Civilization and Capitalism

"Everyone will agree that Braudel is one of the best historians of the 20th century. He really worked on a large scale. Civilization and Capitalism was a book he wrote and prepared his whole life. It was published in 1979 when Braudel was already in his 70s. It is three volumes, it’s huge, thousands of pages. He engages in a historical work which is extremely dense, complex and spanning all the world. Nowadays globalization is in fashion, but Braudel was taking a global approach to the world between the 15th and 18th century very early on. He managed to integrate all different civilizations, all different parts of the world. It is an extraordinary enterprise. The way the three books are organized is that the first one is focused on the “long-term” structures. These are the structures of daily life, material culture – how people ate, how they dressed, how they used money for their needs, how they organized their life, what their habitat was. The second volume is much more connected to markets, to capitalism, to organization of exchange, around trade, manufacturing, industries, how all these evolved in different parts of the world. The third volume concerns time: how different systems, different world economies were structured in different periods of time around specific centres. This is very useful because it shows how centres evolved, how they were replaced, how they expanded, how they organized areas of influence, how peripheries emerged, and how areas of influence expanded. This kind of approach — which was developed by Immanuel Wallerstein in his 3-volume book on the world system — was accused of Euro-centrism. Wallerstein centred his analysis of capitalism on Europe, even if he did include Asia. Since the 1980s this idea of European precedence from the 16th century onwards has been challenged — by Bin Wong, Kenneth Pomeranz and Jack Goody. Braudel, by contrast, who wrote before Wallerstein, had a much more comprehensive vision. He includes China, the Ottoman Empire and all the Muslim world. There is a hint that Europe, in many techniques, preceded other parts of the world, but Braudel was much more comprehensive. Every book I’ve chosen is inter-disciplinary. Braudel integrates for me, in a fantastic way, history and geography and I don’t think you can write about history without introducing geography. The first big volume by Braudel was on the Mediterranean, in 1949. It was the first time the Mediterranean as a space was studied from a historical point of view, and this was a major breakthrough. In Capitalism and Material Life he developed this connection between time and space, and I think this is crucial for all historians. Braudel is an inspiration for locating your research, for considering the importance of place. When I chose the conjunctures which triggered racism, I was always careful to understand the precise place, and why the geography mattered."