Early Modern History and the Social Sciences: Testing the Limits of Braudel's Mediterranean.

John A. Marino, ed. Early Modern History and the Social Sciences: Testing the Limits of Braudel's Mediterranean.

Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002. xx + 290 pp. index. tbls. map. bibl. $44.95 (cl), $34.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-940474-25-5 (cl), 1-931112-07-X (pbk).

Fernand Braudel was a pioneer of contemporary global history. In the second edition of La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen a l'epoque de Philippe II (1966) he published two photographs taken in 1964 from an American satellite, Nimbus A, showing a large expanse of the Mediterranean that offered direct evidence for the first time that Italy is really shaped like a boot. This was the foundation, or refoundation, of the "new history," which Braudel had invoked in his inaugural lecture at the College de France in 1950, which he saw reaching out beyond the Mediterranean to the rest of the globe, including the Far East, and which he followed up in later works written from "the perspective of the world." But this all began with his beloved Mediterranean (1949), which was researched during the 1930s and which was written in prison during the Second World War. Here he followed the impulse of Durkheimian sociology, Vidal da la Blachian geohistory, and perhaps Tainean history, by way of Henri Berr and Lucien Febvre, who suggested that Braudel reverse the order of his plan for a book on Phillip II and the Mediterranean. Braudel did indeed give priority to the latter (and dedicated the book to Febvre) and focused not on political "surface agitation," which Francois Simiand, after Paul Lacombe, denigrated as "l'histoire evenementielle," but on geohistory and socioeconomic structures (if not "laws") and so on synchronic rather than diachronic analysis, or rather on both together by means of a view of an "almost immobile history, history that stands still," in the words of his disciple Le Roy Ladurie, and that relates individuals to their milieu.

Braudel's vision captured the imaginations of many European historians (and others) over the next generation and more, dominating what he himself in 1950 called "the French historical school" and inspiring many epigones and critics. Here are more testimonies to the amazing fortuna of Braudel's work, eleven contributions from a conference held at Bellagio in 1997 celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of The Mediterranean. Braudel's eyes were often "too big for his stomach" (as he once told Jack Hexter, accepting the comparison with Rabelais); and his own interdisciplinary agenda, which at its most omnivorous encompassed Febvre's "history of everything," furnishes the horizons of this collection ranging from "the original landscape" to "worlds beyond the Mediterranean" and written by scholars ranging from Spain and Portugal to Australia, Britain, and America. The essays are concerned both with the strengths and weaknesses of Braudel's work and with the condition of the human sciences more than a half-century afterwards.

All the authors acknowledge Braudel's fame if not influence and the impetus he gave to the alliance of history with adjacent fields, beginning with geography (the chapter by Marino), which is now enjoying a remarkable revival, and economics, which is not, except in theoretical terms; but they also deplore his failures. In fact Braudel inherits some of the criticisms formerly suffered by Marxist notions when Marx was more of a historiographical presence, especially his materialism, economic and social oversimplifications (Bartolome Yun Casalilla, Jan de Vries, and Ottavia Niccoli), avoidance of political and military history (M. J. Rodriguez-Salgado), neglect of "mentality" and the cultural aspects of historical change (Peter Burke and Jack Goldstone), especially with regard to minorities (Henry Kamen), and overemphasis on factors of longue duree (Anthony Pagden). Particular critiques include those of De Vries on the disjunction in Braudel's analysis between late medieval and post-industrial urbanization, Casalilla on the lack of market homogeneity that impose limits on Braudel's (and Immanuel Wallerstein's) view of world economy, and Mark Elvin on the inadequacy of his comparatist remarks on China.

In fact, in this miscellaneous collection Braudel figures less as a focus or target than as a peg on which to fasten reflections on the topics suggested in the primary title. Marino offers a valuable study of the "mapping mentalities of the Renaissance" and the human geography of the Annales school, its postmodern aftermath, and future prospects. Casalilla discusses Braudel's apolitical economic ideas, abstracted from historical context and the "economic decision-making process," and his outdated view of the relations between city and countryside in Spain, the study of which also needs a political and institutional basis and more attention to historical change. Repeating his own distinction between an early "industrious" and a later "industrial" revolution, De Vries celebrates new developments in rural and urban history and criticizes conventional views about a universal and unchanging market as the framework for explaining economic change. In what is only an implicit criticism of Braudel, Niccoli focuses on "images of society," emphasizing social mobility over traditional views of hierarchy, and the metaphors which shaped not only political discourse but also political action. Burke again advertises the virtues of anthropology in fulfilling and humanizing the Braudelian vision of "civilization" and of a total history--virtues which emerged for the most part after the Braudelian regime. Rodriguez-Salgado shifts attention to the "old history," to political and military events which Braudel, turning to long-term structures, decided to marginalize; and Rodriguez-Salgado underlined the importance of ideology and power, which not even a concern for long-term structures can afford to overlook. Goldstone's topic is cycles of revolutions in terms of the relations between material factors and mentalities associated with longue duree. Antonio Manuel Hespanha's discussion of "early modern law and the anthropological imagination," legal doctrines and common sense from everyday life, is an interesting interdisciplinary discussion, though without direct connection to Braudel. Henry Kamen turns to minority cultures, marginal mentalities, which, though they could not figure significantly in Braudel's macro-historical scheme, are essential to a "world perspective." Mark's Elvin's essay employs Braudel's categories but concentrates mainly on the inadequacies of his largely uninformed and evasive views on China both in the The Mediterraneam and in later works. Lastly, Pagden examines Braudel's innovative conceptions of time and space in terms of the encounter with America, which opened the door to a truly global--and a truly modern--history.

The one face of Braudel that does not receive attention here is that of the rhetorician and the literary artist, which--even more than his social-scientific inheritance and pretensions and his ostentatious erudition--surely accounts for much of his fame and influence. Not for Braudel the Caesarean stance (though he likewise opens with a geographical preliminary), for The Mediterranean is very much a first-person singular book, beginning with his declaration that "I have passionately loved the Mediterranean," and ending with a conclusion in the second edition celebrating twenty years of popularity, during which the book was both "criticized (very little) and praised (very often)." While marginalizing events and personages (except for Philip II and the Battle of Lepanto), Braudel manages to dramatize the countryside, the conditions of travel, and even his sources, which he celebrates, in the last sentence of the book, as "the most concrete, the most ordinary, the most indestructible, the most anonymously human"--all of which remain implicitly under the sovereign gaze of this scientific and yet passionate observer, virtuoso portrayer, and global academic empire-builder.

The present volume avoids this aspect of Braudel's achievement and limits the discussion to his first book, avoiding his later even grander enterprises, especially the trilogy on "civilization and capitalism," (again echoing "superstructure and material base"), which takes the market as the best way framework in which to cast a world history without trying to describe absolutely everything, and the book perhaps closest to his heart, his last, unfinished project, which, faithful to his first impulse, was a reverentially rich quest for the "identity of France," reviewed "from the perspective of every single social science." Nor have more recent efforts to create a world history surpassed Braudel's vision, or even achievements, despite the piecemeal and occasional suggestions for updating offered in this volume.

DONALD R. KELLEY

Rutgers University