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Braudel's Mediterranean: Un Défi Latin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

John A. Armstrong
John A. Armstrong
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin (Madison)
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Abstract

Fernand Braudel's immense history of international politics in the sixteenth century s i significant for analytic social scientists from two standpoints—methodological and substantive. Although Braudel does not pretend to present a theory of history or international relations, he utilizes a broad range of geographic and economic theory to provide a novel conceptual framework. He devotes particular attention to defining boundaries in time and space. Braudel is highly innovative in his use of quantitative techniques, as in his analysis of communications potentials to delineate the spatial configurations of the sixteenth-century world. Just as Braudel's eclectic methodology suggests alternatives to approaches dominant in North American social science, his substantive emphasis on the pre-eminence of Latin civilization during the formative period of the modern Western world provides an impressive alternative perspective to the Whig interpretation of sixteenth-century history which has generally prevailed in English-speaking countries.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , July 1977 , pp. 626 - 636
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1977

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References

1 Bloch, “Pour une Histoire Comparée des Sociétés Européennes,” reprinted in , Bloch, Mélanges Historiques, I (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N. 1963), 18 ffGoogle Scholar.

2 See especially the anthropological approach in Barth, Frederik, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget 1969)Google Scholar.

3 The tripartite time perspective pre-dates publication of Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet, which also takes the Mediterranean as its subject. Braudel (II, 1239) recognizes his kinship to Durrell.

4 This is particularly evident in combining maps and chronology to trace diffusion. As David Collier and Richard E. Messick have recently demonstrated (using similar techniques), the diffusion variable is significant in explaining the distribution of institutional phenomena, despite “the very unequal attention [accorded this factor] in political research.” See “Prerequisites versus Diffusion: Testing Alternative Explanations of Social Security Adoption,” American Political Science Review, LXIX (December 1975). 1299Google Scholar.

5 Le Monde Islamique (Paris: Presses Universitaires 1957), 63 ffGoogle Scholar.

6 These maps are only 2 of the 68 graphs, charts, and maps supplementing the text.

7 This position is advanced by Ennen, Edith, Frühgeschichte der europäischen Stadt (Bonn: Röhrscheid 1953), 111 ffGoogle Scholar., 225 ff. (not cited by Braudel).

8 Américo Castro, The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History, trans, by King, Willard F. and Margaretten, Selma (Berkeley: University of California Press 1971), 7Google Scholar. Castro also sharply differs with Braudel on the substantive question of expulsion of the Moriscos and Jews.

9 But Philip IPs sedentary rule was also made possible by political circumstances in France, which allowed him, in contrast to Charles, access to direct routes to his possessions in the Netherlands and Italy (I, 372).

10 Braudel's hypothesis that the territorial state could advance where cities were not too numerous or rich resembles that of Rokkan, Stein, “Dimensions of State Formation and Nation-Building,” in Tilly, Charles, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1975), 576 ffGoogle Scholar.

11 , Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet (New York: Dutton 1962)Google Scholar, Justine, 31.

12 Perhaps deliberately, Braudel never fully confronts the ambiguous position of France between the North and the Mediterranean. For example, he notes that Catholics of the Franche Comié are repelled by the excesses of “southern piety” (II, 765). The ambiguity is particularly important because northern Frenchmen have led the astonishing French economic, political, and intellectual recovery after World War II, whereas the Mediterraneans were more often cast in the role of opposition. (It has been noted that the anti-DeGaulle votes in 1965 almost coincided with the thirteenth-century areas of Albigensian domination.)

13 “Whig version” seems to be the most nearly neutral term; Hispanic writers often refer to la leyenda negra—the black legend—of Spanish atrocities, current for centuries in the English-speaking world. See the recent analysis and documentary collection, Gibson, Charles, ed., The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New (New York: Knopf 1971)Google Scholar.