Fernand Braudel

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Image:FernandBraudel.JPG Fernand Braudel (August 24 1902–November 27 1985) was a French historian. He revolutionized the 20th century study of his discipline by considering the effects of economics and geography on global history. He was a prominent member of the Annales School of historiography, who concentrated on meticulous historical analysis in the social sciences.

He was born in the département of the Meuse. He studied at the elite Paris Institute of Political Studies (better known as Sciences Po). In 1923 he went to Algeria, then a French colony, to teach history. Returning to France in 1932, he worked as a high school teacher and met Lucien Febvre, the co-founder of the influential Annales journal, who was to have a great influence on his work. In 1939, he joined the army but was captured in 1940 and became a prisoner of war in a camp near Lübeck in Germany, where, working from memory, he put together his great work La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen a l'époque de Philippe II. Part of his motivation for writing the book, he said, was that, as a "Northerner," he had come to love the Mediterranean. After the war he worked with Febvre in a new college, founded separately from the Sorbonne, dedicated to social and economic history.

In 1962 he wrote A History of Civilizations to be the basis for a history course, but its rejection of the traditional event-based narrative was too radical for the French ministry of education, who rejected it.

Besides La Méditerranée, his most famous work is the three-volume Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries (in French, Civilisation Matérielle, Economie et Capitalisme, XV^e-XVIII^e), which first appeared in 1979. It is a broad-scaled history of the pre-industrial modern world, presented in the minute detail demanded by the school called "cliometrics" focusing on how people made economies work.

Braudel claims that there are long term cycles in capitalist economy which developed in Europe in 12th century. Cities and later nation-states follow each other subsequently as centers of these cycles. Venice in 13th to 15th century (1250-1510), Antwerpen in 16th (1500-1569), Amsterdam in 16th to 18th (1570-1733), London and England in 18th and 19th (1733-1896).

Braudel has been considered one of the greatest of those modern historians who have emphasised the role of large scale socio-economic factors in the making and telling of history. He can also be considered as one of the precursors of World system theory.

SUNY Binghamton in New York has a "Fernand Braudel Center", and there is an Instituto Fernand Braudel de Economia Mundial in São Paulo, Brazil.

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