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本文译自 Marnie Hughes‑Warrington 所著 Fifty Key Thinkers on History（Routledge，2014 年第三版）一书中关于费尔南·布罗代尔的词条。
原书版权归作者及出版社所有。本译文为个人兴趣翻译，非官方授权版本，仅供学习、交流与研究之用，不作任何商业用途。
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布罗代尔（1902–1985）

费尔南·布罗代尔——近代早期欧洲史学家——常被描述为马克·布洛赫和吕西安·费弗尔所倡导的年鉴学派的继承者。这一观察部分正确，因为费弗尔鼓励布罗代尔将人文社会科学各领域的研究纳入其著作之中。但它也是一个局限性的描述，因为它几乎未能告诉我们布罗代尔著作中所展现的创新性，例如《菲利普二世时代的地中海与地中海世界》（1949年；修订版1966年；英译本《地中海与菲利普二世时代的地中海世界》，1972—1973年，下称《地中海》）——该书被誉为“我们这个时代的第一部历史著作”和一部“流浪汉式拉伯雷风格的杰作”。¹

布罗代尔于1902年8月24日出生于法国小村庄吕梅维尔-昂-奥尔努瓦。七岁时移居巴黎后，他就读于伏尔泰中学和索邦大学，并于1923年以历史学教师资格获得者的身份毕业。在阿尔及尔大学任教期间（1923—1932年），他发表了一篇关于十六世纪西班牙人在北非的论文，并着手撰写博士论文——该论文最初是对菲利普二世外交政策的研究。² 他后来回忆道，在非洲书写欧洲，从“对岸、颠倒地”看待地中海，对他后来关于各民族与其环境相互交织的历史观的形成产生了相当大的影响。³ 因此，阿尔及利亚被布罗代尔视为他通往《地中海》出版的二十五年旅程的起点。1932年至1935年间，他在巴黎的孔多塞中学、亨利四世中学以及巴西圣保罗大学任教。在从巴西返航的途中，布罗代尔与吕西安·费弗尔结为好友，后者向他讲述了自己在人文社会科学领域开展跨学科研究与合作的期望。

布罗代尔于1938年在高等研究应用学院任职，但随着第二次世界大战爆发，他被征召入伍，后被俘。在美因茨（1940—1942年）和吕贝克（1942—1945年）的战俘营中，布罗代尔将他关于菲利普二世政策的思想转变为一项目光远大的研究——关于菲利普统治时期的地中海。关于这项研究起源的叙述已经带上了一层传奇色彩，这在很大程度上也受到布罗代尔本人的鼓励。他声称：“正是在囚禁中，我写下了这部巨著，吕西安·费弗尔一本接一本地收到了我的练习簿。全靠我的记忆力，我才完成了这一杰作。“布罗代尔的成就是其记忆力和多年扎实研究的非凡产物。他后来声称，监狱是”一所好学校。它教会人耐心和宽容“。⁴ 但正如杰梅利所指出的，即使在他身处吕贝克那样困难的环境时，他仍能利用当地市立图书馆的藏书。此外，很难确定寄给吕西安·费弗尔的那些笔记究竟在何时做过修改：例如，序言中的增补是在被俘前还是被俘后所作的，并不清楚。这些疑问使得我们难以精确断定他何时形成了那三重时间观——这一观念后来成为他历史视野的标志性特征。⁵

由此产生的著作便是《地中海》——该书在1972年英译本问世之前已售出约73,000册，如今已有意大利语、西班牙语、匈牙利语、波兰语、葡萄牙语、塞尔维亚-克罗地亚语、希腊语、德语、荷兰语、日语和中文等译本。⁶ 布罗代尔的著作不仅在欧洲研究领域影响深远，也引发了对奥斯曼历史和现代伊斯兰历史本质的讨论，以及如何将撒哈拉等其他地理区域描述为历史之海的争论。⁷

1947年，布罗代尔与吕西安·费弗尔和夏尔·莫拉泽共同在高等研究应用学院创立了社会科学第六学部；两年后，他接替费弗尔成为法兰西公学院教授。直至去世，他一直主编战后的《年鉴》杂志，并出版了大量文章和著作，其中包括：《物质文明与资本主义，十五至十八世纪》（1967年，后作为《物质文明、经济和资本主义，十五至十八世纪》第1卷重印，3卷，1979年；英译本《资本主义与物质生活，1400—1800》，1973年；修订版《文明与资本主义，十五至十八世纪》，3卷，1981—1992年）；《论历史》（1969年；英译本《论历史》，1980年）；《物质文明的反思》（1977年）；以及《法兰西的特性》（1986—1990年，2卷；英译本《法兰西的特性》，1990—1992年）。伊曼纽尔·沃勒斯坦认为布罗代尔关于资本主义的著作启发了他研究世界历史中经济联系和不平等的“世界体系”方法。布罗代尔对“世界体系”历史更广泛的影响，还体现在宾汉姆顿大学经济、历史体系与文明研究中心以他的名字命名这一事实上。

在布罗代尔看来，传统所书写的历史照亮过去，就像萤火虫照亮黑夜一样：

我记得巴伊亚附近的一个夜晚，我被一场磷光萤火虫的烟火表演所包围；它们苍白的光亮了，又灭了，又再次闪烁，却始终未能以任何真正的光明刺破黑夜。事件也是如此；在它们的光亮之外，黑暗主宰一切。 （《1950年历史的处境》，载《论历史》，第10—11页）

历史提供了“闪光却没有照明；事实却没有照明”，因为史学家往往只关注事件、个体行为和短期发展，并假定每一个都可以被孤立地感知。历史因而被简化为“事件史”（histoire événementielle），尤其是政治事件史。放弃事件史的戏剧性和“令人喘不过气的急促”并非易事，但如果我们想更好地理解世界，就必须这样做。在布罗代尔看来，短期并非历史的中心；史学家只是把它当成了中心。相反，历史并没有中心。像其他结构主义者一样，他认为意义是关系性的而非实体性的：对象、事件和个体行为的意义不在于事物本身，而在于我们在它们之间所建构的关系。他写道：

在生活世界中，不存在完全自我封闭的个体；一切个体活动都植根于一种更为复杂的现实——一种社会学所称的“相互交织”的现实。 （同上，第11页）

这些关系的“结构”范围广泛，并且按照人们可能并未意识到的规则运作。

布罗代尔认为，把握结构需要拓宽和深化我们跨越时间、穿透时间的视野。也就是说，史学家不仅要考虑共存元素之间的关系（例如文化、地理、经济和政治发展），还要考虑不同时间段之间的关系（例如长期发展和短期发展）。当我们改变视野时，就再也无法维持时间是同质的这一虚构：“时间不以单一均匀的速度流动，而是以一千种不同的步伐行进，或快或慢，这些步伐几乎与编年史或传统历史的日常节奏毫无关系”（同上，第11页）。描绘出时间的各种步伐是不可能的，但布罗代尔在历史时间中辨识出三大类别：地理时间（长时段[la longue durée]：至少跨越一个世纪的时期）、社会时间和个体时间（事件史）。

这种三重时间观贯穿布罗代尔的所有著作，但在《地中海》中体现得最为清晰。《地中海》分为三个部分，对应时间的三种步伐。在第一部分“环境的作用”中，布罗代尔探讨了人与自然环境关系的历史——即地理历史学，或如罗伯特·梅休所认为的更恰当的称呼“地理史学”。⁸ 这是一种

几乎难以察觉其进程的历史——人与环境关系的历史，一切变化都缓慢的历史，不断重复、周而复始的历史。我不能忽视这几乎 timeless 的历史——人与无生命世界接触的故事，我也不能满足于传统历史著作中那种通常放在开头却无甚作用的地理导言——那些关于矿藏、农业类型和典型植物的描述，简要列举后再无提及，仿佛花朵并非每年春天都会重开，羊群并非每年都会迁徙，或者船只并非航行在一个随季节变化的真实海洋上。 （《地中海》，第1卷，第20页）

这一部分显然受到布罗代尔对维达尔·白兰士和阿尔贝·德芒戎地理学研究兴趣的影响，也受到他对该地区热爱的塑造（同上，第17页）。他的目标是向我们展示地理景观在历史中扮演着重要角色。例如，他声称平原上产生的观念很少能在山区扎根，因此在山区，“文明从未稳定”（同上，第36页）。

第二部分“集体命运与总体趋势”着眼于社会结构或“局势”（conjonctures，即不同同时发生现象之间的趋势或联系）的历史：一种关于经济体系、科学技术发展、政治制度、观念变迁、国家、社会、文明和战争形式中起作用的节奏和力量的历史（同上，第21页；另见“历史与社会科学：长时段”，载《论历史》，第30页）。例如，十五和十六世纪的经济增长时期有利于西班牙和土耳其大帝国的兴起（《地中海》，第2卷，第657—703页）。第三部分“事件、政治与人”

给予传统历史——一种可以说不是以人类为尺度，而是以个体的人为尺度的历史，即保罗·拉孔布和弗朗索瓦·西米昂所称的“事件史”（l’histoire événementielle）——以发声的机会：即事件的历史，表面的扰动，历史浪潮以强健之背承载的泡沫之巅。一种短暂、快速、紧张波动的时间，按其定义是极度敏感的；最轻微的震颤也会使其所有触角颤动。 （同上，第1卷，第21页）

在这一部分中，布罗代尔为我们提供了菲利普二世、唐·加西亚·德·托莱多和奥地利的唐·胡安等人物的生动肖像，以及十六世纪下半叶的战争与条约的记述。尽管布罗代尔并不想否定个体历史，但他担心它会夺走对地理和社会历史的关注。因此，他竭力阐明：虽然个体有时会引发变革，但更多时候他们是地理和社会结构的囚徒。“人创造历史，“他写道，“但历史也创造人”（《1950年历史的处境》，载《论历史》，第11页；另见“历史与社会科学：长时段”，《论历史》，第30页）。因此，布罗代尔对个体行为的兴趣，仅在于它们揭示了结构。他也抵制将任何个体或对象置于其著作中心的诱惑。即使是地中海本身也是支离破碎的：“它是一个复杂的海群；这些海被岛屿打断，被半岛截断，被错综复杂的海岸线环绕”（《地中海》，第1卷，第17页）。布罗代尔是一位空间思想家；他通过描述对象与人之间的关系网络来描绘世界。这种空间描绘方式在他第二部主要研究——三卷本《文明与资本主义，十五至十八世纪》（《日常生活的结构》、《商业之轮》和《世界的视野》）——中也发挥了作用。在《日常生活的结构》中，他认为前工业化欧洲经济的制约因素——“粮食供应不足、相对于资源而言人口过多或过少、劳动生产率低下，以及控制自然的进展仍然缓慢”——在十五至十八世纪之间几乎未曾改变（《日常生活的结构》，第27页）。第二卷《商业之轮》考察了经济趋势的各种形式（如市场、交换、合伙关系和纸币），第三卷《世界的视野》则追溯了资本主义的戏剧性崛起——从十五世纪的威尼斯，经安特卫普、热那亚和阿姆斯特丹，直到工业革命初期的英国。该著作还有两个突出的创新之处。第一，布罗代尔坚持认为，资本主义这一全球现象必须用全球性的术语来解释。例如，在描述宗教少数群体在国际贸易中的作用时，既包括了印度的帕西人，也包括了法国的胡格诺派（《商业之轮》，第165—167页）。此外，与亚洲、非洲和美洲相比，欧洲劳动力相对昂贵，这被视为刺激了与工业革命相关的机械发展。第二，正如沃勒斯坦所指出的，布罗代尔反转了大多数自由派和马克思主义者共有的资本主义观。在他们看来，资本主义涉及建立自由竞争市场，而布罗代尔则认为它涉及高度的垄断化（《商业之轮》，第412—428页）。此外，在自由派和马克思主义者将资本家视为经济专业化践行者的地方，布罗代尔将资本主义的成功归结为拒绝专业化（同上，第377—382页）。⁹

布罗代尔的历史视野要求对长时段内的广泛历史证据进行研究。但这也要求对多种历史研究和社会科学的方法与问题保持开放态度。然而，历史学与社会科学之间通常会彼此设限，并将各自的结论呈现为关于人类的完整视野（“历史与社会科学：长时段”，《论历史》，第25页；“社会科学的统一性与多样性”，《论历史》，第25—55页；“历史与社会学”，《论历史》，第64页）。此外，它们还将自己的方法和研究主题的选择视为不可改变的。在布罗代尔看来，这种筑起壁垒和永久基础的倾向是不幸的，因为它使我们无法理解现在和过去。对布罗代尔而言，研究过去显然使更大的自我理解成为可能。他写道：

在伦敦住一年，你不会了解多少英国，但你会了解很多法国：因为你拉开了距离。过去和现在相互照亮。因此，历史既关乎现在，也关乎过去。 （“历史与社会科学：长时段”，《论历史》，第37页）

布罗代尔将这一思想铭记于心，这在他关于今日法国形成过程的两卷本研究《法兰西的特性》中显而易见。这部作品揭示了在长时段的背景下当下的短暂性，并得出了一个令人痛苦的结论：法国在欧洲的“脆弱”地位长期以来已被“不可逆转地”决定了（《法兰西的特性》第1卷，第11、15、114、262、281、298页；第2卷，第149页）。

布罗代尔对历史与社会科学之间关系的兴趣、将历史研究超越主要政治焦点的主张，以及对长时段历史发展的关注，使他成为马克·布洛赫和吕西安·费弗尔的继承者，以及雅克·勒高夫、埃马纽埃尔·勒华拉杜里和马克·费罗的“精神之父”。然而，他对时间的多元视野及其所蕴含的对人类的“去中心化”，使他与年鉴学派的主流氛围区别开来。在他看来，结构从不赋能；它们总是约束。因此，对个体的研究只是揭示结构这一目的的手段。很少有年鉴派史学家——或任何其他史学家——会赋予人如此边缘的地位。因此，埃利奥特写道，布罗代尔的地中海“是一个不受人类控制的世界”，而拜林则抱怨，通过否认人类的统一者角色，历史变成了不过是一台“令人精疲力竭的踏车”。由此，马丁利得出结论，“海洋本身被轻视了”。然而，像凯尔纳这样的其他评论者则将《地中海》的内容和结构解读为对主流历史观的一种剖析或百科全书式的讽刺。¹⁰ 我们可以像J. H. 赫克斯特那样，将布罗代尔归结为史学界的拉伯雷——一个嘲弄我们对历史假设之虚荣的人物。不过，本着布罗代尔的精神，或许更明智的做法是将这一方面视为他对历史书写贡献之“深水区”中的一个特征。

布罗代尔主要著作

“个人证词”，《现代史杂志》，1972年，第44卷：448—467。
《菲利普二世时代的地中海与地中海世界》，2卷，S. 雷诺兹译，格拉斯哥：威廉·柯林斯出版社，1972—1973年。
《物质文明的反思》，P. M. 拉纳姆译，马里兰州巴尔的摩：约翰斯·霍普金斯大学出版社，1977年。
《论历史》，S. 马修斯译，伊利诺伊州芝加哥：芝加哥大学出版社，1980年。
《资本主义与物质生活，1400—1800》，M. 科昌译，格拉斯哥：丰塔纳出版社，1974年；修订版《文明与资本主义，十五至十八世纪》，3卷（《日常生活的结构》、《商业之轮》、《世界的视野》），S. 雷诺兹译，格拉斯哥：威廉·柯林斯出版社，1981—1992年。
《法兰西的特性》，2卷（《历史与环境》、《人民与生产》），S. 雷诺兹译，伦敦：哈珀柯林斯出版社，1990—1992年。

另见：布洛赫、费弗尔、福柯、勒华拉杜里

进一步资源

伯克，P.，《法国历史革命：年鉴学派1929—1989》，剑桥：政体出版社，1990年。
杰梅利，G.，《费尔南·布罗代尔》，由意大利语译为法语，B. 帕斯凯特和B. 普罗佩托·马尔齐译，巴黎：奥迪尔·雅各布出版社，1995年。
凯尔纳，H.，“无序的行为：布罗代尔的地中海讽刺”，《历史与理论》，1979年，第18卷（2）：197—222。
赖，C.-C.，“对费尔南·布罗代尔《文明与资本主义》的再思考”，《欧洲经济史杂志》，1995年，第24卷（1）：177—193。
李，R. E.，《长时段与世界体系分析》，纽约州奥尔巴尼：纽约州立大学出版社，2012年。
麦克尼尔，W. H.（编），《现代史杂志》，1972年，第44卷（4）：447—539。

英文原文

Fernand Braudel, historian of early modern Europe, is often described as heir to the Annales approach promoted by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. This observation is partly right, for Febvre encouraged Braudel to draw research from various fields from the humanities and social sciences into his work. But it is also a limiting description, for it tells us little about the innovation at play in his writings such as La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949; revised edition 1966; trans. as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 1972–3, hereafter The Mediterranean), which has been described as ‘the first historical work of our time’ and a ‘masterpiece of picaresque Rabelaisian history’.¹¹

Braudel was born in the small French village of Luméville-en-Ornois on 24 August 1902. After moving to Paris at the age of seven, he studied at the Lycée Voltaire and the Sorbonne, from which he graduated as an agrégé in history (1923). While teaching at the University of Algiers (1923–32), he published a paper on the Spaniards in North Africa in the sixteenth century and worked on his doctoral thesis, which started as a study of Philip II’s foreign policy.¹² He later reflected that writing on Europe in Africa, seeing the Mediterranean ‘from the opposite shore, upside down’, played a considerable part in shaping his later views of the intertwining histories of peoples and their environments.¹³ Algeria is thus identified by Braudel as the start of his twenty-five-year journey towards the publication of The Mediterranean. Between 1932 and 1935, he taught at the Lycée Condorcet and the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, and at the University of São Paolo, Brazil. During the return voyage from Brazil, Braudel befriended Lucien Febvre, who told him about his hopes for interdisciplinary research and collaboration in the humanities and social sciences.

Braudel took up an appointment at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in 1938, but with the outbreak of the second world war he was called up for military service and later taken prisoner. In camps at Mainz (1940–2) and Lübeck (1942–5), Braudel transformed his ideas on the policies of Philip II into a far-reaching study of the Mediterranean during Philip’s reign. Tales of the origins of this study have taken on a legendary quality, encouraged in no small part by Braudel himself. As he claimed: ‘It was in captivity that I wrote this enormous work that Lucien Febvre received, composition book by composition book. Only my memory allowed me this tour de force’. Braudel’s achievement was the remarkable product of his memory and years of thorough research. Prison, he later claimed, was a ‘good school. It teaches patience, tolerance’.¹⁴ But as Gemelli points out, even when he was in the difficult environment of Lübeck, he was able to use books from the local municipal library. Furthermore, it is difficult to date the modifications made to the notebooks sent to Lucien Febvre: for example, it is not clear whether additions to the preface precede or postdate his captivity. Such doubts make it difficult to determine precisely when he formulated the threefold view of time that was to become the hallmark of his vision of history.¹⁵

The book produced was The Mediterranean, a work that sold around 73,000 copies before its English translation in 1972, and which can now be read in Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, German, Dutch, Japanese and Chinese.¹⁶ Braudel’s work has not only been influential in European studies, but has also prompted debate on the nature of Ottoman and modern Islamic history, and how other geographical regions such as the Sahara might be described as seas of history.¹⁷

In 1947, with Lucien Febvre and Charles Moraze, Braudel founded the Sixième Section for the social sciences at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and two years later he succeeded Febvre as a professor in the Collège de France. Up to his death, he edited the post-war version of the Annales journal and published a host of articles and books, including Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, XVe–XVIIIe siècle (1967, reprinted as vol. 1 of Civilisation matérielle, économique, et capitalisme: XVe-XVIIIe siècle, 3 vols, 1979; trans. as Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, 1973; revised edn, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, 3 vols, 1981–92); Ecrits sur histoire (1969; trans. as On History, 1980); Afterthoughts on Material Civilization (1977); and L’identité de la France (1986–90, 2 vols; trans. as The Identity of France, 1990–2). Immanuel Wallerstein has credited Braudel’s works on capitalism for inspiring his ‘world-system’ approach to the study of economic connections and inequalities in world history. Braudel’s wider impact on ‘world-system’ history is also evident in the naming of the Binghamton University Center for the Study of Economics, Historical Systems, and Civilizations after him.

For Braudel, history as it is traditionally written illuminates the past as fireflies do the night:

I remember a night near Bahia, when I was enveloped in a firework display of phosphorescent fireflies; their pale lights glowed, went out, shone again, all without piercing the night with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails. (‘The Situation of History in 1950’, On History, pp. 10–11)

History offers a ‘gleam but no illumination; facts but no illumination’, because historians tend to focus exclusively on events, individual actions and short-term developments, and assume that each can be perceived discretely. History is thus reduced to histoire événementielle or the history of events, particularly political events. Renouncing the drama and ‘breathless rush’ of histoire événementielle is no easy matter, but we must do so if we are to achieve a better understanding of the world. In Braudel’s view, the short term is not the centre of history; historians have only taken it to be such. Rather, history does not have a centre. Like other structuralists, he believes that meaning is relational rather than substantial: the meaning of objects, events and individual actions lies not in the things themselves, but in the relationships we construct between them. He writes:

In the living world there are no individuals entirely sealed off by themselves; all individual enterprise is rooted in a more complex reality, an ‘intermeshed’ reality as sociology calls it. (Ibid., p. 11)

These ‘structures’ of relations are extensive and operate according to rules of which people may not be aware.

Apprehending structures, Braudel believes, requires broadening and deepening our gaze across and through time. That is, historians must not only consider the relations of coexisting elements (for example, cultural, geographic, economic and political developments) but also those over different periods of time (for instance, long-term and short-term developments). When we change our gaze, we can no longer maintain the fiction that time is homogeneous: ‘time does not flow at one even rate, but goes at a thousand different paces, swift or slow, which bear almost no relation to the day-to-day rhythm of a chronicle or of traditional history’ (ibid., p. 11). Plotting out the various paces of time is impossible, but Braudel detects three broad groupings in historical time: geographical time (la longue durée [the long term]: periods that span at least one century), social time and individual time (histoire événementielle).

This threefold view of time underpins all of Braudel’s writings, but it is most clearly in evidence in The Mediterranean. The Mediterranean is divided into three parts, corresponding to the three paces of time. In the first part, ‘The Role of the Environment’, Braudel explores the history of the relationship of people to the physical environment in geo-history, or what Robert Mayhew thinks is more properly called ‘geohistoriography’.¹⁸ This is a history

whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man in his relationship to the environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles. I could not neglect this almost timeless history, the story of man’s contact with the inanimate, neither could I be satisfied with the traditional geographical introduction to history that often figures to little purpose at the beginning of so many books, with its descriptions of the mineral deposits, types of agriculture, and typical flora, briefly listed and never mentioned again, as if the flowers did not come back every spring, the flocks of sheep migrate every year, or the ships sail on a real sea that changes with the seasons. (The Mediterranean, vol. 1, p. 20)

This part of the work is clearly shaped by Braudel’s interest in the geographical research of Vidal de la Blache and Albert Demangeon, but also by his love of the region (ibid., p. 17). His goal is to show us that landscape has an important part to play in history. For example, he claims that ideas conceived in the plains rarely catch on in the mountains and thus that, in the mountains, ‘civilisation is never stable’ (ibid., p. 36).

The second part, ‘Collective Destinies and General Trends’, looks to the history of social structures or conjonctures (trends or connections between diverse simultaneous phenomena): a history of the rhythms and forces at work in economic systems, scientific and technological developments, political institutions, conceptual changes, states, societies, civilisations and forms of warfare (ibid., p. 21; see also ‘History and the Social Sciences: the Longue Durée’, in On History, p. 30). For example, the period of economic growth during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries favoured the emergence of the large Spanish and Turkish empires (The Mediterranean, vol. 2, pp. 657–703). The third part, ‘Events, Politics and People’,

gives a hearing to traditional history – history, one might say on the scale not of man, but of individual men, what Paul Lacombe and François Simiand called ‘l’histoire événementielle’, that is, the history of events: surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs. A history of brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations, by definition ultrasensitive; the least tremor sets all its antennae quivering. (Ibid., vol. 1, p. 21)

In this part, Braudel offers us lively portraits of figures such as Philip II, Don García de Toledo and Don John of Austria, and accounts of the wars and treaties of the second half of the sixteenth century. Though Braudel does not want to dismiss the history of individuals, he suspects that it might steal attention from geographical and social history. He thus takes pains to make it clear that, while individuals sometimes instigate change, more often than not they are the prisoners of geographical and social structures. ‘Men make history’, he writes, ‘but history also makes men’ (‘The Situation of History in 1950’, On History, p. 11; see also ‘History and the Social Sciences: the Longue Durée’, On History, p. 30). Braudel is thus interested in the deeds of individuals in so far as they reveal structures. He also resists the temptation to make any one individual or object the centre of his book. Even the Mediterranean is fragmented: ‘it is a complex of seas; and these seas are broken up by islands, interrupted by peninsulas, ringed by intricate coastlines’ (The Mediterranean, vol. 1, p. 17). Braudel is a spatial thinker; he describes the world by describing the webs of relationships between objects and people. This form of spatial mapping also plays a role in his second major study, the three-volume Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century (The Structures of Everyday Life, The Wheels of Commerce and The Perspective of the World). In The Structures of Everyday Life, he suggests that the constraints of pre-industrial European economies – ‘inadequate food supplies, a population that was too big or too small for its resources, low productivity of labour, and the as yet slow progress in controlling nature’ – barely changed between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries (The Structures of Everyday Life, p. 27). Volume 2, The Wheels of Commerce, looks to forms of economic trends (such as markets, exchanges, partnerships and paper money) and volume 3, The Perspective of the World, traces the dramatic rise of capitalism – from fifteenth-century Venice, through Antwerp, Genoa and Amsterdam, to England at the dawn of the industrial revolution. There are two further innovations in this work. First, Braudel insists that capitalism, a global phenomenon, must be explained in global terms. For example, in describing the role of religious minorities in international trade, he includes both the Parsees of India and the Huguenots of France (The Wheels of Commerce, pp. 165–7). Also, the relative expensiveness of European labour compared to Asia, Africa and the Americas is seen as stimulating the mechanical developments associated with the industrial revolution. Second, as Wallerstein notes, Braudel inverts the view of capitalism shared by most liberals and Marxists. Where they see capitalism as involving the establishment of free competitive markets, Braudel sees it as involving a high degree of monopolisation (The Wheels of Commerce, pp. 412–28). In addition, where liberals and Marxists see capitalists as practitioners of economic specialisation, Braudel pins the success of capitalism on the refusal to specialise (ibid., pp. 377–82).¹⁹

Braudel’s vision of history requires the study of a broad range of historical evidence over la longue durée. But it also demands an openness to the methods and questions of the many kinds of historical research and of the social sciences. Typically, however, history and the social sciences erect barriers against each other and present their conclusions as being a complete vision of humanity (‘History and the Social Sciences: the Longue Durée’, On History, p. 25; ‘Unity and Diversity in the Social Sciences’, On History, pp. 25–55; ‘History and Sociology’, On History, p. 64). Furthermore, they cast their methods and selection of research topics as immune to change. In Braudel’s view, this propensity for erecting barriers and permanent foundations is unfortunate, as it denies us the possibility of understanding both the present and the past. It is clear for Braudel that the study of the past makes greater self-understanding possible. He writes:

Live in London for a year and you will not learn much about England, but you will learn a lot about France: you see because you have distanced yourself. Past and present illuminate one another reciprocally. So history is as much about the present as it is about the past. (‘History and the Social Sciences: the Longue Durée’, On History, p. 37)

That Braudel took such a message to heart is evident in his two-volume study of the shaping of present-day France (The Identity of France). This work exposes the ephemeral nature of the present when seen in the context of the long term, and offers the painful conclusion that France’s ‘vulnerable’ position in Europe has long been ‘irreversibly’ determined (The Identity of France, vol. 1, pp. 11, 15, 114, 262, 281, 298; vol. 2, p. 149).

Braudel’s interest in the relationship between history and the social sciences, in taking historical research beyond a largely political focus, and in historical developments over the long term locates him as the successor to Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre and the ‘father’ to Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Marc Ferro. His plural vision of time and the ‘decentring’ of humanity that it entails, however, sets him apart from the Annales milieu. For him, structures never enable; they always constrain. Consequently, the study of individuals is only a means to the end of revealing structures. Few Annales historians, or any other historians for that matter, accord people such a marginal status. Thus Braudel’s Mediterranean, writes Elliott, ‘is a world unresponsive to human control’, and by denying humanity the role of unifier, Bailyn complains, history becomes nothing more than ‘an exhausting treadmill’. As a consequence, Mattingly concludes, ‘the sea itself is slighted’. Other commentators such as Kellner, however, read the content and structure of The Mediterranean as an anatomy, or encyclopaedic satire of dominant views of history.²⁰ We could, like J. H. Hexter, conclude that Braudel is the Rabelais of historiography: a figure who mocks the vanity of our assumptions about history. In the spirit of Braudel, though, it is perhaps wiser to see this aspect as only one feature of the ‘deeper waters’ of his contribution to history making.

Braudel’s major works

‘Personal Testimony’, Journal of Modern History, 1972, 44: 448–67.
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols, trans. S. Reynolds, Glasgow: William Collins, 1972–3.
Afterthoughts on Material Civilization, trans. P. M. Ranum, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
On History, trans. S. Matthews, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800, trans. M. Kochan, Glasgow: Fontana, 1974; revised edn, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, 3 vols (The Structures of Everyday Life, The Wheels of Commerce, The Perspective of the World), trans. S. Reynolds, Glasgow: William Collins, 1981–92.
The Identity of France, 2 vols (History and Environment, People and Production), trans. S. Reynolds, London: Harper Collins, 1990–2.

See also: Bloch, Febvre, Foucault, Le Roy Ladurie

Further resources

Burke, P., The French Historical Revolution: the Annales School 1929–89, Cambridge: Polity, 1990.
Gemelli, G., Fernand Braudel, trans. from Italian to French by B. Pasquett and B. Propetto Marzi, Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1995.
Kellner, H., ‘Disorderly Conduct: Braudel’s Mediterranean Satire’, History and Theory, 1979, 18(2): 197–222.
Lai, C.-C., ‘Second Thoughts on Fernand Braudel’s “Civilization and Capitalism”’, Journal of European Economic History, 1995, 24(1): 177–93.
Lee, R. E., The Longue Durée and World-Systems Analysis, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012.
McNeill, W. H. (ed.), Journal of Modern History, 1972, 44(4): 447–539.