1929, at the Strasbourg University, was widely influenced by
Durkheim’s disciples working in this University gathered around the famous
academic journal ‘L’Année Sociologique’. In fact, the first generation of the ‘Annales’
School was mainly engaged in the development of a new dominant economic and
social history trying to overcome the limitations of the spread of Marxist historical
materialism. Braudel was a direct hair of a key idea that history was always social.

Fernand Braudel was born in 24 August, 1902, in a small rural village from a
peasant family of Lorraine, on the borders of France and Germany. Because of poor
health he spent his childhood in the village of Luméville-en-Ornois at his paternal
grandmother's farm, with its chickens, stone walls, and countless fruit trees, in a
world that (as he described it) was still centered on the blacksmith, the wheelwright,
the itinerant woodcutters and an ancient mill. When he was six, Braudel moved to
live in Paris and its suburbs, where his father was a teacher of mathematics. His
father was a thoughtful, strict and demanding secondary school teacher. When he
was ten, Braudel studied Mathematics, Greek, Latin and other courses in the famous
Paris’ Lycée Voltaire. When he grew up, he wanted to study Medicine, but his father
objected. After that, he found that he loved history very much History, and discovered
that his memorization was strong. So he entered in the referential Sorbonne College
of Paris University to study history when he was eighteen. He thought the course
was easy, but not interesting. He was already interested in social and economic
history, but the course was still largely based in political and institutional history in
the context of a factual and positivist history. In 1923, aged twenty-one, Fernand
Braudel finished his bachelor degree in History writing a dissertation on “Philip II of
Spain's Mediterranean policy period" (西班牙菲利普二世時期的地中海政策), in order
to discuss the Mediterranean situation of the then so-called King Philip II Age. 12
After passed the national examinations for history teachers, he was allocated to
Algeria (a French colony at that time), North Africa, as a secondary school teacher.
In 1923, at the age of twenty-one, he traveled to his first post as a history teacher, at
the grammar school of Constantine in Algeria, and here he saw the Mediterranean
for the first time. During this time, he was really interested in teaching History.

12
http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/history/historian/Fernand_Braudel.html

12
However, most of the history topics he taught were still collections of past political
events and bigwig biographies. In 1928, his first article, "Spanish in North Africa",
followed this kind of traditional historiography orientations. An Orthodox, factual and
political History was considered the leading model of both History research and
teaching, and Braudel matched the dominant wave. Nevertheless, his true
intellectual formation began here in Algeria: Braudel turned from studying the past of
Lorraine (which he came to think was too full of national problems) to that of Spain,
and he began to contemplate a traditional doctoral thesis in History on the
Mediterranean policy of Philip II between 1559 and 1574; by 1927 he was publishing
reviews of books on Spanish history. But he was also fascinated by the new history
of Lucien Febvre, based on the science of human geography, as exemplified in a
book written in 1913 but not published until 1922, La Terre et l'évolution humaine,
translated as A Geographical Introduction to History (London, 1932). Braudel read
this book in 1924. As usual his approach was cautious: it was three years before he
began to write to Febvre, and their close personal friendship did not begin for
another ten years. Meanwhile, in his first reply to Braudel, Febvre had planted a
serious doubt about Braudel's subject of doctoral research:

Philip II and the Mediterranean, a good subject. But why not the
Mediterranean and Philip II? A much larger subject. For between
these two protagonists, Philip and the middle sea, the division is not
equal. 13

Braudel was a successful schoolteacher and became known as an expert in

his chosen area. In 1932 he returned to Paris and was nominated to a series of more
and more prestigious lycées; in 1933 he married one of his earliest pupils from
Algiers. Then he made a decision that was to change his life: in 1935 he accepted
the offer of a five-year position to the new university being established with French
help at São Paulo, in Brazil (the famous USP, nowadays the largest university in
South America). It was a golden chance for him and for others of his generation who
had not followed the easy road to break into French academic life; at least one of his
contemporaries and friends in that enterprise became equally famous, the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

13
http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/history/historian/Fernand_Braudel.html

13
"It was in Brazil that I became intelligent," wrote later Braudel. 14 He managed to rent
a large mansion, complete with a Chevrolet and an Italian chauffeur, from someone
who conveniently spent the period of the university terms in Europe. Each winter
Braudel returned to Europe and worked in the archives of the great Mediterranean
trading cities, such as Venice and Dubrovnik. He was an innovative researcher in
two respects, conceptual and practical. He made the move from government
archives to commercial archives, and by chance he invented the microfilm, which he
used in order to copy two or three thousand documents a day, to be read during the
university year in Brazil:

“I bought this machine in Algiers: it belonged to an American

cameraman and was used to make rough images of scenes for
films. On it you had a button that allowed you to take one photo at a
time, or you pressed it and you took the whole shoot at once. When
I was offered it, I said to the cameraman, "Photograph me that: if I
can read it, I'll buy it." He made me a magnificent photo. And that's
how I made kilometers of microfilms. It worked so well that when I
was in Brazil I could spend whole days reading documents.” 15

In 1936, during the long voyage back to Brazil in a cargo boat, he told his wife
that he had decided to make the Mediterranean the centre of his research. A year
later he was offered and accepted a post with a much lower salary at the main
research centre in Paris, the École Pratique des Hautes Études, in one of the two
non-scientific sections, the IVe Section (historical and philological sciences). Next
year, by chance the boat on which he and his wife traveled home from Brazil in 1937
was carrying Lucien Febvre back from a lecture tour in Buenos Aires, and during the
two-week voyage they became close friends. Febvre, then aged sixty and a
professor at the Collège de France, had been one of the two young professors at
Strasbourg who founded the polemical journal Annales in 1929. The journal sought
to create a new and more open approach to history in a provocatively colloquial style,
an approach defined mostly by its search for "a larger and a more human history"
(Marc Bloch), by its denial of all historical barriers and by its rejection of the
traditional history of politics and government in favor of a deeper analysis of social

14
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/braudel/
15
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/braudel/

14
and economic forces. From this time on Febvre became Braudel's friend, intellectual
adviser and confidant.
When the II World War began, Braudel was mobilized in the artillery branch
and stationed on the frontier in Alsace; he saw no fighting, but he was forced to
surrender after the Germans encircled the French army. Despite the armistice, in
1940 he was imprisoned at Mainz, where he remained until 1942. Then he was
denounced by fellow officers as being a supporter of De Gaulle rather than Pétain,
Braudel was sent to a special "discipline camp" for "enemies of Germany" at Lübeck.
He remained there until 1945. He was reasonably happy amid all sorts of
"dissidents", partisans of De Gaulle, French Jewish officers, sixty-seven French
priests of all descriptions, escapees, "all the best types in the French army," together
with English airmen and Dutch, Swedish and Polish officers. He only missed the
German books that he could find in the municipal library of Mainz. It was during
these five years of captivity that Braudel wrote the first draft of his monumental
work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.
Assisted by a few books, but using mainly his prodigious memory of his pre-war
researches, he constructed a work that combined a vast chronological and historical
sweep with a mass of minute details, covering the entire Mediterranean world from
the Renaissance to the seventeenth century. This immense intellectual achievement
was written in exercise books on a small plank in a room shared with twenty
prisoners. At intervals parcels of the manuscript would arrive in Paris for criticism by
Febvre; by the end of the war the work was finished, only to be rewritten at the rate
of thirty to fifty pages a day until it was finally presented in 1947 as a doctoral thesis
of 1,160 pages. 16
The transformation of Braudel's thought in captivity remains a mystery,
although recent publications of writings from this period offer some insights. In one
sense The Mediterranean was, as he said, "a work of contemplation," his escape
into a world that he could control and whose detailed realities he could believe in
with greater ease than the artificial world of prison life. In 1941 he wrote a rare letter
from Mainz to his wife (who was living in Algeria): "As always I am reading, writing,
working. I have decided to expand my work to the period from 1450 to 1650: one
must think big, otherwise what the point of history is?" In the two camps he gave

16
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/braudel/

15
miniature university lectures to his fellow prisoners. Notebooks containing the text of
some of these lectures have been discovered and were published in 1997. They
show that the reflective experience of prison was crucial to his historical thought, for
in these lectures Braudel sets out virtually all the great themes that he presented
after the war.
Shortly before the presentation and public defense of his thesis, Braudel had
been passed over as Professor of History at the Sorbonne in favor of a more
conventional historian. At his rival's viva voce examination, he sought to justify the
choice, telling Braudel: "You are a geographer; allow me to be the historian." In
retrospect it is clear that this moment marked a turning point in the intellectual history
of France: over the next thirty years the Sorbonne stagnated as a conservative
backwater, while outside the university system Braudel proceeded to construct his
great empire of "the human sciences," and to open a series of vistas that could
perhaps never have found their place within a more conventional university
atmosphere, where orthodoxy in teaching was valued above originality of
ideas. Braudel made his reputation with The Mediterranean, which was published in
1949; a second revised and reorganized edition was published in 1966, in
preparation for the American edition of 1973. With this new edition Braudel became
the best-known historian in the world. A new generation of historians worldwide was
brought up to believe in the words of its preface: the old history of events was indeed
dead, "the action of a few princes and rich men, the trivia of the past, bearing little
relation to the slow and powerful march of history (…) those statesmen were, despite
their illusions, more acted upon than actors." 17
In 1949, Braudel substituted Lucien Febvre as Modern History Professor at
the glorious College de France. Since 1946, Braudel became the chief-editor of the
“Annales”. Meanwhile, in 1947, a new section of the École Pratique des Hautes
Études had been formed (with the help of money from the Rockefeller Foundation):
the famous VIe Section in social sciences, with Febvre as its president and Braudel
as his assistant. In 1949 Braudel received the immensely powerful position of
president of the agrégation in history, the general qualifying examination for teaching
in secondary schools. His reforms were resisted by the conservatives, but they could
not dislodge him until 1955. The record of what he sought to achieve is contained in

17
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/braudel/

16
his little textbook for teachers called Grammar of Civilizations (written between 1962
and 1963, republished in 1987, and translated in English as “History of
Civilizations”), designed to introduce contemporary history and world history to the
school curriculum. 18 History was divided into six civilizations – Western, Soviet,
Muslim, the Far East, southeast Asia, and black Africa, all of course of relevance to a
France still, at least in memory, committed to its status as a colonial power. Braudel's
attempts at reform were destroyed by an unholy alliance of right and left, for he was
one of the few French intellectuals who belonged to neither camp. He was therefore
hated by Georges Pompidou, who defended the unimportance of all history apart
from the history of one's own country and who irrationally regarded Braudel as
responsible for the events of 1968. At the same time Braudel was denounced by
orthodox communists as "a willing slave of American imperialism." In 1956, when
Febvre died, Braudel completely managed all the affairs of the journal and shifted its
name to ‘Annales. Economies, Societes et Civilizations’. Along the 1950’s, Braudel
became famous and won a great reputation as a new referential historian worldwide.
A world recognition leading in May, 1977, to creation at the State University of New
York, of the ‘Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical
Systems, and Civilizations’ leaded by Immanuel Walerstein. 19

The literature review of Fernand Braudel prolix writings must stress four main
books which are worldwide well known: ‘The Mediterranean and the Meditarranean
World in the Age of Philipp II”, “Civilization and Capitalism”, “History of Civilizations”,
and the unfinished “The identity of France”. 20 Albeit these changes in the English
translations, these referential books must be add up by “History and Social
Sciences”, nowadays almost forgotten, but still the most theoretical Braudel
publication framing that important and complex debate with the anthropological
structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. 21
In the past thirty years, cultural exchanges between China and France, and
the modernization of the Contemporary Chinese historiography invited some few
Chinese historians to study the French Annales School and to meet Fernand Braudel

18
BRAUDEL, Fernand (1993). History of Civilizations. New York: Penguin Books.
19
http://www2.binghamton.edu/fbc/scholarly-acitvities/nwslt-34.pdf
20
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernand_Braudel.
21
BRAUDEL, Fernand. History and the Social Sciences: The Long Duration. In:
http://abs.sagepub.com/content/3/6/3.abstract.

17
main works, namely the three volumes master-piece known in English as ‘Civilization
and Capitalism’. In 1978, seven years prior to Braudel’s death, Zhang Zhilain was the
first Chinese historian to write an article with an “Introduction of French Annales”.
Later, in 1986, Zhang wrote an essay on “The Historic Methods of Fernand Braudel”,
received with applauses in several Chinese universities and research centers on
contemporary history subjects. These two essays were then included in “From Gaul
to De Gaulle”, written by Zhang for the SDX Joint Publishing Company, in 1988. Yao
Meng, another history scholar in China, presented an article on “the mainstream of
contemporary history and the evolution of the French School” in “The World History”
in 1986, quoting and discussing Braudel’s legacy. Two years later, in 1988, the same
scholar wrote the book “French contemporary history seen from the New History",
edited by Joint Publishing (Hong Kong) Company, largely based on his previous
article. At the mean while, Yao Meng translated Jacques Le Goff well known book on
“new historians”, edited by Shanghai Translation Publishing House, in 1987,
therefore presenting a chapter on Fernand Braudel to the Chinese public.
In the 1990’s through the increasing of the Reform policies and the new
Chinese open-up process to the world, some of the most important titles of Fernand
Braudel were translated in Chinese. “Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century”
was translated in three volumes by SDX Joint Publishing Company, in 1993;
‘L'identité de la France’ was translated by Beijing Commercial Press, in 1994; “The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II”, in two volumes,
was published by Beijing Commercial Press, in 1996, editing also Braudel’s “Ecrits
Sur Le Capitalisme“( 資 本 主 義 論 叢 ), which included some important debates like
“History & Social Science”, the referred polemic that our great historian had with the
most important 20th century French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Along with
the Chinese translations of these titles, some historians in Chinese academic
institutions became in the last years much more aware of the key contribution of
Fernand Braudel for a new global history.
In general, the Chinese historians’ acknowledgment of Braudel historiography
is mainly cored on the identification of his systemic ideas and theories. First, “The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the Age of Philippe II”, the book that
made Braudel won his world reputation, is very well known in China, being reprinted
for the Chinese collection of foreign classics along with works of Marx, Voltaire,
Adam Smith and many others. Normally, Chinese historians appreciate in this book

18
the linkages between geography and history, as well as the balance between
civilization and economies. At the same time, some Chinese new scholars on the
fields of History and Social Sciences are sympathetic with Braudel orientation of the
‘Annales’, when he reminded his collaborators since 1957 the principles of the
leading academic journal: “No Religion, No Anti-Religion, No Marxism, No Anti-
Marxism (…) but we should be fair to study history and to achieve to new
conclusions.” 22 But it was through the Chinese translation of ‘Civilization and
Capitalism’ that Chinese historians became more involved with the key ‘long durée’
Braudelian theory. Let us remember again that in the three volumes of this master-
piece of contemporary historiography, Braudel was trying to understand the
permanencies and changes of the ‘time of civilizations’ at a world scale, from 15th to
18th centuries, soughing to explain the global success of European capitalism. The
time of civilizations was in Braudel triptych the time of geography, landscapes and
human long term domestication of spaces changed in human territories, sets of
societies and economies. This type of historical time was almost immobile,
generating processes of changing in tradition. Changes in civilizations are very slow
in contrast with the vivid changes in events, individual lives or those emergent
changes coming from wars and plagues. Even these kinds of dramatic and profound
events can be accommodated by the large time of civilizations.
There is, therefore, this leading characteristic in Braudel’s historiography: the
combination of time and space in large scales. Capitalism worldwide, and the history
of capitalism in China, were researched and discussed by Braudel from this key
dialectic system.

22
《年鑑學派管窺》，賴建誠著，左岸文化出版社，第 139-141 頁，2003 年。

19
 3. CAPITALISM: A EUROPEAN MODERN INVENTION

In Braudel’s key book Civilization and Capitalism, the three volumes are largely
committed to explain from a long term perspective the background of successful
development of Capitalism in Europe. Fernand Braudel explains that the European
economic historical turn goes back to the 15th century, especially after 1450, when
the European economy (in fact the European world-economy) developed rapidly,
generating a large set of very rich trade cities. However, the price of agricultural
products did not rise up but fall down, and the rural people discovered the trade
cities as a new social opportunity. Later, in 16th century, the expansion of an Atlantic
economy and the appearance of international trade fairs in central and south Europe
encouraged furthermore the economic development. There were, in fact, many trade
fairs held in different countries, such as: Antwerp Trade Fair in Belgium, Frankfurt
Trade Fair in Germany, and Lyon Trade Fair in France along with very active fairs in
Spain and Italy already linked to maritime trade in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean
areas. 23 Summarizing, in the 17th century, business activities were broken away from
a divided Mediterranean and expanded to Atlantic Ocean and even to the Asian
seas. Meanwhile, trade fairs were on the downgrade through an intensive the
emergence of trade urbanization multiplying countless shops and commercial
enterprises all over Western Europe. Continuous supplies of shops, trade enterprises
and commercial companies substituted the late medieval tradition of trade fairs.
Shops sprang up like the mushrooms and built a dense sales network. The irruption
of new trade professions and spaces spread the social and economic influence of a
new bourgeoisie which, in North Europe, mainly in the Netherlands, England, France

23
《資本主義的動力》(la Dynamique du Capitalisme)，布羅代爾著，第 14-19 頁，1994 年
。

20
and parts of Germany were more and more committed to a capitalist dynamic. The
well know example of the famous Dutch Company, the V.O.C., created in 1602,
stood up as a paradigm of a shared capitalist society aiming to control the huge
profits of the Asian trade and the intermediary role of European colonial powers able
to spread the European world economy to a planetary scale.
Nevertheless, in Braudel Civilization and Capitalism global perspective, the
three European centuries between 15th and 17th century, were not able to change the
structures of an ‘Old Regime’ system. The discontinuity takes off in the 18th century
with the long term process of European industrialization. For the global perspective
raised in the three volumes of Civilization and Capitalism, Braudel presents the
process of industrialization as the only true important discontinuity in human history:
industrialization changed each one and all human civilizations. Therefore, in 18th
century, the take off of the process of industrialization generated a rapid economic
development, shifting the socio-economic structures, trade and finances. Stock
Exchanges appeared and expanded the area of the global trading activities and its
companies. Money and credit easily flowed to other places, shifting the structures of
global trade. Continuously increasing of consumption, primary markets and shops in
Western European cities were more dynamic than before, and gradually spread to
the rural area. 24 Industrialization demanded a new economic and financial global
capitalism, a long term process of urbanization and a new world economic order
grounded in the military and political superiority of European colonialism leaded by
the British Empire.
Fernand Braudel highlights in Civilization and Capitalism that the European
structural economic system from 15th to 17th century was not basically different from
other regions of the world or other competitive world-economies. In fact, in India, in
China, in Japan, in the Ottoman Empire or even in other Islamic societies markets
appeared everywhere and vivid economies grounded in centuries of capital
accumulation and regional trade were in place. For instance, in India, we could
found in the modern period a market in each village. Moreover, trade fairs were
excellent in India because Indians combined the trade and temple fair in one, often
held near by a public shrine or sanctuary. This type of fairs existed also in Southeast

24
《資本主義的動力》(la Dynamique du Capitalisme)，布羅代爾著，第 14-19 頁，1994 年
。

21
Asia and several Muslim areas. In fact, compared with India, Islam regions held a
countless number of trade fairs. Some, as the trade fairs in Mecca were very
prosperous, and developed some instruments and exchange systems, such as
negotiable bills and cash. This was also the case of China offering until late 18th
century a dynamic commercial internal economy, spreading numerous fairs, markets
and exchange economic systems. Nonetheless, according to Braudel’s analysis in
Civilization and capitalism, these structures in several non-European societies
described a primary market and economic system. A primary market and economic
system still lacking of a clear global “market value”, and an individual capitalist
person as “a factor”. China in these processes was for Fernand Braudel a self-
efficiency country in the past. China was truly a huge economy entity, but built
around its primary economy.

THE EUROPEAN CAPITALIST DYNAMIC

Researching the traditional and structural factors that influenced economic

modern systems, factors like geography, population, agriculture, industry or internal
trade, Fernand Braudel doesn’t find a particular or singular European advantage.
The population was growing up rapidly in the world, wherever in Europe, in the
Islamic and even more in India, China, the Far East or Southeast Asia. Cities and
even harbor-trade-cities spread everywhere generating the most diverse processes
of urbanization around “trade-towns”, “Temple Cities”, “Fortresses”, “Factories” and
“Coastal Cities”. Although some of these cities, as Malacca or Canton, were
important trade platforms is impossible to foresee in them a capitalist dynamic. This
is an exclusive European.
According to Braudel finds in Civilization and Capitalism, demography,
economic and trade factors were not enough to sustain a capitalist development. In
the European Western towns more and more engaged with global trade, the social
dynamics were a key element to sustain the shift towards a new capitalism. The
feudal social hierarchy began disappearing with the socio-economic growth of

22
generations of traders, companies and commercial enterprises engaged in world
trade. These social groups became the social pillars of a world capitalist dynamic,
expanding the former family and locals businesses through the world by commercial
expansion, intermediation and colonial social power. Therefore, even in social terms,
the main European advantage is for Braudel the long distance trade, the long term
European economic and social process of embracing the planet as a unique market.
Nevertheless, each economic world stage had its own history, and Europe began to
conquer the world, at the same time to expand itself. Like civilizations, nations and
empires, the economic world was formed gradually.
Prior to the European industrialization, the different world-economies were
based on what Braudel defines both as the primary industry or pre-industries, a set
of manufacturing structures and markets that were very stiff and static, and therefore
unable to guide an economic system. Before the European industrialization, the
economic systems were controlled worldwide by rural structures and some
subsidiary pre-industries: on one side was the villages and farmers, living by self-
sufficient and without any connection with the outside; on the other side was
developing the capitalism and market economy, tried to spread out, forming and
showing the world that we live today. Hence, there were at least two worlds and two
strange lives between primary-pre-industries and modern capitalist economy; but
each of them was a cause and effect to each other. 25
Complex and unbounded traces of a fragmentary world economic history
spread into the different areas of the world until 18th century. Each economic world
region had a very long period of time, and in order to explain any regional economic
world achievement, different economic geographies should be separated in different
economic areas. This is the Braudelian logic of the world-economy concept: the
regions sharing the same economic structures can only be understood through a
compulsory research project merging its internal economies and its position in world
economy and trade. For example: although the Mediterranean can be divided in
many regions due to different countries, states, governments, cultures and societies,
it still constituted an entity with economic unity coming from its structural shared
economic systems and its position in world economic and trade exchanges. In fact,

25
《15 至 18 世紀的物質文明、經濟和資本主義》(Civilization & Capitalism: 15th-18th
Century.: the Limits of the Possible, volume II ) 布羅代爾著，第 528 頁，1999 年。

23
this entity started in late Middle Ages to be cored in the north Italian cities, but the
economies of Venice, Milan, Genova and Florence could not represent the whole
economy of the Mediterranean. A system of centers and peripheries organizes any
world-economy.
There is a pole, a polarization, a center in each world-economy region that is
always a dominant city placed as a back-up centre to support the daily business,
market and regional activities. In this centre, goods, capital, merchants, credits and
commercial letters often appeared. Some transshipment cities became the service
places to ground the financial centre. At that time many big cities needed the small
cities helping them to develop, thus there was a saying: “To sacrifice other cities,
than to maintain the high living level of the centre.” 26 One day, the centre city may be
changed. No matter what happened, this type of dominant city can be replaced.
Amsterdam replaced Antwerp in the 17th century; London replaced Amsterdam; and
New York, around 1929, surpassed London as the dominant center of the then
Western world-economy.
This morphology pattern can be applied to any world-economy area. In China,
explains Braudel, the Ming Dynasty gave up Nanjing as capital, although being
nearby the sea and able to be used to expand the Chinese overseas economic
influence. The capital shifted towards Beijing in 1421 underlining the internality of the
Chinese pre-industrial and pre-capitalist economic system. Since Beijing is a closed
inner city the capital change made China lose even the game of exchanges of in
world trade in the following future. Philip II of Spain made the same, establishing the
capital in Madrid, another inner city. After that, Spain lost the trade world which
brought up the success of Antwerp and Amsterdam. In the centre of any world-
economy there was only one pole, as long as this pole. If the center falls down, the
surrounded regions can be affected. When the Venetians lost their sovereignty, they
also lost the power to governing other overseas places. Then, in the mid 17th century,
since Portugal lost its enclaves in Southeast Asia, from Cochin to Malacca,
Amsterdam gradually established its dominant position as the center of the European
world-economy. After that, France lost in the colonial competition with United
Kingdom which started from 1762, losing its dominant positions in North America and

26
《15 至 18 世紀的物質文明、經濟和資本主義》(Civilization & Capitalism: 15th-18th
Century.: The Wheel of Commerce, volume III) 布羅代爾著，第 16 頁，1999 年

24
Canada, and this promoted London to be the center of the European world-economy
after 1815. And finally, United States became strong and the dominant Western
economic giant and New York also became the center after 1929.
Between 15th and 18th century, the traditional order of the European world-
economy was centered in a succession of dominant cities: Venice, Antwerp, Genoa,
Amsterdam and London. The first three did not implement measures of economic
domination of world trade but were only able to link regional European areas plus the
Mediterranean trade. Amsterdam and London were able to tackle a dominant
position in world trade through a set of new economic dynamics from the navigation
modern management to business expansion, credits, banks, finances and later
industrial expansion. From the 15th century onwards, the dominant cities in Europe
restricted and contact each other in varying degrees, and they became a power
centre in the world from 17th century on; at the same time, these later cities gradually
were more dominant than the former others influencing much more world economic
areas.
In the global history project presented in Civilization and Capitalism, Fernand
Braudel presents the formation of a new modern world system largely created by
world economic and trade new linkages founded by a variety of regions. These
different world regions were gathered by different world-economies, therefore
displaying there own internal economic unity but very different positions in the world
economy and trade from 15th to 18th century. Nevertheless, in this modern period
these different world-economies from Europe to Africa, from the Americas to
Southeast Asia or the Far East were already interconnected but at different economic
levels. There were at least three different types of situations or hierarchy linkages:
first, a small central region, mainly around Western Europe, cored in a dominant city
where was the most advanced capitalist dynamics aimed to embrace the entire
planet; second, some semi-peripheral areas, as Portugal, Spain or parts of Eastern
Europe, engaged in world trade connections but not able to benefit a centre or to
move clearly towards a fully capitalist dynamic; finally, the majority of the other world
regions were peripheral areas both in the margins of world trade flows or structured
around internal economies, as China or Russia in the modern times. In these
peripheral regions, internal forms of economic systems subsisted through the support
of heavy centralized states and feudal resiliencies. This hierarchy of the modern world
system was adopted by Fernand Braudel directly from the famous Immanuel

25
Wallerstein book on the “Modern World System”, although Wallerstein preferred to
present China and Russia not as peripheries but as external areas of the world
system. 27 To determine the position of different world-economies in this hierarchy of
centers and peripheries, Braudel suggested that was not enough to research and
compare economic systems still widely similar, but mainly their different positions
regarding the domination of world trade and economic exchanges at a global scale.
Nevertheless, as Braudel rightly points out, the economic activities either internal or
external are not isolated from social, cultural and political systems.
From the 15th to 18th century, market economies expanded rapidly worldwide,
but the integration of a key market value as the main dynamic element of a world-
economy seems a unique European process. In fact, in Modern Europe the changing
of market values led to a chain of the changing prices generating the 16th century
famous “price revolution”. The European maritime and trade expansion was also
able to observe, study and influence other markets, discovering that prices were
changing in some places through the chain of precious metals markets and prices,
connecting the silver production and trade in South America and Japan to China and
the Indian Ocean economies.
Fernand Braudel rightly suggests the substantive connection and network
links between trade and transport. 28 The daily exchange markets at local levels
existed worldwide organizing a “first form” of trade economy but far from requesting
impressive transportation systems. This type of trading was periodical, predictable,
and opened almost to everybody. And there was without any unknown factors to
affect the exchange, it was “transparent”, so that everybody knew the progress of the
exchanges. A town market was a good example of this s pattern. It links the
producers, farmers, craftsmen, buyers and sellers together. Sometimes, there were
two to three middlemen to hoard the goods in order to control the prices and the
market, for earning more profit. In consequence, a “second kind of form” would

27
WALLERSTEIN, Immanuel(1974). The Modern World-System, vol. I: Capitalist Agriculture
and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New
York/London: Academic Press; (1980) The Modern World-System, vol. II: Mercantilism and
the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750. New York: Academic Press;
(1989) The Modern World-System, vol. III: The Second Great Expansion of the Capitalist
World-Economy, 1730-1840's. San Diego: Academic Press. V.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Wallerstein.

28
《資本主義的動力》(la Dynamique du Capitalisme)，布羅代爾著，第 30 頁，1994 年。

26
replace the first one, creating urban markets linking and specializing chains of
production and demand. 29 But even in these cases, the required systems of
transportation were mainly internal and “natural” taking advantages from
hydrographic systems as was the case for centuries in Chinese economic history. In
contrast, the spread of a capitalist dynamic in modern Western Europe was not
paved by internal transportation advantages, largely similar to other world-economies
as in China or India, but by a continuous set of external maritime transportation
systems. The superiority of Iberian navigation worldwide from 15th century onwards
was adopted in the 17th century by the other European colonial powers, being the
ships and maritime equipments of Holland, England and France in the 17th century
already much more fast, cheap and sage than any other non-European maritime
transportation system. In this perspective, the European maritime powers were able
to offer intermediation services to the world trade cheaper, faster and safer than any
continental and caravan system. If we compare, for example, the European maritime
trade of Chinese silks, porcelains and other products with the traditional continental
Silk Road system through central Asia, the European economic and transportation
advantages were paramount.
Nevertheless, Braudel doesn’t explain the world economic success of a
modern European world-economy simply through a causal link between economy
and transportation. If this was the main causal link, the Portuguese naval superiority
would be able to build up a capitalist dynamic that cannot be identified in the Iberian
economies in the 16th century. Portugal and Spain build up a maritime transportation
economy with a large global impact, but this process didn’t created any kind of social
dynamic or social groups engaged in modern capitalist investments. Almost until 18th
century, the Iberian maritime expansion and trade was largely controlled by theirs
Crowns, privileging luxurious and apparatus investments in their court societies
rather than in the creation of capitalist companies, banks, investments and
enterprises. In fact, the Iberian maritime expansion in the 15th and 16th century was
largely sponsored by financial capital coming from the main Italian and German
banks.
A modern capitalist dynamic in Braudel Civilization and Capitalism theory
needs also an ongoing complicity between economy and society, between capitalist

29
《資本主義的動力》(la Dynamique du Capitalisme)，布羅代爾著，第 37 頁，1994 年。

27
and social new dynamics. The input and the participation of the society made the
existence of capitalism, since society is just like our breathing, surrounding and
affecting our daily lives. In all modern societies, from Europe to China, whatever their
scale and level, existed different social classes engaged in horizontal and vertical
forms of social and economic mobility. At the same time, the processes of economic
production, distribution and consumption created different wealth hierarchies widely
controlled by the civilizations and States’ systems of formal categorization and
control of their members, social groups and professional situations. These formal
categorization systems, as in modern China, were largely inherited from centuries of
civilization social and moral processes aiming to fix individuals and groups to
authorized and legalized social positions. In these cases, from feudal Europe to
China or the Indian castes’ system, a horizontal mobility was dominant and based
mainly in migration mobility. Vertical social mobility through social and economic
promotion was much rarer but starts spreading in the European societies and
economies with the development of several bourgeois groups engaged in world
trade. However, the social and political empowerment of these groups was clearly
different in the modern European world. Hostile to the very famous Max Weber
theory on the causal links between Protestantism and Capitalism, Fernand Braudel
researches the bourgeois empowerment as an economic and social long term
process; build up far from any religious dominant exceptionalism. For example,
England and London became a centre of the European world-economy after the
Glorious Revolution in 1688 creating a new gentry and integrating world trade and
capitalist groups in the State and Government processes. Something that the
Netherlands was trying to achieve in 17th century and the United States had
completely done in the second half of the 19th century. In these cases, we find strong
governments served by and increasing bureaucracy of civil officials, States able to
force their citizens to obey the laws, to afford increasing taxes’ systems when
necessary, but also able to protect the freedom of credit, commerce and world trade
and navigation. This is a process in which governments and new capitalist bourgeois
groups shared the power in order to participate and benefit from the world economic
activities. But once out of the centre, far from the successive central poles of
Amsterdam, London or later New York, there was a different socio-economic
dynamic. Governments were still engaged in controlling economic movements and
social mobility, using civilization and old moral values to reproduce arcane social

28
hierarchies as was the case in China. Peripheries and semi-peripheries of the
modern world system were still guiding economies through their old cultural,
ideological and state systems based in the traditional divine right of kings and
emperors guiding as shepherds individuals and groups imprisoned in traditional
hierarchies. At the same time, as Braudel rightly acknowledges it, most of the non-
European worlds became progressively European colonies. Their populations
became slaves, producers or cheap labor force of the European colonial trade and
industrialization revolution. European Metropolitan States were the masters of
these colonies. However, the European emigration to the colonies, a form of long
distance social mobility, was able to create an important social group of colonial
elites, including “mestizos”, largely grounded on world trade connections and
capitalist dynamics. 30
Nevertheless, Fernand Braudel seems particularly hostile to the classic
Marxist theory explaining exclusively modern European capitalism as the expression
of the modern bourgeoisie social and economic power. Contrary to the Marxist
causality, the European modern trade and commercial bourgeoisie was not always
and systematically investing in capitalism and even less mobilizing capital revenues
to fuel the European industrialization. There was a good example on the dominant
French bourgeois behavior in 16th and 17th century. The parents or grandparents of a
French gentleman got rich by business, but their grandchildren just inherited their
property from them. The gentlemen did not do businesses any more, they bought
and managed lands and tried to engage in processes of getting a noble status
through territorial power and marriage. These processes did existed also in other
South European countries, and in the case of Portugal the leading 20th century
Portuguese historian, Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, coined the concept of “knight-
trader” (cavaleiro-mercador) to emphasize the movement of transformation of traders
in a new modern nobility. 31 Therefore, the European modern bourgeoisie earned
their property from the following three sources: first, being usurers to loan money to

30
《15 至 18 世紀的物質文明、經濟和資本主義》(Civilization & Capitalism: 15th-18th
Century.: The Wheel of Commerce, volume III) 布羅代爾著，第 3 頁，1999 年。
31
GODINHO, Vitorino Magalhães. L´économie de l´empire Portugais aux XVe-XVIe
siècles (1958, 1969). Os descobrimentos e a economia mundial, 2 vols, 1963-1970 (2ª ed.
correcta e ampliada, 4 vols, 1982-1983). V.
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitorino_Magalh%C3%A3es_Godinho.

29
farmers and squires; second, being officials of the financial or judicial, and those
positions were negotiable and inheritable; third, except their earning, most of the
property came from their ancestors. Normally, these bourgeois did not want people
to know that they came from the merchant families and invested widely in inventing
genealogies of a nobility that they didn’t inherited but bought or married.
The European industrialization from 18th century onwards was not fueled by
this king of bourgeoisies; it was paved by different social bourgeois groups, a pre-
industrial bourgeoisie benefiting both from world trade, urbanization and pre-
industrialization. The European textile industry, for example, began to implement
capitalist pre-industrial dynamics since late 15th century. The major Italian
Renaissance towns engaged in world-trade were also able to implement the
“Putting-out System”, to gather, manage and centralize a lot of labors. Some manual
factories started to develop in European western cities along with rapid urbanization,
factors that made businessmen able to control all the economy pre-industrial
activities. When these pre-industrial activities mobilized the hinterland along with
world trade, some of the key pre-conditions for the European industrialization take-off
were reunited. One of the key factors of European industrialization came from the
exploiting system changes and exchanges. Since labors, exchanges and capitals
were enough in the urban centre of the European world-economy, economic
activities that can be done easily in the centre might not perform easily in the edge
regions. The labors were then attracted to the urban centre usually from the edge
regions. Wallenstein believed that the European modern world-economy was based
in the co-existence of a large variety “production methods”, while capitalism
progressed by the sacrifice of other “production methods”. 32
At the same time, political innovation happened in Modern Europe. The first
task of a modern country is to control the potential violent behaviors in order to make
people obey and to respond to external threats. But a second modern task arose in
Europe from late 15th century through the intervention at different levels of the
economy, which means to make most of the citizens able to have their own income
and to ensure the revenues and expenditures of the country, such as military
expenditure, royal family apparatus, taxation systems, customs structures, etc. Pre-

32
《15至18世紀的物質文明、經濟和資本主義》(Civilization & Capitalism: 15th-18th
Century.: The Wheel of Commerce, volume III) 布羅代爾著，第46頁，1999年。

30
modern societies all over the world were largely building around the goal of forcing
their populations to obey to the ruler, especially when countries were unstable or
engaged in internal colonization processes gathering new territories and ethnic
groups. Pre-modern China, Japan, Thailand or India were build up through this
power rules, dealing more brutally than Europe with social threats, therefore murder
became commonplace, and it was accustomed in public. In some Islam countries,
prisoners were usually executed without a hearing. Legal systems were largely a
codification of punishment and State monopoly of violence, being unable to integrate
in the pre-modern laws the complexities coming from new social and economic
dynamics as Europe started to do in the modern period. 33 The European invention of
modern capitalism was a complex process. It cannot be explained by a single social,
political and economic factor. Is a set, a march towards a new civilization, the
industrial civilization, through a long term process gathering market economy, social
changes, world trade and modern states and laws.

WHY DID CAPITALISM FAILLED TO APPEAR IN CHINA

BETWEEN 15TH-18TH CENTURIES?

In the historiography master-piece that is the three volumes of Fernand

Braudel Civilization and Capitalism the place of China modern history is important. In
the first volume, we can collect an impressive set of 61 references to Chinese
history: but only 16 in the second volume, and 19 in the third volume (V. Appendix).
This collection means that Braudel researched widely China as mainly a vivid
material civilization that lacked during the modern period to engage in world trade
(second volume), being in consequence unable to mobilize the key global demands
requiring a capitalist modern dynamic (third volume).
Braudel acknowledges in his research that the economic history of China,
from 15th to early 19th century, highlights a territorial space gathering a growing
population and a very active set of economic activities, agrarian, commercial and
industrial. Moreover, China had a vivid and strong market economy and many

33
《15 至 18 世紀的物質文明、經濟和資本主義》(Civilization & Capitalism: 15th-18th
Century.: The Wheel of Commerce, volume III) 布羅代爾著，第 451 頁，1999 年。

31
markets spreading from large urban spaces to small countryside villages. This
market economy was very active distributing countless volumes of primary
agricultural goods and large amounts of industrial productions, from silk to
porcelains, from furniture to equipments, from civil construction to textiles and
several other different growing economic activities. Internal trade was paramount,
industrial activities were already very developed, and the Chinese productions were
much more impressive that in all modern Europe together. However, this powerful
Chinese market economy didn’t build up anything close to a capitalist dynamic as
Europe was able to create in the modern period. China’s historical situation was a
paradigm that capitalism did not establish automatically from a market and trade
economic basis even when the market economy was very active and extensive as in
China until early 19th century.

Although being a critique of Max Weber famous theories on China stagnation

in the modern period, Braudel seems to agree that the main obstacle to a Chinese
move to a true capitalist dynamic was the State. 34 The Chinese bureaucracy class
was almost co-extensive to the main economic activities, controlling and surveying
productions and exchanges through the markets systems. The weight of the imperial
central State and its mandarin’s bureaucracy was almost impossible to break and
was normally able to recover after crisis, riots and mass rebellions. At that time, the
officials who studied the Chinese classic knowledge enjoyed a great prestige, no
groups or classes could be compared with it. These officials represented the law and
order, and the public moral; but not all of them were honest. Many officials,
especially those working in the ports, customs, fiscal and market systems were
always bribed by the merchants. Some officials were not ashamed to become rich by
the bribery. In European cities, such as Venice and Genova, the merchants were
highly respected by the society; nevertheless, it was the opposite state in China
where traders and merchants were filling the lower social and moral ranks of the
Confucian ideal society.
Summarizing Fernand Braudel arguments in Civilization and Capitalism three
volumes, the control over the economic activities, structures, movements and groups
was firmly handed by the imperial State which prevented the autonomous

34
WEBER, Max (1951). The Religion of China. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber.

32
development of a trade and industrial bourgeoisie moving towards an ongoing
capitalist dynamic. In fact, barriers to the creation of a national pre-capitalist
bourgeoisie came from the tight central state and bureaucracy socio-economic,
political and moral control. Moreover, the State centralization and bureaucratization
in the Ming and Qing dynasties was ground in an official imperial collection of moral
values and teachings, especially claiming a Confucian origin. And it gradually
became the traditional values system, imperial ideology and political regime of
China. Although Confucian moral values largely centered in the filial piety ethics
often adapted and fitted into different social local levels, it was able to generate a
unifying cultural, religious and imperial ideology. The state officials recruited through
the imperial examination system were formally the guardians of this imperial
ideology, having therefore the moral obligation to take the responsibility of working
for the public interests, public projects, cities security and management, and invasion
defense etc. All of these were formally, officially and morally the tasks of the State
and its bureaucratic bodies. In consequence, the imperial Confucian State was
obliged to protect its economy, especially the agricultural production, which was the
mainly revenue and basis of Chinese growing population. This protecting system, as
it was explained, covered in fact most of the economic activities, being responsible to
“protect” and control the loans to the farmers, the silk producers and enterprises, to
build the barns, to tax the population or to organize the internal trade and its spaces,
organizations and groups.
In parallel, Fernand Braudel acknowledges in Ming and Qing China a long
term institutionalized process of wealth concentration in the State, a kind of very
bizarre imperial capital concentration system, then consumed by the imperial court
apparatus and invested by the State in public works. According to Braudel
perspectives, the economic wealth was concentrated in the State and, in
consequence, became an obstacle to free capitalist movements, aiming mainly to
strengthen the power of the State. This was grounded in a set of State economic and
financial monopolies, including the imperial privilege of China to cast coins arbitrary,
although coins were forged and devaluated easily. The State currency control could
also issue the bank notes arbitrary. However, the bank notes holders were not able
to exchange it easily into real coins. Most of the businessmen, usurers and bills
holders relied on the taxes to gain their small incomes; and always were afraid that
others disclosed their property to the government, so that they were punished by the

33
heavy fiscal demands. In this financial system, only the State could accumulate the
wealth enough to provide most of the economic civil investments. In fact, China had
a strong, stable market economy; economic activities were very active; and shops
opened everywhere. Braudel states that the State supported the economy much
more than in modern Europe states; but the imperial State controlled everything,
including those that were extremely rich. In China, the land nearby the cities was
taxed heavily in order to eliminate any processes of social local oligarchies
domination opposed to the central State. Hence, in Ming and Qing China a capitalist
dynamic was impossible in political, social and economic terms, being the capital
accumulation processes supported, supervised and controlled by the State
bureaucracy which was vigilant enough to control private businessmen capital
wealth.
Although Braudel presents these Chinese economic, political and social
characteristics as a long term evolution of the Chinese unique imperial system, he
explains it very far from the Max Weber conceptualization of an immobile and
stagnant civilization. Fernand Braudel Civilization and Capitalism rightly asserts that,
looking back to the Chinese History from a long term perspective, the factors of
social change and dynamics were present, and usually every Dynasty always ended
by a large peasant revolt then followed by a huge war devastating the rural economy
at scales impossible to find in late medieval and modern Europe. After these revolts
ending up in large millions of deaths and huge economic losses, finally the new
dynastic power established a new government, and forced the old one to collapse
but following up the same political and ideological imperial Confucian principles.
When a large revolt broke out, the central State had to take some repressive
measures, but normally was not military and politically strong enough to pacify the
largest incidents. So the war expanded, affected the production and made a plenty of
displaced people. Thus, the contradiction between people and land gradually
increased again. At this moment, the new dynastic State implemented the suitable
measures, and the demographic and economic traditional system recovered quickly.
State stabilization lead up to a new virtuous cycle of population growth and land
redistribution. During this period, the population and land increased stably, so it can
be called the heyday of the dynasty. When the land was developed to physical limits,
the population increased continuously and exceeded the territorial limits of the

34
dynasty; an internal colonization process arose leading to the continental but not
overseas colonization process responsible for building up modern China.
Trying to understand the logic of these social rebellions and dynasty changes,
Braudel stresses the long term relationship between corruption, land acquisition and
dynasty decadence and failure. The central imperial Chinese State was not strong
enough to control all the rural areas, and endemic official corruption became a
systemic feature in the links between central State and local communities. Because
of the huge weight of local communities, at the beginning of the new dynasty, if the
emperor took more actions against local landlords and plutocrats, recruiting officials
among the peasants, the dynasty was more able to match local territories as was the
case in the dynastic changes during Tang, Ming and Qing dynasties. On the contrary,
if the new dynasty was build up exclusively through an alliance with local landlords
its life was much shorter. For example, the Emperor Guangwu of the Han, was
regarded as a generous emperor because he massacred a lot of local officials and
landlords when he implement the (“ 度 田 ”) Field measurements system. Zhu
Yuanzhang, a Song Emperor, also killed countless landlords cruelly, after he reached
the power.
Fernand Braudel regards these contradictions between central State and local
communities, landlord socio-economic might and economic central protection as an
important long term economic and social feature of Chinese history contributing to
explain the State control of economic productions, markets, groups and wealth. In
fact, under the traditional imperial system in China, the landlords’ privileges were
systematically restricted by law. The landlords were often able to use their strong
local power and leading socio-economic positions to annex the land illegally, and to
transfer their fiscal burdens to a heavily exploited pesantry. For instance, in Tang
Dynasty, after the implementation of “兩稅法”,(Tax system in Tang Dynasty) some
landlords used natural disasters negative impacts to acquire farmers’ land, however,
they signed private agreements rather than registered it officially. Hence, they got the
land, but the State taxes were borne to the peasants. When the farmers could no
longer afford to pay the taxes, they forced to become displaced and fuelled countless
local riots, some leading to large revolutions and civil wars. Therefore, the imperial
central order had to face continuously the landlords’ general power, trying to limit it
through economic control presented as protection of the peasants and land

35
resources. Normally this was achieved through new taxes burdens generating also
riots and large social rebellions. Dynasties changes came directly from these
dysfunctional long term processes but were not able to solve it in economic and
social terms. Braudel acknowledges that massive land acquisitions followed the last
dramatic years of each dynasty, but the landlords were able to gain with this process
leading to the old regime collapse. In consequence, some powerful landlords
sponsor and relied on the new dynastic regime, and some even became emperors or
influential statesman. In order to control the landlords’ social and economic power,
the Chinese imperial system relied on central fiscal and legal measures or in civil
war. The Chinese imperial State was not able in a long term perspective to sponsor
other socio-economic dominant groups or other sorts of socio-economic upper
classes as in the Ecuropean modern process of development of trade, industrial,
financial and national bourgeoisies.
In Chinese social and economic history, from 15th to early 19th century,
covering the two last dynasties, Ming and Qing, these problems had also an
important demography contest. The Chinese population increased continuously
during these centuries, and the capacity of land to support the population growth was
very limited. Large revolutions and civil wars had a clear demography impact, almost
a conjectural and provisional short term solution for the unbalance between
population and land resources. Some civil wars, as the Manchu-Qing dynasty
change, killed almost one third of the Chinese population, namely in the South, and
this temporarily broke up the vicious cycle of population and land. Moreover, these
revolutions and civil wars were also temporarily able to wipe out the landlords,
interrupting the ongoing conflict between their power and the peasants’ economic
burden. This is the Braudelian summary lesson of the dynasty cycle in the Chinese
History. Nevertheless, the great French historian explains that a quantitative
perspective on demography history is not enough. Social and economic history must
also take into account the quality and structure of population. During wars, epidemics
and other natural disasters, the surviving population could often get stronger abilities
to adapt to the new environment and to create new balances and diets between
population and resources. If some historical researches were able to highlight these
qualitative factors in the social and economic history of modern Europe, Braudel was
not able to gather studies and historical information for the case of China. In
consequence, the famous dynastic cycle theory still stands up.

36
THE NECESSARY AND DECISIVE COMPONENT OF MODERN CAPITALISM:
WORLD AND FOREIGN TRADE

The success of modern capitalism in Europe is cored in three associated pre-

conditions: (1) a market economy; (2) the complicity of social groups; and (3) a
leading position in world trade and economy. The first pre-condition did exist in the
economic history of China from 15th to early 19th century, but it is almost impossible
to find the other two. If these three pre-conditions are the factors leading to the
European modern capitalist dynamic, it is undeniable in Braudel long term
perspective the role of the third key factor: economic and trade circulation at a global
scale.
In China, maritime trade existed and was still important in the southern
regions, Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Guangzhou even after the Ming ban of foreign trade
and traders in mid-fifteenth century. Traders, smugglers and even pirates were active
in the South coastal areas of China, but their commercial movements were largely
non-official, albeit being widely tolerated. In fact, the Portuguese settlement in
Macao, around 1553-55, comes directly from this double situation of ban on foreign
trade and traditional commercial ties with external economies in Southeast Asia and
the Indian Ocean. Later, by monopolizing an official very controlled system of trade
between Europe and China, Guangzhou gradually became a trading centre in China.
In 1720, “公行” (business company for foreign in Canton), which was commissioned
by the Beijing central government, was formally established in Guangzhou. To some
“foreign firms” trading places where offered, but the imperial authorities didn’t regard
Guangzhou and its tolerated foreign trade presence as a Chinese investment in
maritime and external trade. Most of the maritime trade initiatives in the South
coastal areas and cities of China, like Fujian, were organized as private enterprises
carried on through the bribery of local mandarins and as an ongoing smuggle
system. Nevertheless, in 1638, after Japan implemented the isolationist policy,
Chinese businessmen from Fujian participated actively in the trading of copper and

37
silver in Japan. These examples could easily be multiplied, but they are examples
from the margins of a continental empire. They are examples merging local maritime
communities and the huge southern presence of those famous maritime Chinese,
“tanka”, living in boats in the coastal areas and not tolerated in the Chinese
continental territories of cities. These maritime populations spread in the South China
Sea and in Southeast Asia developing important commercial links with the mainland
production. Nevertheless, their impact in the internal large economic and social
structures of China is almost irrelevant. In spite of being engaged in very lucrative
trade activities, these maritime and overseas Chinese groups were unable to
sponsor any remote kind of capitalist dynamic in mainland economy. As we know,
their capitals and influences were used much more lately, after the reform policies,
from 1978 onwards, when the present-day take off of the new Chinese capitalism
mobilized systematically the wealth of the Chinese overseas and Diasporas from
Singapore to the United States.
Fernand Braudel remind us that even among these Chinese overseas and
maritime communities the Confucian ethics of filial piety and family leadership were
still dominant. In fact, the spirit and moral principles of Confucianism thinks the family
relationship as a base of society. It emphasizes the individual’s responsibility within
the family as more important than the other forms of social responsibility. In
traditional Chinese society shaped by the Confucian ethics of family and filial piety,
even if the son grew up, he was still obliged to obey and took care of his parents
when they were old, and also needed to date back to his ancestors, in order to
maintain and spread the family spirit. 35 At the same time, in Chinese traditional
society, trust in foreigners, in the others, was considered as a fault of responsibility,
especially in the self-sufficient farmers’ world of local communities framed by family
lineages. Farmers usually tried to do everything within the local family rather than
depending on their neighbors. They do not contact with others outside the local
community unless during the rental recollection period. In addition, complex division
of labor and professional different activities seldom appears in the local villages,
because peasants aimed to be self-sufficient. Actually, self-sufficiency was a social
ideal of the Chinese traditional peasantry and society. However, the system of
property rights and ownership was not set up clearly due to the complex links

35
《信任》(Trust)，法蘭西斯著，第88頁， 2005年。

38
between land, local lineages and families. This was a very complex social and
economic situation impacting directly on the state systems of taxation that were a
permanent serious problem in the relationship between central and provincial states
and local communities. Since the central and provincial states allocated the taxation
to local officials and authorized farmers, most of the local taxes arose from a
negotiated long term process with very few concrete bonds to the local economy and
production. In addition, peasants were enlisted in the imperial army by local officials
without any demographic or legal basis. People paid tax to the local officials on the
one hand; however, they did not gain any rights, obligations and help from the
central State. Therefore, the strong family local and community system was the only
social system that could protect the peasants from external constraints. Chinese
peasants in traditional imperial China could only trust in their family members rather
than the government, officials, and local authorities largely represented as foreigners
or corrupted. Furthermore, most of the Chinese peasants lived in very poor
conditions most of the time, so they could not help each other, relying only on their
own extensive family lineages to protect themselves.
Most of the textbooks and western scholarship on Chinese history explain the
social system as guided by the long term process of transforming Confucianism in
the leading imperial ideology, ethics and social norms. Although, according to
Braudel, it is difficult to explain the Chinese economic and social history, including
the paramount weight of peasantry, only from an exclusive Confucian ideology,
Confucianism paved the way for an official social system built up during 2500 years.
Let us remember that Confucianism was mainly a set of ethical principles centered in
the preservation of the social status quo through a permanent return to tradition,
family and lineage ancestors’ rites. This type of ethical philosophy did not rely on a
constitution or legal system, but relied on the continuous preservation of very fixed
social norms. These social norms’ can be divided in the mandatory set of rigid social
relationships as follow: the emperor domination of all his subjects, the rule of fathers
over their sons, the supremacy of the husband and the marginalization of the wife,
the empowerment of elder brothers and friends. Since Confucianism spread this
hierarchical system of the social norms and relationships, it considered the emperor
at the very top of the society, and immediately under his rule then there was a
complex group of scholar-officials consisting of a bureaucratic body of magistrates
and imperial administrators. This political structure was regarded not as a State, in

39
the Western classic sense, but as an “enormous family” in which the relationship
between the emperor and the subjects received the normative moral form of a father
ruling and protecting his children in the name of Heaven. The Chinese emperor
framed and explained by countless Confucian comments and scholars was the “Son
of Heaven” as well as the mega-father of all Chinese subjects.
The Confucian-imperial social ideology was widely grounded in the
development of the examination system that recruited the imperial bureaucracy,
magistrate, administrators and scholars. In the Ming dynasty the imperial
examination system was already formalized as a selection system based on talent
rather than on any socio-economic status, power or influences. In this “merocratic”
system, the future talents needed to pass a series of standard local, provincial and
central examinations centered in the memorization and commentary of the
Confucian classics. Nevertheless, due to the difficult conditions of examinations
preparation lasting decades of hard work, the main revenue sponsoring the
candidates to become imperial scholar-officials was the support of rich local
landlords. The very few able to pass the imperial examinations to became officials,
magistrates, administrators and scholars relied not on a State wage system, but on
benefits grounded on taxes and farm rentals. Therefore, the bureaucracy imperial
reproduction system through the imperial examinations gradually evolved towards a
long term socio-economic alliance between landlords and bureaucrats. In this
historical context, the place for traders and businessmen in the Confucian-imperial
social ideology was critical, send to the lower ranks of society. If somebody became
a nouveau rich suddenly, he hoped his son not to inherit his business, but to attend
the imperial examinations to become a scholar-official with dominance over local
land resources. Moreover, the businessmen, especially who became rich with the
businesses and trade, did not reinvest the money that they earned before in their
businesses or trade. They spent the money on the land, since the landlords’ position
was higher than businessmen in the Chinese traditional society. A re-capitalization
process based on business and trade profits to build up larger capitalist-type
situations didn’t exist in the official Chinese conceptions of society wealth.
Following Braudel research, the restraining commerce policies implemented
by the Ming were a logic consequence of the dominant social ideology, and the
business activities were restricted seriously by the State and its bureaucratic
apparatus. The imperial restrictions on trade and business were especially hard on

40
maritime commercial activities. The arrival or departure of vessels was closely
inspected by the local officials, and the external trade entering in Chinese markets
came more from bribery and officials corruption and less from free trade movements.
In fact, during the Ming Dynasty, all the Chinese cities were kept under strict
surveillance. The citizens were divided according to their socio-professional to live in
the different areas, and fenced off every night so that citizens from different social
groups did not contact with each other. Merchants were largely controlled and
heavily taxed, normally obliged to live in a very marginal zone and to invest their
capitals in countless schemes of bribing and trying to buy social protection from the
local mandarins. The Portuguese settlement in Macao displays innumerous
examples of these processes of corrupted relationships between traders and
imperial officials, junior and very senior.

THE FAILURE OF CAPITALISM DEVELOPMENT IN MODERN CHINA

The debate on the failure of capitalism development in China during the

period of European “invention” of modern capitalism received a key theory from Max
Weber books on Chinese religion, published in the late 1910’s, prior to Weber death.
Analyzing the general links between Chinese imperial politics, traditional social
system and religion, Weber explained the lack of capitalist dynamics during the Ming
and Qing periods through the contrast between European Protestantism and
Chinese Confucianism. The first feeding the European capitalism, while
Confucianism kept the Chinese society imprisoned to traditional and feudal values.
In one word, for Weber, the Chinese society was unable to move towards modern
capitalism not due to economic reason but for lack of a rationalist ethic, which had
developed in Western world for a long time. Although gathering the demographic and
economic pre-conditions for a capitalism development, imperial China did not
encourage capitalism as a social system based on new social norms and relations. A
paternalist and patrimonial society was dominant unable the development of new
socio-economic groups, the economic diversification of cities, the growth of a guild

41
system, the capitalization of the currency system, and above all a clear participation
in world trade markets and opportunities. In fact, in Ming and Qing China, the
autonomy of military and political city structures was very low. The main cities were
fiefs of the feudal landlords, so the political responsibilities did not fall on the public
domain. The city’s major institutions and organizations, such as members of the guild
cooperated with the officials to deal with the economic affairs of the city. Citizens did
not participate in urban politic, and that was monopolized by the bureaucracy. The
key role of bourgeois urbanization in Modern that was so important in the process of
spreading interconnected capitalist dynamics didn’t exist in imperial China until early
20th century.
The political, economic and social situation was even less dynamic in the
dominant rural world. The bureaucracy played an important role in the economic and
fiscal management of the land. Selected out through the imperial examinations
process held by the central State, the local officials didn’t have any restrictions of
social identity and family background, being in most of the cases alien to local
communities. Officials in the local government were designated by the central State,
recruited among the “generalists” to manage the country rather than among the
senior specialists engaged in provincial and central top positions. Because of the
vast territory of China, the rural governance needed cooperation with local powers
on the hands of rich landlords in order to maintain the national unity. Thus, “clan” and
lineage solidarities continued to play an important role appointing village to manage
local. When invaded by external officials, the whole village (or clan) would join and
fight against the invaders. The benefits of spontaneous rural economic and political
organization were to provide a stable social environment for the agricultural
production, but tit prevented most of the business and trade local development. In
this traditional Chinese rural world, it is very hard to see any kind of capital
accumulation able to sponsor capitalist market dynamics coming from trade and
industrial investments.
In the classic Max Weber interpretation of China, the main obstacle to modern
capitalism was moral as morals, protestant ethics, were in contrast the causal
explanation for the European invention of a capitalist new civilization. In ancient
China, knowledge was more important than economic wealth, but not “technology
knowledge” as the European world emphasized since the Renaissance. For
Confucianism, specialized and technique knowledge was always ignored. The

42
knowledge highlighted in ancient China mainly considered the internal character
accomplishment and services to the emperor, which meant the knowledge.
Moreover, the moral theory of Knowledge for Confucianism was widely divergent and
contrary to the competing ”return to nature” proposed by Taoism requiring an
important set of natural sciences and techniques. Furthermore, Confucianism
became enshrined in a set of canonic classics representing the official imperial
knowledge and the sources of State examinations. The Classics orthodox knowledge
despised secular and technical skills that were not suitable to make a perfect moral
character. It also despised businessmen and traders’ knowledge, techniques and
praxis since they did not directly participate in the production, but they earned profits
from commercial and financial activities generating social dynamics contrary to the
social Confucian norms and filial piety ethics.
In spite of convoking and revising Max Weber classic theories on China,
Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism criticizes the Weberian moral and rationalist
explanations. Fernand Braudel prefers to discuss the failure of capitalism in modern
China from the perspectives of economic and social history at a global scale. The
lessons of modern capitalism “invention” in Europe came from a historical set of
dynamic links between economy, society and world trade. Technologies, religious
reforms and moral values were largely subsidiary and even consequences of the
long term transformations on the relations between economy, society and global
trade. Western modern enterprises, as the famous Dutch V.O.C., created in 1602,
brought together capital, trade bourgeoisie technical knowledge, systems and
concepts of modern management, production, finances and commerce. Moreover,
as Braudel stresses it, the economic development of Japan in the past, as well as
the famous Asian Tigers like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Singapore had
benefited from this complex relationship in which there was innovation but also
imitation of Western capitalism. In these cases, as in the last decades fast economic
growth of China, the key engine seems to be world trade or globalization, the word
that everybody now uses and abuses.
In consequence, Braudel prefers to debate the failure of capitalism in modern
China by researching mainly the linkages between the structure of Chinese economy
and Capitalism dynamics. In China, as the great French historian repeatedly asserts,
the extension and variety of markets was very impressive in the past. Almost every
town or small village had its daily market allowing farmers to return their homes in

43
the same day. In Chinese towns, even small, there were different retail shops, usury
houses, snack and tea establishments and many other facilities. Each of them was
property of individual businessmen and their families. The large Chinese cities were
surrounded by medium and small towns, and the distance between them was
moderate, so that the towns were able to intermediate the supply of the necessary
agricultural foodstuff and goods to the huge growing urban areas. Albeit these
markets achievements and linkages, China lacked senior as specialized markets
such as commodity fairs or stock exchange markets already very organized in
Europe in the late middle Ages. The strict State control of trading only allowed the
existence of primary markets connecting the agricultural production to the urban
consumption. All the other economic activities were subsidiary and unable to build
up their own markets around trade, currencies, loans and external imports. 36
In these conditions, it is very difficult to find a moral or legal system in imperial
China organized to protect capitalist investments, markets and very simple capitalist
operations. It is hard to think about capitalism in Ming and Qing China where a legal
system to protect debts and contracts didn’t exist. Moreover, private property rights
were ignored within the imperial protection of the general property rights on land. 37
Protection of loans, interests, currency exchanges, capital investments and most of
the countless simple capitalist movements’ lack of legal definition and protection.
Actually, the legal structures, personal and decision were framed by the moral and
ethic Confucian-imperial ideology, rather than in positive law or jurisprudence,
therefore understanding law as the punishment of crimes and wrong characters. In
contrast, there were some ongoing central investments in the implementation of a
legal system for the taxation of land. As a result, there were plenty of small farmers
who were the base of the taxing system and military services, but the concentration
of wealth in the State increased the division of production in small fiscal zones, a
complex and diversified system that the bureaucracy was unable to systematize
through law. In consequence, the local officials were obliged to trust communities’
landlords and leaders to collect negotiated and sporadic taxes. These fiscal alliances
prevented any legal equalizing rights and legal systems that were built up very far
from any perception of individual property or economic rights. In this context, Braudel

36
《資本主義與二十一世紀》，黃仁宇著，第 24 頁， 2007 年
37
《西方世界的興起》(The rise of the western world )，道格拉斯‧諾斯/羅伯斯‧扥馬斯，第
125 頁，1988 年。

44
thinks rightly that the legal system in imperial China was not mainly a Weberian
problem of lack of rationality but a consequence of long term economic structures
and traditional division o labor in a society ignoring individualism and free capitalist
social dynamics.
The economic modern European evolution, needs and pressures didn’t exist
in Ming and Qing China. Economic needs and socio-demographic pressures were
completely diverse. Braudel recalls Adam Smith and his famous theory on the
wealth of the nations, a book that was extolling Chinese economy through the
relationship between population and agriculture. Adam Smith explained that there
are “two systems” to increase people’s wealth. One is the agricultural system,
another is the commercial one. He also stated that the commercial system is a
modern European creation, while the former was dominant in feudal and agrarian
societies as in imperial China. Building up from Smith classic political economy,
Braudel stresses that China was a continental country, society and economy
organized far from any maritime, overseas or colonial aims. The traditional Chinese
political economy emphasized agricultural production rather than allocation, and
therefore controlled internal trade and restricted external commerce for a long time.
The main political economic imperial goal aimed to “protect” Chinese self-sufficiency,
a condition of social order and State centralization.
In this context, the merchants in China were totally different from the
European entrepreneurs investing in a modern capitalism dynamic. During the last
Chinese dynasties, no matter how rich were the merchants, they were still were
dependent from the officials favors; they could not become a new social class both in
socio-economic or ideological terms. Social structures and groups were controlled by
an authoritarian political regime unable to integrate other socio-economic groups
than those related with land and allowed urban guilds of manufacturers and traders.
A trade or industrial bourgeoisie crossing these boundaries or moving freely across
the country and its frontiers was dangerous threat to the dominant social system and
its agricultural background. Confucius said: “Worry about the unfair wealth rather
than worry about the insufficient wealth; worry about the number of citizens rather
than worry about the stabilization of the country.” Commenting this sentence, the
famous Confucian poet, Du Fu, questioned: “How can we get an immense house in
order to satisfy the poor of the whole country.” An ideal society based on collective
order received the label of “Harmony” and became the pursuit of Confucianism-

45
Imperial ideology. There was not room available in imperial China for the bourgeois
capitalist individualism and personal success.

4. THE THEORY: SOURCES & PROBLEMS

The huge and durable influence of Fernand Braudel three volumes on

Civilization and Capitalism seems to lie not only in his paramount erudition, but much
more on the “simple” logic of the long term perspective. The first volume of the genial
triptych compares the material foundations of different civilizations worldwide, from
15th to 18th century. Food, transportations, housing, furniture and several other key
structures of daily life are compared, connected and contrasted between Europe,
Asia, Americas and the Islam societies. Braudel conclusion is as simple as complex:

46
civilizations were largely different, diverse and reproducing long term traditional
balances between population, geography and climatic constraints. A kind of almost
immobile history was attached to these material structures only surpassed by rare
luxurious and apparatus investments controlled by the higher ranks of these
societies, from Europe to India, from China to the American and African colonies. In
the third volume of Civilization and Capitalism, this immobile history is challenged by
a new historical process leading in Europe to a new civilization: industrialization. The
process of industrialization spread worldwide anchoring the supremacy of the
European world-economy and generating a process of civilizations’ primary
economic and material homogenization. What was different in the pre-industrial
different civilizations, the material foundations and culture, became mainly similar:
the same cars, the same flats, the same roads, the same airports, the same plains,
almost the same clothes and diets. The second volume of Civilization and
Capitalism, subtitled “The Wheels of Commerce”, bridges the first and second
volumes. It deals with the engine for the transformation of modern capitalism in a
world civilization: world trade. Simple, isn’t it?
Actually, the historical consequences and challenges of this theory are
oceanic. For example, Braudel presents the process of industrialization as the only
true discontinuity in the history of humankind. Civilizations are addressed as long
term processes of balance between populations and landscapes through the
material domestication of the space. Cultures, religions, morals or philosophies are
regarded as sub products of these long term processes of territorial domestication
and socio-economic organization. Although revising classic “culturalist” theories,
namely Max Weber writing on Chinese religion, Fernand Braudel was largely hostile
to cultural, religious and moral causalities, preferring the challenges of long term
perspectives on the economic and social history of the world. Therefore, in the core
of Civilization and Capitalism the reader finds a theory, again simple but intelligent,
to explain the world path and opportunities to ground the process of industrialization
and with it the success of modern capitalism. The theory is summarized at the end of
the second volume of Civilization and Capitalism trough an associated set of three
compulsory factors:

• The continuous existence of a vigorous and developing market economy

creates a sine qua non first condition that, being able to be found at the world

47
 scale between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, it is not sufficient for the
domination of the capitalist process. China is, for Braudel, the paradigmatic
example of how a capitalistic superstructure cannot be installed just from a
lively economy;

• (ii) It is necessary, therefore, a second indispensable condition to enjoy the

complicity of a society able to prepare the capitalistic action centuries in
advance, by favoring the longevity of the social-economic lineage and that
continuous accumulation of the superior social groups without which no
capitalistic dynamics is possible. Braudel research was not able to find this
operating social factor in imperial China;

• (iii) In addition, lastly, nothing would be truly possible without the special and
almost liberating action of the world market through the formation of a modern
world-economy. Europe was able between 15th and 18th century to conquer a
dominant position in the world trade and economic exchanges, while China
was completely out of this process, lacking of maritime expansion, external
trade and overseas colonies.

According to this very intelligent theory, in the case of China, the main
obstacle to the development of capitalism lies in the state, the cohesion of its
bureaucracy, on the very long duration of a system of centralizing and moralizing
state. Following the rigors of a Confucian moral with the instrumental use of culture,
ideology and religion, the State itself, comprising the mandarins of every level, is
placed at the service of a bureaucratic understanding of the common good. In effect,
the State of the great empire of the middle tried to control everything, from flooding
to agricultural production, from the administration of the cities to foreign commercial
threats, even trough an internal and external trade always closely monitored. A
system where accumulation was only permitted to the State and to the State’s
apparatus, exemplifying the distinction between “simple” economy and the
“complexity” of capitalism, China shows, between fifteenth and eighteenth centuries,
a solid market economy in busy local spaces, spread between teeming groups of
artisans and thousands of itinerating merchants, multiplying in a myriad of stores and

48
fairs. The first factor, an active market economy, did exist in China, but the other two
factors were completely alien to the imperial Chinese society and political economy.
Which are the sources for this very clear theory on the failure of capitalist
development in China in the modern period? Civilization and Capitalism subjects on
China are not originally researched from primary sources. In general, with the
exception of some primary documents used by Braudel to research Italian and
French economic and trade structures in the modern period, most of the three
volumes narratives, descriptions and explanations were build up gathering and
criticizing published historiography along with some key epochal printed sources,
cartographies and iconographies. China historical debates are also grounded on
secondary materials. Fernand Braudel highlighted its information on Chinese history
in the introduction to the first volume of Civilization and and Capitalism, and latter in
a booklet entitled Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, published for
English-speaking readers. 38 In the first volume’s introduction, Braudel is very brief,
stating that

for China I am grateful to Etienne Balazs, Jacques Gernet and Denys

Lombard. (BRAUDEL, Civilization and Capitalism, I, 26)

Balazs was an important Hungarian sinologist from which Braudel uses

largely his books on Chinese civilization and bureaucracy variations on a theme
(1964), and mainly Histoire et institutions de la Chine ancienne des origines au XIIe
siècle après J. C. (1967). 39 Jacques Gernet was the leading French historian of
China, and Braudel revisited, among other titles, his famous book Le Monde chinois
(1972), a huge editorial success in Europe. 40 Braudelian readings from Denys
Lombard are much more enigmatic. In fact, albeit trainded as a sinologist, Denys
Lombard became one of the most important historians of Indonesia and the only
Braudel’s disciple able to apply is theories, concepts and methods to the history of
Southeast Asia. However, the famous Lombard book on the history of Indonesia, Le
carrefour javanais. Essai d'histoire globale, was published the École des Hautes

38
BRAUDEL, Fernand (1982). Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism. London
& Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
39
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne_Bal%C3%A1zs.
40
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Gernet.

49
Études en Sciences Sociales after the death of Braudel, in 1990, and the great
French was not physically present to read a prolix and intelligent application of the
Braudelian methods build up around the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world
in the Age of Philippe II. 41
A more detailed research of Fernand Braudel main perspectives on Chinese
economic and social history specifies that his main concepts, interpretations and
leading theories were not based on that triple debt, but on other social sciences
suggestions. Paradoxically for someone as Braudel who was a prisoner in Nazi
Germany during the Second World War, an important source for his perspectives on
Chinese economic history came from a German geographer almost forgotten due to
his close support and work for the Third Reich: Walter Christaller. In fact, the
Chinese markets and political economy research discussed in the second volume of
Civilization and Capitalism, The Wheels of Commerce, came directly from Christaller
theory. Braudel uses also the sociology of Georges Gurvitch to analyse the
contradictions of the Chinese traditional social structure. The identification in China
of a clear lack of fixed capital, capitalist investments and processes of re-
capitalization were inspired by the theories of the economist Simon Kuznets, a
referential author for Braudel due to his long term explanations in economics. The
rest, comes from the unique Braudelian intelligence to bridge history and social
sciences exploring others’ scientific fields suggestions to build up his own impressive
conceptualization logic from a dominant long term approach to which the global is
not only the addition of national parts, but a system able to communicate, integrate
and stratify the different economic regions of the world. Global changes between
15th and 18th century were the key to understand the European economic and trade
supremacy later consolidated through the industrialization process.
It is not hard to find inaccuracies and critical problems in Fernand Braudel
perspectives on China in the context of the theory explained in Civilization and
Capitalism. The main critical point was probably the ‘allergy’ (as Braudel wrote it) of
the French great historian towards Max Weber theories. In fact, Braudel have very
little to say about ‘capitalist values’: industry, thrift, enterprise, discipline, rational
profit and so on. Yet, the historical contrast between what can be labelled ‘pro-
enterprise cultures’, such as 17th century Holland and Meiji Japan, and ‘anti-

41
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denys_Lombard.

50
enterprise cultures’, such as 16th and 17th century Spain and imperial China, is a
striking one. Nevertheless, these differences in ‘values’ were not relevant for Braudel
project of a history at a global scale. Can a theory on modern capitalism neglect
cultural values that seem relevant for those countries different economic histories?

5. CONCLUSION:
UPDATING FERNAND BRAUDEL AND CHINA

The conclusion could be a clear ‘yes’ to the last question. If we apply the
economic and trade global Braudelian engine to present day Chinese fast economic
capitalist growth and relevant presence in the process of globalization, the Chinese
success doesn’t seem basically cultural, but purely material, industrial, commercial
and economic. Nevertheless, to be fair to Braudel debates on Chinese history in the

51
modern period, one must take into account that Chinese civilization always attracted
the French historian who followed with interest the Chinese 1949 revolution, the
socialist process and the Cultural Revolution and its influences in French
intelligentsia and universities in the process leading to May 1968 famous riots and
turmoil. In fact, Braudel gathered a lot of important research questions about
Chinese civilization. The French historian rightly asked why did Ming Dynasty reject
(or miss) the chance to expand its powers and economy to the world after gained a
great success on launching a series of overseas expeditions? Before the Europeans,
Chinese had discovered the Cape of Good Hope, but neither Columbus nor Vasco
da Gama were Chinese. At the same time, Braudel was intrigued with other key
research question: why did Chinese innovate and keep the predominance of many
key technologies, such as metal smelting, printing and papermaking rather than
develop them at a global trade scale? In fact, these technologies became global
commercial and industrial goods through European modern trade and
industrialization. Braudel thought that the answer to these and similar research
questions didn’t come from complex theories on cultures, religions and ethics, as in
Max Weber famous theories. The questions could only be highlighted from a clear
global and long term perspective, addressing the main structures of Chinese
economy and society in a world modern context. Moreover, in late 1950s, Braudel
established the China Study Centre in the Advanced Practice Institute, in Paris, and
after his dead, in 1992, his wife, Paule Braudel, declared:

If Braudel was still alive, he would be very curious to study how

China treats modern capitalism. If Braudel’s ideas were correct,
China will reform capitalism by its own way. 42

There is a “own way” for Chinese capitalism development? Regardless the

paramount social, political and rights problems, China is not only developing very
fast, but become a key protagonist of the globalization process. Moreover, the
Chinese investments and trade in Africa and Latin America, as well as its growing
presence in the financial and economic markets of EU and EUA, are largely
sponsored and mobilizing an impressive body of State owned companies. It is,

42
BRAUDEL, Paule. “Les origines intellectuelles de Fernand Braudel : un témoignage ». in :
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Année 1992, Volume 47, Numéro 1, p. 237 – 244.

52
therefore, very difficult to present nowadays the Chinese very bureaucratic State as
an obstacle to capitalism development. In contrast, is the Chinese development
grounded in traditional and patriarchal values? Other than some investments in a
very general return to some vague Confucian ideas, the Chinese economic growth
seems basically material and industrial, rather than spiritual or ideological.
Everybody and everyone wants to become rich and to benefit from the opportunities
of a vivid capitalist market economy formerly served in a “socialist” framework and
now open up the path to a heavenly “harmonious society”, a cliché that doesn’t mean
ideologically nothing. Fernand Braudel general theory in “Civilization and Capitalism”
was probably right: it is the global, the world, world economy and trade the key
responsible for national fortunes and modern developments. China is the paradigm.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• BRAUDEL, Fernand. La Mediterranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque

de Philippe II (1947-1949). The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World
in the Age of Philip II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

• BRAUDEL, Fernand (1993). History of Civilizations. New York: Penguin Books.

• BRAUDEL, Fernand (1982). Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism.

London & Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

• BRAUDEL, Fernand (1985). Civilization and Capitalism, I. The Structures of

Everyday Life. The Limits of the Possible . London: William Collins Sons.) 《

53
 15至18世紀的物質文明、經濟和資本主義》(Civilization & Capitalism: 15th-
18th Century.: the Limits of the Possible, volume II ) 布羅代爾著，第528頁，
1999年。

• BRAUDEL, Fernand (1985). Civilization and Capitalism, II. The Wheels of

Commerce. London: William Collins Sons.) 《15至18世紀的物質文明、經濟和資本主
義》(Civilization & Capitalism: 15th-18th Century.: The Wheel of Commerce, volume
II) 布羅代爾著，第16頁，1999年

• BRAUDEL, Fernand (1985). Civilization and Capitalism, III. The Perspective of the
World. London: William Collins Sons.)

• BRAUDEL, Fernand. History and the Social Sciences: The Long Duration. In:
http://abs.sagepub.com/content/3/6/3.abstract.

• BRAUDEL, Fernand (1989). The Identity of France. New York: Harper & Row.

• BRAUDEL, Paule. “Les origines intellectuelles de Fernand Braudel : un

témoignage ». in : Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Année 1992, Volume 47,
Numéro 1, p. 237 – 244.

• BURKE, Peter (1990). The French Historical Revolution. The Annales School 1929-
1989. Cambridge: Polity Press.

• GODINHO, Vitorino Magalhães. L´économie de l´empire Portugais aux XVe-XVIe

siècles (1958, 1969). Os descobrimentos e a economia mundial, 2 vols, 1963-1970
(2ª ed. correcta e ampliada, 4 vols, 1982-1983).

• WALLERSTEIN, Immanuel (1974). The Modern World-System, vol. I: Capitalist

Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth
Century. New York/London: Academic Press; (1980) The Modern World-System, vol.
II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750.
New York: Academic Press; (1989) The Modern World-System, vol. III: The Second
Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730-1840's. San Diego:
Academic Press.

• WEBER, Max (1951). The Religion of China. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

54
 • 《資本主義的動力》(la Dynamique du Capitalisme)，布羅代爾著，第 14-19 頁，
1994 年。

• 《年鑑學派管窺》，賴建誠著，左岸文化出版社，第 139-141 頁，2003 年。

• 《信任》(Trust)，法蘭西斯著，第 88 頁， 2005 年。

• 《資本主義與二十一世紀》，黃仁宇著，第 24 頁， 2007 年

• 《西方世界的興起》(The rise of the western world )，道格拉斯‧諾斯/羅伯斯‧扥馬斯

，第 125 頁，1988 年。

• 《史學九章》，汪榮祖著，三聯出版社，第 65 頁，2006 年。

• 《世界歷史譯叢》，〈新史學的鬥士們〉Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie 著，

1980 年第 4 期 (北京)。
• 《年鑑學派管窺》，賴建誠著，左岸文化出版社，第 139-141 頁，2003 年。

• 《資本主義與二十一世紀》，黃仁宇著，第24頁， 2007年;《資本主義與二十
一世紀》，黃仁宇著，第514頁， 2007年

WEB RESOURCES

• Memory and the Mediterranean, retrieved at http://www.randomhouse.

com/knopf/authors/braudel

• http://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/20/books/books-of-the-times-braudel-monument-to-
a-love-affair-with-france.html

55
• http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/77993/Fernand-Braudel

• http://conservapedia.com/Fernand_Braudel

• http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/history/historian/Fernand_Braudel.html

• http://www2.binghamton.edu/fbc/scholarly-acitvities/nwslt-34.pdf

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernand_Braudel.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Wallerstein.

• http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitorino_Magalh%C3%A3es_Godinho.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne_Bal%C3%A1zs.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Gernet.

• http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denys_Lombard.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber.

56
 APPENDIX

REFERENCES TO CHINA
IN FERNAND BRAUDEL ‘CIVILIZATION AND CAPITALISM’

VOLUME I - THE STRUCTURES OF EVERYDAY LIFE.

The Limits of the Possible

CHINA: population, 33-4, 39-41, 44-7;

new crops in, 44;
internal migrations, 45;
marriage age in, 47;
living space in, 48;
natural disasters in, 49;
population density, 61, 64;
harvests in, 74;
famines, 76; and barbarian conquests, 94, 96-7; and colonial markets, 102;
decolonization of, 102;
diet in, 105-6;
wheat in, 108, 146;
poor in, Ill, 285;
rejects livestock, 120;

57
 rice in, 145-9, 151-5;
expansion, 152;
mountains unexploited, 153-5;
maize in, 167;
luxuries in, 184;
food and cookery in, 187-8, 200- 1;
meat-eating in, 199-201;
table manners in, 207;
ignores dairy products, 2ll;
lacks eggs, 213;
fish and fishing in, 214;
sugar cane in, 224, 226;
water supply in, 230;
beer in, 238, 248;
alcohol in, 248;
tea from, 249-55;
hot drinks in, 254-5; and opium, 261; tobacco in, 262, 264;
building materials in, 270- 3;
houses in, 280, 282, 285;
domestic heating in, 286, 290;
furniture in, 288-91;
dress in, 312-14;
textiles in, 325-7;
lack of soap in, 330;
coal in, 336, 368, 370;
labour and tools in, 338-9;
camels in, 343;
few horses in, 345-6, 348;
windmills in, 358;
timber in, 366;
technology in, 372;
iron manufacture in, 375-7;
gunpowder and arms in, 385-7, 396-7;
printing in, 397, 399, 40 1;
paper in, 399;
ships and navigation, 403, 406-7, 410- 12; 415;
roads in, 415 -16, 418;
travel to, 419-20;
inland water transport, 422, 429;
money and currency in, 440, 442- 3, 448, 45 1-7, 472;
and European trade deficit, 462;
towns in, 483, 486, 497, 500-1, 524-5, 540-7;
craftsmen in, 489;
urban fortifications in, 492, 494-5

VOLUME II - THE WHEELS OF COMMERCE

CHINA: shops, 61-2;

paper money, 113;
markets, 115, 117-20;

58
 fairs, 125, 130-2;
economic system, 136;
trade, 141-2, 404-5 , 582;
merchants, 153;
gold and silver, 198, 200, 203;
trade deficit, 219-21, 223;
opium war, 223;
peasant revolt, 254;
crafts, 303-4;
gold mining, 326-7;
coastal prosperity, 582;
non-development of capitalism, 585-8, 560;
mandarins, 595

V O L U M E III - THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE WORLD

CHINA, CHINESE: as world-economy, 25-6, 32, 266, 484;

capital cities, 32; and peripheral territories, 40- 1, 266;
empire, 54-5;
mandarins, 61;
silk, 218;
Dutch trade with, 218, 220, 222;
1740 uprising in Java, 221;
East India Company in, 222; and South American silver, 404;
trade with Russia, 444-5, 448, 454, 458-9;
relations with Russia, 461;
Ming revival, 485;
sea trade, 485-6;
precious metals in, 490;
capitalism thwarted, 520;
British trade with, 522;
in East Indies, 523-4, 529;
abandons long-distance expeditions, 528-9;
per capita income, 534;
paper money, 620

59