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Braudel's Geohistory–a Reconsideration*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Bernard Bailyn
Bernard Bailyn
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

Since its publication in 1949 Fernand Braudel's La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II has been received as a major addition to the literature of early modern history. In France, the excitement over this eleven-hundred-page work has centered on what would appear to be its revolutionary innovations in historical method. Lucien Febvre, for example, in an article in the Revue historique, after describing the book as more than a “perfect work of an historian with a profound grasp of his métier” and even more than a “professional masterpiece,” declared that the book introduces a revolution in the mode of conceiving history. “It marks,” said Febvre, “the dawn of a new time, of that I am certain.” His article concluded with this charge to youth: “Read, re-read, and meditate on this excellent book. … Make it your companion. What you will learn of things, new to you, about the world of the sixteenth century is incalculable. But what you will learn simply about man, about his history and about history itself, its true nature, its methods and its purposes—you cannot imagine in advance.” Braudel himself devoted an article in the Revue économique to elaborating the method used in his book and presented it to economic historians for their consideration.

Type
Review Articles and Discussions
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , Summer 1951 , pp. 277 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1951

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References

1 Febvre, Lucien, “Un livre qui grandit …,” Revue historique, CCIII, fasc. II April-June, 1950), 216, 224Google Scholar. See also Febvre's “Vers une autre histoire,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, July-October, 1949, and Bataillon, Marcel, “La Méditerranée …,” Revue économique, No. 2 (July 1950), 232–41Google Scholar.

2 Braudel, Fernand, “Pour une économie historique,” Revue économique, No. 1 (May 1950), 37–44Google Scholar. It is also interesting to note that in the same article he speculated about the need for studying the movements in the past that had no future: historical freignages, viscosités, résistances, he called them. In 1931, will be recalled, Herbert Butterfield elaborated a similar idea as applied to political history in his Whig Interpretation of History, and, in the same month in which Braudel's article appeared, A. J. P. Taylor, in a review of Keith Feiling's History of England, pulled the idea to its logical conclusion and assumed as definition of Tory history the study of the functioning of political and social institutions at given periods, ignoring creative ideas and movements in time. Taylor concluded gloomily, “If we survive at all, both Dr. Trevelyan and Mr. Feiling will be outmoded; what we must expect is history that will be neither Whig nor Tory, but Byzantine.”—New Statesman and Nation, May 5, 1950, p. 518.

3 English Historical Review, LV (July 1940), 450Google Scholar.

4 Braudel writes that he first undertook the study of Philip II in 1923 (p. xi).