The Perspective of the World

This concluding volume triumphantly completes Braudel’s great trilogy on the social and economic history of the world from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. Following his highly praised The Structures of Everyday Life and The Wheels of Commerce (winner of the 1983 Los Angeles Times Book Award for History), Braudel now charts the growth of the world economy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century.

Most of the usual matter of history — politics, wars, dynastic rivalries, conflict of religious beliefs and secular ideologies — is left out. What is rendered here with the eye and brush of a master is the human activity that underlies the business of life: the bustle of the market, the calm of the great manipulators of capital, the labor of the slave, the peasant and the factory worker of the early industrial age; the fashions of the rich, the rise of the great cities and financial centers — Genoa, Venice, Amsterdam, London — and the character and development of the trade routes that nourish them; the movements of population, the ebb and flow of wealth, the slide into poverty and decay.

The sharply drawn, freshly colored glimpses of individual lives and fortunes that compose this vast moving tapestry reflect the extraordinary vivacity of a historian whose reach of mind is matched by his power to put history under the microscope.

The visual impact of his work is not confined to the writing. Maps and graphics are used with characteristic skill to illuminate a point or to demonstrate an argument. The text is profusely illustrated with contemporary prints and drawings from around the world.

The translator, Sian Reynolds, who won the Scott-Moncrieff Prize for her rendering of Volume II (The Wheels of Commerce), has once again reproduced in English the speed, vigor, and ease of a great stylist.

FERNAND BRAUDEL was born in 1902, received a degree in history in 1923, and subsequently taught in Algeria, Paris, and Sao Paulo. He spent five years as a prisoner of war in Germany, during which time he wrote his grand thesis, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, which was published in 1949. In 1946 he became a member of the editorial board of Annates, the famous journal founded by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, whom he succeeded at the College de France in 1949. He has been a member of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and since 1962 has been chief administrator of the Maison des Sciences de 1’Homme. Professor Braudel holds honorary doctorates from universities all over the world.

Jacket painting: Portuguese Merchants in India Dining with Their Feet in Water, from the Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome, Ms 1889, 16th c. (Folco Quilici).

——–

Volume III investigates what Braudel terms “world-economies”–the economic dominance of a particular city at different periods of history, from Venice to Amsterdam, London, New York.