REVIEW ARTICLES

BRAUDEL’S M E D I T E R R A N E A N : THE MAKING A N D MARKETING

O F A MASTERPIECE*

For History itself [this book] marks a great step forward, a salutary renewal. It is the dawning of a new age, I am sure of it. I would like to say to the young in particular: read it, re-read it, think about this fine book. What it will tell you about the . . . world of the sixteenth century is in- calculable; but what it will tell you about Man as such, about his history, and about History itself-its true nature, its methods and its purpose- you cannot imagine beforehand. It is not just a book which teaches; it is a book which enriches.’

Even today, some of the claims made for The Mediterranean in Lucien Febvre’s review of 1950 must seem a trifle extravagant to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ears. Did this, the first book of a virtually unknown historian, really repre- sent ‘a revolution in the way we conceive of History, an overthrow of our old practices, an “historical mutation” of the utmost importance’?2

Certainly, Braudel’s Mediterranean was no ordinary book. In the first place, it had been uncommonly long in the making. It began life in 1923 as a study of Philip 11’s Mediterranean policy, when Braudel was a history master in an Algiers school, and it steadily took shape as he roved about the Medi- terranean from Marseilles to Mhlaga and from Venice to Valencia, armed with a converted movie-camera which could photograph up to 3,000 pages of documents a day. Braudel was the first historian to use true microfilms. Gradually, in the 1930s, the thesis changed from a conventional work on Philip I1 and the Mediterranean into a vast panoramic study of the Medi- terranean world in the age of Philip 11 and, in this new form, after sixteen years of preparation, Braudel began to write. Alas, it was the autumn of 1939 and Braudel was soon called up, captured and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany where he remained until 1945. Amazingly, he managed to write most of his book from memory in the camp, sending his draft back to France in school note-books one by one as they were filled. After the war, Braudel checked his references and verified his facts until in 1947 he was ready to submit his text to the Sorbonne for the degree of Docteur-bs-Lettres. It was accepted and two years later it was published. The Mediterranean had taken twenty-six years to emerge.3

The unusual conditions surrounding its composition help to explain the * Femand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of

Phirip II , translated by Sian Reynolds, London (Collins), 1972 and 1973,2 vols., f6.00 each. L. Febvre, ‘Un livrc qui grandit: La M M i t e m k et le monde mediterrankn B

l ’ t p u e de Philippe II’, Revue historque, 203 (1950), pp. 21624; quotation from p. 224. Ibid., p. 216. This account is based on Braudcl, ‘Personal Testimony’, Journal of Modern History,

44 (1972), pp. 448-67. 238

BRAUDEL’S MEDITERRANEAN 239 eclectic character of Braudel’s masterpiece. Few authors have the dedication or the inclination to work on their chosen project for a quarter of a century; fewer still have four years’ enforced idleness thrust upon them, albeit amid uncomfortable and humiliating conditions, in which to reflect upon and rationalize their life’s work. Both were essential to The Mediterranean. The long apprenticeship in the archives provided the encyclopaedic knowledge which makes almost every page of this book sparkle with breathtaking sweeps and insights; the years of confinement afforded the opportunity to ponder and assess those static features, conditions and structures of everyday existence which stubbornly asserted themselves and forced princes, traders and peasants to conform to a rhythm of life which they were powerless to change.

It is impossible to find a single, short passage which can convey the full flavour and impressive range of this book, but Braudel’s perceptive reflections on the problems posed by distance in sixteenth-century Europe @p. 355- 379) are fairly typical. He begins with a timely reminder that today, when we have too little space, a constant effort of imagination is needed to remember that in early modem times there was too much of it. Distance was ‘Public Enemy Number One’. It required two months to cross the Mediterranean from east to west in the sixteenth century; it could take five years to send a merchant ship from Spain to the Philippines and back. Obviously the modern transport revolution has increased the speed of travel enormously, and this is an important fact for historians to remember when they try to assess the difficulties facing early modem statesmen and traders; but equally important, and rather less obvious, is the fact that modern transport has also eliminated the uncertainty imposed on all travel in the past by the elements. In the six- teenth century, the distance between two points was not ‘invariable, fixed once and for all. There might be ten or a hundred different distances, and one could never be sure in advance, before setting out or making decisions, what timetable fate would impose’ (p. 357). Sensational news and important orders might travel surprisingly fast-tidings of the St. Bartholomew’s day massacre (August 1572) travelled at 100 kilometres a day by land; an urgent message from Don John of Austria to Philip I1 (in June of the same year) made the journey by sea from Sicily to Catalonia at 200 kilometres a day-but nothing like these speeds could be achieved regularly. A storm at sea or brigands on the roads could hold up traders and couriers for long periods: a journey which ‘normally’ lasted three weeks might drag on for three months. Mer- chants and governments alike, well aware that ‘Time is Money’ (a phrase which 6rst appeared at this time), had to reconcile themselves to the long delays inherent in travel both by land and sea. And this, in turn, explains a great deal about the realities of international trade and politics in the sixteenth century. An empire like that of Philip 11, for example, ‘suffered from the delays of shipping in the Atlantic, the Indian, and even the Pacific Oceans; in fact, it had to respond to the workings of the first economic and political system that spanned the known world. This was one reason why the pulses of Spain beat at a slower pace than others’ (p. 374). And so Braudel goes on: enquiring, probing, explaining. Lyrical descriptions of the climatic and geographical imperatives of the Mediterranean world are interspersed with powerful and penetrating analysis of the empire of Philip I1 and the problems facing it.

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By any standard, The Mediterranean is a remarkable book, a masterpiece of historical craftsmanship; but it would be wrong to suppose that the book alone is responsible for the enormous impact Braudel has had upon the study and practice of history. His influence is conspicuous everywhere. The preface to The Mediterranean, for example, includes a list of thirty-two historians, all of them famous names, whose published work has grown out of Braudel’s book in some way. The list, although long, is modest: the footnotes to Braudel’s text reveal many more individual contributions and insights taken from the work of an army of pupils and former pupils of all nationalities. Well, not quite all . . . Of the thirty-two scholars mentioned in Braudel’s preface, only one comes from the English-speaking world; hardly any English or American historians are cited in the footnotes. For all its evident merit and intellectual distinction, The Mediterranean and its author have been strangely neglected by the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. A consideration of this relative disregard reveals that, however brilliant, history books need to be ‘marketed’ if they are to be really influential.

It would seem, on the face of it, that Braudel’s book has been neglected over here mainly because it challenged the accepted British view of how the past should be studied. The Mediterranean was unashamedly a manifesto for a new kind of history, for the sort of history sponsored by the Annules, the journal founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre to serve as ‘a meeting-point for all the sciences involved in the study of man and ~ociety’.~ The Annales insisted on the need for an outward-looking history, for a ‘total’ history in which the historian, as Lucien Febvre wrote, ‘must have a know- ledge of everything which derives from, serves and expresses Man, of every- thing that indicates his presence, his activity, his tastes, his mode of existence as Man’.’ It was the approximation to ‘total history’ which Febvre most praised in his review of The Mediterranean in 1950. The book’s great claim to originality, he argued, lay in its organization, with Part I devoted to the physical and geographical environment in which Spain’s struggle with the Ottoman Turks took place, Part I1 covering the slowly-changing economic, social and political condition of the Mediterranean world of the sixteenth century, and Part III-the last-dealing with the individual episodes in the great contest between Philip I1 and the Sultan. Mere events, Thistoire evtnementielle’, came last : there, crowed Febvre, lay ‘la grande rivolution’, ‘la conception nouvelle d’histoire’. And there, too, lay what many English and American historians could not stomach.

The . . . book offers some splendid understanding of the circumstances which contributed to the shaping of policy and action; the only things missing are policy and action. [G. R. Elton, 1967

The three major sections4ealing successively with geography, with society, and with ‘events’-never quite came together. [H. S. Hughes, 19661

This reviewer found the liaison of the political history with the elements of human geography somewhat unconvincing. [R. A. Newhall, 19501

M. Aymard, ‘The A n d e s and French Historiography (1929-1972)’, The Journal of

L. Febvre, Combats pour I’Histoire (Paris, 1953), p. 402; quoted, in translation, by European Economic History, 1 (1972), pp. 491-51 1 ; quotation from p. 491.

Aymard, op. cit., p. 502.

BRAUDEL’S MEDITERRANEAN 241 This was the central criticism levelled by English and Merican commentators at the first edition of The Mediterranean.6 It was repeated by another genera- tion of critics about the second French version, published in 1966, with 20 per cent more text (almost all added to the sections on ‘structure’) and enriched with a profusion of plates, maps, tables and diagrams (likewise mainly concentrated into the first two parts).

Braudel never fully succeeds in showing the relevance of the long-range develop- ments for the events of the period of Philip 11. [Felix Gilbert, 19711

Braudel’s mountains move his men, but never his men the mountains. [John Elliott, 19731’

English historians have always excelled at ‘l’histoire 6vknementielle’-at political and constitutional history-and they have put up an able defence against those who have attacked it, whether foreigners (like Fernand Braudel) or native (like Keith Thomas).s They have been encouraged and fortified in their belief that the ‘new ways’ in history are inferior to the old by the mani- fest errors of fact, the questionable use of evidence, and some rather rash generalizations which seem to mar a good many of the offerings of the Annales school-even The Mediterr~nean.~ For the moment, in Britain at any rate, the ‘old ways’ still rule the historical roost and it will take more than a few foreign monographs to dislodge them.

However, the opposition of the historical Establishment, by itself, cannot explain the relative neglect of Braudel’s achievement over here. After all, the French historical Establishment was also once dominated by scholars intent on the study of homo politicus or homo diplomaticus in isolation, against whose ‘pleasant little game’ Febvre, Braudel and their associates ranted and railed mercilessly for years.l0 And in the end they won: by the 1950s le style annales had become the new orthodoxy. In France today, l’histoire e‘vine- mentielle is dead-but it was not killed by words alone. The historical methods and perspectives of Febvre and Braudel were soon being propounded and ‘marketed’ by a new historical Establishment whose tentacles embraced the whole of France.

In 1947 Lucien Febvre, the friend and patron of Braudel and already the sole editor of the Annales, secured government funds for what was virtually a research institute of his own: the VI” section of the Ecolepratique des Hautes

G. R. Elton, f i e Practice of History (London, 1967), p. 167; Hughes and Newha!l cited (and endorsed) by J. H. Hexter, ‘Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien . . . , Journal of Modern History, 44 (1972), pp. 48Q-539, at pp. 531-2.

Gilbert cited by Hexter, foc. cit.; J. H. Elliott in The New York Review of Books, 3 May

Cf. G. R. Elton, The Practice of History, chapter 1 , completed in December 1966, which makes a frontal attack on the ‘new ways’ advocated by Keith Thomas and others in an issue of the Times Literary Supplement earlier the same year (7 April). Despite the erudition and skill displayed by Professor Elton in presenting and sustaining his criticisms, time has vindicated almost all Mr. Thomas’s predictions about the future develop- ment of historical studies in Britain.

For Braudel, cf. the formidable list of mistakes and misinterpretations in The Mediter- ranean drawn up by Hexter and Elliott in their reviews noted above. Braudel was particu- larly weak on the Ottoman empire because he could not read the Turkish and Arabic sources and this led him to make several questionable assertions. For one small example, cf. M. A. Cook, Population Pressure in Rural Anatolia, 14SO-1600 (Oxford, 1972).

lo Febvre was a particularly vitriolic critic of historians who chose to follow a course different from his own, and in his passion he could be partial and petty. For an exposure of some distasteful reviewing methods, CJ D. M. Fenlon, ‘Encore une question: Lucien Febvre, the Reformation and the School of Annales’, Irish Historical Studies, 1974-5 (in printing).

1973, pp. 25-8.

H-K

242 REVIEW ARTICLES

Etudes. It specialized in the study of history. Because of the highly centralized structure of French education, almost all historical research undertaken in France soon came to be channelled through this new organism. Through the Annales and through the VIP section, Febvre was able to direct, promote and publish the studies of a very large number of promising young historians; and at his right hand was Braudel. In 1948 a special Centre de recherches historiques was set up within the VZ‘section, with Fernand Braudel as its first director. In 1956 Braudel succeeded Febvre as President of the VZ” section itself, and in 1957 he became editor-in-chief of the Annales. It was a formidable accretion of power. Few important historical works were published in France between 1950 and 1965 which were not financed by the Centre de recherches historiques, published as articles in the Annales, and finally issued as vast monographs by one of the three major publishers who handled the various prestigious series produced by the VI‘ section. For twenty-five years, Braudel thus had a unique opportunity to direct the research of the best young his- torians produced by an entire country (plus many foreign scholars who were attracted to study in Paris). Not surprisingly, the character of French historical studies began to change as Braudel’s pupils ‘read, re-read and thought about’ the new methods and approach which underlay The Mediterranean; not surprisingly, their books were modelled on the master’s-Goubert’s Beauvais, Le Roy Ladurie’s Languedoc, Bennassar’s Valladolid and so on-thus diffusing still further the ‘new concept of history’. But not to Britain.

Sadly, for most English and American readers, all these excellent books remained closed. Like Braudel’s Mediterranean (1200 pages), they were extremely long: 999 pages on Lyon in the sixteenth century, 1035 about Languedoc, no less than 10 volumes on Seville . . .ll Moreover, all of them were written in a style which, though often vivid and eloquent, contained many technical terms and expressions which may have delighted the initiated French reader but could only confuse his English-speaking counterpart. ‘The young’, above all, could hardly be expected to make their way through books like these. The lack of an English edition of The Mediterranean un- doubtedly helps to explain the failure of Braudel’s masterpiece to achieve the same prominence in Britain as elsewhere. It is a book which cannot properly be appreciated in small doses; it must be drunk in copious drafts, unhindered by the need to consult dictionaries and grammars. Now, at last, this is possible. The English Braudel, handsomely printed, lavishly illustrated and ably trans- lated, enables everyone to discover at first hand the attractions ofthis profound and stimulating book. Already the applause has begun. In 1972 the Journal of Modern History devoted almost an entire issue to The Mediterranean and its author, including a fascinating autobiographical sketch by Braudel and fulsome praise of the man and his achievement from two of our most eminent ‘Anglo-Saxon’ historians, J. H. Hexter and Hugh Trevor Roper.

The Mediterranean is an impressive monument to a lifetime of love and labour for History. No library, indeed no serious student of history, can

‘ l The books cited are as follows: P. Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 6 1730 (Paris, 1960); E. Le Roy Ladurie, LRs paysans de Lunguedoc (2 vols., Paris, 1966); B. Bennassar, Valladolid au Si6cle d’Or (Paris, 1967); R. Gascon, G r a d commerce el vie urbaine au XYIe si6cfe. Lyon et ses marchumis (c. I520-c. I.580) (2 vols., Pans, 1971); H. & P. Chaunu, Sdville et I’dtlantique 1504-1650 (Paris,, 1955-9: there are seven volumes of tables and statistics; volume VIII, which is in fact three different volumes all in one, contains the commentary).

EUROPEAN EXPANSION OVERSEAS 243 afford to be without a copy. It may have taken twenty-six years to write, but which historian would not willingly sacrifice half his working life in order to create a masterpiece which will stand for ever? St. Salvator’s College, University of St. Andrews GEOFFREY PARKER

EUROPEAN EXPANSION OVERSEAS 1830-1914

‘In the 1830’s the colonial empires were smaller than they had been at any time since the early seventeenth century. . . Yet a century later, it was easier to list the few places which were not and had never been under European domination than to name those which were; . . . (and) . . . the proportion of the world’s land surface actually occupied by Europeans, whether still under direct European control as colonies or as one-time colonies was 35 per cent in 1800, 67 per cent in 1878 and 84-4 per cent in 1914.’ In this simple way, Dr. Fieldhouse’s opening paragraph sets the scene for his examination of the reasons for the spread of European influence in the less developed world in the nineteenth century and, more particularly, the reasons, after 1870, for the scramble to annex territories which had hitherto only been informally aligned to the European economy.’ The book is not quite as comprehensive as the title indicates: it centres on the countries of Western Europe and most, but not all, of their colonies. Russia gets less attention and the United States, Italy and Japan hardly any at all. Despite this, the sweep is wide and, given the controversial nature of the subject, the undertaking is a courageous one, ably executed.

Dr. Fieldhouse’s main contention is that there is continuity in imperial expansion throughout the nineteenth century and that the shift from ‘informal’ methods of influence to ‘formal’ control, which occurred largely after 1870, was a change in degree rather than kind. Moreover, the change occurred not because of any increase in the desire for empire in Europe but because problems in the extra-European world-which Dr. Fieldhouse generalizes as the ‘periphery’-forced action upon reluctant European states. He goes on to argue that the major weakness of most of the existing theories is that instead of accepting this they see imperialism after 1870 as an entirely new phenomenon generated by changes in Europe.

He distinguishes two ‘Eurocentric’ arguments which regard the new imperialism as a consequence of economic change in Europe, the first relating formal colonization to the rise of protectionism and the second (which is derived from Hobson and Lenin) associating it with the need of investors to export surplus capital from the leading industrial nations. Dr. Fieldhouse agrees that the economic difficulties of the great powers during the ‘Great Depression’ period intensified the search for new markets. But he denies the contention that, in the 1880s, when the move to formal empire got under way,

Economics and. Empire 1830-1914. By D. K. Fieldhouse. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 1973. XVI + 527 pp. E6.50.