Braudel, Fernand

(1902-85)

A leading member of the Annales School of French history, best known for his magnum opus The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), although hisCapitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 (1967) is more accessible to sociologists.

Braudel's monumental studies of nascent capitalism are replete with typologies of economies and cultures. However, the organizing principle of his work was a distinction between different levels of historical time within which change takes place at different speeds, most notably the threefold distinction betweenhistoire événementielle, histoire conjoncturelle, and histoire structurale. ‘History’, he claimed, ‘exists at different levels … On the surface the history of events works itself out in the short term; it is a sort of micro-history. Halfway down, a history of conjunctures follows a broader, slower rhythm. So far that has above all been studied in its developments on the material plane, in economic cycles and intercycles … And over and above the “recitatif” of the conjuncture, structural history, or the history of the longue durée, inquires into whole centuries at a time … It functions along the border between the moving and the immobile, and because of the long-standing stability of its values, in appears unchanging when compared with all the histories which flow and work themselves out more swiftly, and which in the final analysis gravitate around it’ (On History, 1980). The last of these generates a ‘geohistory’ of the environment for which Braudel is best known, a history of material life, consisting of ‘repeated actions, empirical processes, old methods and solutions handed down from time immemorial, like money or the separation of town from country’.

Although Braudel was a major influence on world-systems theory, his work has been criticized by some for its imprecision as regards causality, and by others for its implicit historical materialism.