August 24, 1902

Fernand Braudel (August 24, 1902, to November 28, 1985) the French historian, and author of Civilization and Capitalism,  is a good example of the distinction between continental and English intellectual disciplines. The inclination to assume that distinction relates to a continental leaning to the political left is to be resisted. The apparent distinction is an ability to deal with intellectual complexity. 

Braudel with a continental sophistication of thought, includes context as a vital element in his historiography. While his goal is a typology of the world of commerce, or alternatively, what he calls a 'grammar' his conclusions betray a subtle awareness of the limitations of human knowledge.

In his words in the preface to volume II in the Civilization series, The Wheels of Commerce, (first French edition, 1979) Braudel writes:

...I have tried to grasp regularities and mechanisms, to write a sort of general economic history....without ...assuming that the general history can be totally rigourous, the typology definitive or at all complete, the model in any sense mathematically verifiable...[W]hat follows is an attempt...at uncovering certain articulations and developments - and no less, the powerful forces which have maintained the traditional order, 'inert violence' as Jean-Paul Sartre called it. This then is a study on the borderlines of the social, the political, and the economic.

The awareness of subtle context demonstrated by Fernand Braudel makes English historiography often look like a weak draft indeed.

Volume 1 of Civilization and Capitalism is titled: The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible.  Here we see his subtlety in this quote he uses, in a discussion of the function of luxury. He cites the words of Sebastian Mercier in 1771:

A cat, with one tap of its paw can do more damage than the devastation of twenty arpents of land.

And the context for this quote is that Braudel is analysing a history of luxuries, and how what is considered a luxury will vary in time and according to class. "Arpents of land" refers to a traditional measurement of acreage and how this traditional measurement  negatively impacted productivity. The fact that a cat can destroy a porcelain object of  value so easily refers to a slim period of time when porcelain was quite rare and limited to the upperest of classes. 

Perhaps we should go back to Braudel's methodology for a minute, since rarely is this discussed in American texts. 

According to his Britannica article: Braudel became one of the most important historians of the 20th century.

Here is how he work is described by an obscure resource

In 1929 Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who were then professors based at Strasbourg, established a journal called "Annals of economic and social history" (Annales d'histoire économique et sociale). As a Journal Annales was intended to promote a new and more open approach to history in a provocatively colloquial style, an approach defined mostly by its search for "a larger and a more human history", by its denial of all historical barriers and by its rejection of the traditional history of politics and government in favour of a deeper analysis of social and economic forces with the goal of departing from traditional political and military history to explore economic and social history, and to focus more on a long term perspective.

...The rising generation of historical scholars were brought up to believe in the words of [Braudel's preface La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II ]... the old history of events was indeed dead, "the action of a few princes and rich men, the trivia of the past, bearing little relation to the slow and powerful march of history . . . those statesmen were, despite their illusions, more acted upon than actors."....

Braudel offered not "the traditional geographical introduction to history that often figures to so little purpose at the beginning of so many books, with its description of the mineral deposits, types of agriculture and typical flora, briefly listed and never mentioned again, as if the flowers did not come back every spring, the flocks of sheep migrate every year, or the ships sail on a real sea that changes with the seasons," but a whole new way of looking at the past, in which the historian re-created a lost reality through a feat of historical imagination based on detailed knowledge of the habits and techniques of the ploughman, the shepherd, the potter, and the weaver, the skills of the vintage and the olive press, the milling of corn, the keeping of records of bills of lading, tides and winds. It began to seem as important for a historian to be able to ride a horse or sail a ship as to sit in a library. Only the third section of Braudel's book returned to the history of events, "surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs."

The new history of the sixties turned away from the factual certainties of economic and descriptive social history, and explored the "history of mentalities." It held that the historical world was created out of perceptions, not out of events, and we needed to recognise that the whole of history was a construct of human impressions.

There is a nice biographical note about Braudel here.