During this period he kept up with developments in Paris including establishment of Annales in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. ![]() Braudel taught secondary school in Algeria from 1923 to 1932 and then lived in Brazil where he taught at the University of Sao Paulo from 1935 to 1937. Braudel began this research in 1923 at age twenty-one and it was envisaged as his doctoral dissertation and was to concentrate on the policies of Philip II in the form of a conventional diplomatic history. Many consider The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1966 English translation) published in France in 1949 as his defining work. This essay will begin with Braudel’s uses of capitalism, and then take up themes from the volumes of Civilization and Capitalism.īefore dealing with capitalism, some background on Braudel’s career is needed. These themes include Braudel’s emphasis on the economic condition of every-man, on a global approach to economic and social history, and on the process of capitalism and its geographical spread. This essay will not pretend to cover the three volumes of Civilization and Capitalism but rather touch on some broad themes that have had influence on our understanding of world economic history. ![]() 406) in speaking of Civilization and Capitalism says, “it contains a wealth of factual information, mostly correct, but the brilliance of its author’s rather idiosyncratic interpretation has been exaggerated by the popular press.” Whether one buys the whole quotation, one can certainly agree with Cameron that Braudel builds very idiosyncratic interpretations based upon a wealth of information, often very imaginatively used. While the Annales School has made only a small dent in the economic history curriculum in the United States, it has had much more influence on social history worldwide and on economic history in France, Europe and the rest of the world. ![]() Braudel immersed himself into masses of materials and emerged with plausible broad-brush stories to tell, teaching others how to replicate this approach is problematic. Braudel is uniformly praised as one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century, but a hard act to follow. Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalismįernand Braudel is associated with the influential Annales School (La nouvelle histoire) that advocated a major break from the dominant narrative paradigm of the early twentieth century embracing an approach to history integrating the social sciences with a problem-focused history.
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