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Braudel's Mature Mediterranean: Civilization and Capitalism

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Braudel’s Mature Mediterranean: Civilization and Capitalism

Ufuk Karagöz, Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Siena

Eyüp Özveren, Department of Economics, Middle East Technical University

To be published in Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2015, 24, 1, 69-86. Please refer

to the journal version for citation purposes

Abstract

This paper identifies the mature form of Braudel’s conception of the Mediterranean
within the broader context of his Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century,
where it is only indirectly represented. While the Mediterranean as a historical
protagonist—albeit to different degrees—appears in parallel fashion in the
unfolding of all his three major books, The Mediterranean hosts only a nascent and
fuzzy form of the tripartite schema of Civilization and Capitalism which Braudel
derived from the study of the Mediterranean region and then generalized. Hence,
Mediterranean specialists who focus on The Mediterranean exclusively miss the
additional role of the Mediterranean as a world-maker; a salient point made in
Civilization and Capitalism.

Keywords: Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean, Civilization and Capitalism, The

Identity of France, capitalism, market economy

“Miracle, surprise au moins: à Venise le temps ne

s’écoule pas comme ailleurs. La ville et par magie
hors de la durée.”

--Fernand Braudel (1977/1986c: 169)

Introduction

Fernand Braudel’s name became inextricably linked with the writing of

Mediterranean history since the publication of The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in 1949. This book cultivated a generation
of historians whose further archival work then helped fill the gaps when the time was
ripe for a second edition (Aymard 1996: 10) that came in 1966 with major revisions and

1
novelties so as to contribute to the further making of this legend (Stoianovich 1976: 66-
68; Gemelli 1995).1
Braudel’s intellectual influence over historiography (Kinser 1981; McNeill 2001)
owes much to the success of The Mediterranean, ‘with a good claim to be regarded as
the most important historical work of the century’ (Burke 1992: 16). Lucien Febvre
(1950)2 saluted the book as a revolutionary masterpiece parting ways with outmoded
political and diplomatic history. Braudel’s rising influence over the institutions of
higher learning and research in France paved the way for him to become the
personification of the Annales School (Stoianovich 1976) while The Mediterranean was
conceived as laying down its paradigm (Trevor-Roper 1972; Forster 1978).3
Braudel’s postulate of a three-tiered model of historical time and his emphasis on the
longue durée, as well as the conception of the Mediterranean as a physical and human
unity, along with his insistence on close collaboration between history and the social
sciences (see Braudel 1980), offered a critical stimulus to a whole generation of
historians. Consequently, numerous research and book projects emerged, many of
which Braudel himself either actively took part in or wholeheartedly endorsed
(Wallerstein 1976, 1991; Braudel and Duby 1986; Braudel 2009).
Braudel’s approach remained incontestably paradigmatic in the field of
Mediterranean Studies at least until the appearance of The Corrupting Sea (Horden and
Purcell 2000). Partly in response to this shift of emphasis in historiography and partly
thanks to the ‘boom’ in book and periodical publication in Mediterranean Studies
(Alcock 2005), like a true classic, The Mediterranean enjoys a new round of appraisal
in its capacity to provide a point of departure for scholarly debate and inquiry. Several
works appeared that directly refer to Braudel in their titles, aspiring to think with him
and test the limits set by his research agenda (Marino 2002; Harris 2005; Leitner 2007;
Piterberg, Ruiz and Symcox 2010; Fusaro, Heywood and Omri 2010). Even scholars
who have contributed to the development of a new approach in the field as diverse as
Predrag Matvejevic (1999), Horden and Purcell (2000), and Iain Chambers (2008) feel
obliged to acknowledge their indebtedness to Braudel as well as anchoring their own
works in one of the many voices with which his Mediterranean spoke.4 This proves the
strength, potential richness, as well as the continuing influence of the book from which
all else proliferated.

2
 All the same, the ambitious journey taken by The Mediterranean unconsciously
engendered a view that reduced Braudel to a writer of ‘only one (main) book’ so that he
became ‘the victim of his readers’ (Aymard 2001:13). Let us remind ourselves that the
twentieth century was the high time of academic overspecialization that had its
inevitable repercussions even in far more ancient disciplines such as history.
Consequently, historians of the Mediterranean have an inclination to turn for inspiration
to Braudel’s The Mediterranean at the expense of his other books, whereas world
history specialists conveniently skip this first magnum opus and concentrate on his
Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century. This is the institutional academic
backdrop against which the ‘one man, one book’ idea has been reinforced.
Rejecting the ‘one Braudel’ straightjacket, Maurice Aymard (2001: 16) suggested
that
Braudel’s writings should all be taken seriously, and that we must
consider his long life and read his books and articles in a Braudelian
way, i.e., by looking at them in the longue durée, and taking all of
them into account, rather than limiting ourselves to one exceptional
achievement.

Recently, with reference to Braudel’s second magnum opus Civilization and

Capitalism, this call has been reiterated by Piterberg, Ruiz and Symcox (2010: 11).
In this paper, we deliberately focus on Braudel’s, Civilization and Capitalism,
consisting of the three volumes titled The Structures of Everyday Life, The Wheels of
Commerce, and The Perspective of the World. We argue below that the mature form of
Braudel’s conception of the Mediterranean can be identified, neither in his first major
work, nor in his posthumously published and incomplete last manuscript, The Identity
of France, but within the broader context of his Civilization and Capitalism. The
subject- matter of inquiry in Braudel’s first magnum opus was the Mediterranean itself
which was elevated from the status of being either a backdrop or a stage for the
unfolding of historical drama to becoming its most original protagonist. This work
approached the Mediterranean from within and then ultimately elaborated its links with
the outside world. What we wish to do here is to take the other roundabout route in
order to identify the role of the Mediterranean as it appears in the broader context of
Civilization and Capitalism. There is not a single chapter or section in this book that is
exclusively identified with the Mediterranean, but the Mediterranean occupies a
disguised yet very

3
important place in the development of Braudel’s analytical construct. Whereas the
Mediterranean as a historical protagonist—albeit to different degrees—appears in all
three books, The Mediterranean hosts only a nascent and fuzzy form of the tripartite
schema of Civilization and Capitalism which Braudel derived from the study of the
Mediterranean region, and then first generalized for the study of world history, and
finally applied to French history in his last major work. The overall specification of the
role(s) of the Mediterranean in his intermediary work will thus show how the
Mediterranean can also be approached from without, in a way complimentary to the
achievement of his early work. It is only there that the Mediterranean appears as a
‘world-maker’5, that is, with its full world historical significance. This is a must for
fully understanding Braudel’s conception of the Mediterranean, which found its best
expression in Civilization and Capitalism, and then found its way into his last work. In
The Identity of France, Braudel took the mature form of the Mediterranean idea along
with the tripartite scheme of analysis as given, and applied them to the study of French
history without further far-reaching elaborations, possibly because he did not have the
time to do so. Let us remind ourselves that Braudel was not only the author of several
books, but also revised his works thoroughly from one edition to the following. In the
case of the first two major works, this reworking of the basic ideas, but especially the
interpretation he gave to the material he amassed, made a substantial difference. It
would be unrealistic to assume that he would not do the same with his final work,
especially given that he had not even completed the manuscript for submission. This is
probably why the Mediterranean idea remained very much the same from the
intermediary book to the draft of the last; hence the justification for our choice of focus
on the former.
The paper proceeds as follows: First, the analytical backbone of Civilization and
Capitalism is laid out in a nutshell. Particular importance is given to the tripartite
schema, not only because of its connection with the development of his conception of
the Mediterranean in the first place, but also for the reason that in it we identify a proxy
for the intellectual refinement of his thought.6 In the following section, the deployment
of the Mediterranean in this book is discussed and The Mediterranean is revisited in
order to compare and contrast whether Braudel’s approach differed from one book to
the next. Different authors have referred to continuities between Braudel’s two major

4
works without necessarily spelling out exactly where the continuities (or
discontinuities) are. For example, Michel Morineau (1988: 27) spoke of a persistent
grand design as evidence of this continuity. More specifically, François Dosse (1986:
89, 90) singled out the three-tiered pluralisation of temporality, every one of which is
associated with one part of The Mediterranean, as the connecting thread from 1949
onwards. Aymard (1996: 11) matched the first part of The Mediterranean with the first
volumes of Civilization and Capitalism and (the uncompleted) The Identity of France
(1988) implying the persistence of the tripartite schema throughout Braudel’s lifetime.
Philippe Steiner (1988: 140) identified continuity on the basis of the considerable role
of ‘geo-history’. All these works put stress on what was distinctive, whereas there are a
few others (Ferro 1986: 7; Vovelle 1986: 18) that underline what they found missing.
Our paper casts a new light on this intriguing issue. The penultimate section keeps track
of the Mediterranean idea in Braudel’s last major work, The Identity of France, before
the concluding section offers a number of qualifications to the arguments presented
earlier.

Braudel and Capitalism: Turning the Tables

The conceptual apparatus in Civilization and Capitalism upon which the whole
edifice rests must be briefly portrayed in order to better make sense of the roles
attributed to the inland sea in this work. The decades long project began in 1952 when
Febvre asked Braudel to write a book that would ‘provide a summary of the work that
had been done on the economic history of pre-industrial Europe’ (Braudel 1992a: 23) to
be included in the collection Destins du Monde.
In The Mediterranean, Braudel championed a historical language whose most
innovative aspect was its insistence on the ‘perdurability and majestic immobility’ of
the Mediterranean life that imprisoned man in ‘unchanging (or at least very slowly
changing) conditions which stubbornly assert themselves over and over again’ (1972c:
454). In a 1950 dated paper, ‘Toward a Historical Economics’, this view was remapped
into his call to the historians to ‘study not only progress . . . but also its opposite, that
harvest of contrary experiences which fought hard before they went down’ (1980: 84).
To put it into more concrete economic terms, Braudel, ‘a historian of peasant stock’
(1972c: 449), pointed to the existence of vast zones of inertia within a subsistence

5
economy ‘outside the sphere of the international economy of their age’ (1980: 85) that
kept up with ‘the trades and rhythms of the globe’ (1992c: 18). Hence, it was with this
awareness that Braudel approached Febvre’s proposal. This becomes clear in his
Introduction to Civilization and Capitalism:
[N]ot only did I often feel the need to go back to the sources, but I
confess that the more research I did, the more disconcerted I became
by direct observation of so-called economic realities . . . because they
did not seem to fit, or even flatly contradicted the classical and
traditional theories of what was supposed to have happened. (1992a:
23)

As years passed by, Braudel’s (1992a: 23) inquiries culminated in the blatant
rejection of the textbook account of unilinear progress within a homogenous economy.
Instead, for him,

there were not one but several economies. The one most frequently
written about is the so-called market economy, in other words the
mechanisms of production and exchange linked to rural activities, to
small shops and workshops, to banks, exchanges, fairs and (of course)
markets. It was on these ‘transparent’ visible realities, and on the
easily observed processes that took place within them that the
language of economic science was originally founded. And as a result
it was from the start confined within this privileged arena, to the
exclusion of any others. (1992a:23)

Braudel departed from the easily observable realities and pursued the ghosts of two
other ‘economies’ that went unnoticed in traditional accounts:

But there is another, shadowy zone, often hard to see for lack of
adequate historical documents, lying underneath the market economy:
this is that elementary basic activity which went everywhere . . . This
rich zone, like a layer covering the earth, I have called for want of a
better explanation material life or material civilization . . . infra-
economy, the informal half of economic activity, the world of self-
sufficiency and barter of goods and services within a very small
radius. On the other hand, looking up instead of down from the vast
plane of the market economy, one finds that active social hierarchies
were constructed on top of it: they could manipulate exchange to their
advantage and disturb the established order . . . To me, this second
shadowy zone, hovering above the sunlit world of the market
economy and constituting its upper limit so to speak, represents the
favoured domain of capitalism. (1992a: 23-24)

6
 Hence, instead of writing exclusively about market economy in a single volume,
Braudel ended up in a three-volume work erected upon the framework of a tripartite
schema7 consisting of material life, market economy, and capitalism as its constituent
layers. This conceptual apparatus is a highly original one that could open new vistas for
economists and social scientists (Aglietta 1986; Arrighi 2001; Özveren 2005).8 This
becomes clearer when its implications for the two major rivalling positions in economic
thought are traced.
Although ‘capitalism tends to become the sole subject matter of economics, neither
the term nor the concept has as yet been universally recognized by representatives of
[mainstream] academic economics’ (Sombart 1951: 195). In the Walrasian equilibrium-
oriented framework, capitalism is dissolved within the market whereas its Marxian
alternative hides the market under capitalism. Either way, the fortunes and lifespans of
the two are linked together whereas if they are dissociated, one could survive without
the other (Goursalas 1986: 58-9). Braudel does not only treat them separately but also
differentiates them conceptually. The fundamental difference between the market
economy and capitalism for Braudel (1992b: 230) is that the former implies a very high
level of competition ‘with its many horizontal communications between the different
markets’ the agents of which stand on an equal footing with each other in their
exchange relations. This is where Braudel’s notion of market economy borrows heavily
from classical and neoclassical economics. Here, ‘a degree of automatic coordination
usually links supply, demand and prices’ (Braudel 1992b: 230). Thus, the market is
associated with ‘the logic of free competition’ (Braudel 1992b: 577). Yet, to identify
market with capitalism just because ‘the two things coexisted and developed
simultaneously’ is an arbitrary one according to Braudel since the latter is the zone
where ‘the logic of monopoly, speculation and power’ (1992b: 577) reigns supreme.
Capitalism is the ‘anti-market’ (1992b: 230)—the ‘enemy’ of the market in
Wallerstein’s (1991: 202) parlance—where ‘cunning, and intelligence’ (Braudel 1992b:
418) blended with ‘risk-taking and speculation’ (Braudel 1992b: 578) are pivotal in
inventing a ‘counter-game, to oppose the regular mechanisms and instruments of the
market, in order to make it work differently’ (Braudel 1992b: 578). In this layer, ‘the
great predators roam and the law of jungle operates’ (Braudel 1992b: 230) so that ‘quite
naturally and without any qualms’ capitalists ‘bend the rules of the market economy’

7
(Braudel 1992b: 401). That is to say, ‘exploitation rather than [fair] exchange’ ruled
supreme, implying the supersession of the laws of supply and demand’ (Braudel 1992b:
176).
On the other hand, Braudel also differed from Marx, for whom capitalism was a
mode of production in which surplus value is extracted from the production process
through wage labor. Walking away from the noisy sphere of the market, Marx defined
capitalism in the hidden abodes of production. In this account, capitalism is associated
with a certain phase of history, next in line to that of slavery and feudalism, triggered by
the advent of industrialisation. On the contrary, in Braudel, historical capitalism appears
not as a mode of production but as a mode of accumulation that also includes the
production of commodities based on wage labor, but not necessarily being reduced to it.
Besides the concrete forms assumed by capitalism in different time and space
combinations, the essence of capitalism over the longue durée is

its unlimited flexibility, its capacity for change and adaptation. If

there is, as I believe, a certain unity in capitalism, from thirteenth-
century Italy to the present-day West, it is here above all that such
unity must be located and observed . . . the essential characteristics of
capitalism was its capacity to slip at a moment’s notice from one form
or sector to another, in times of crisis or of pronounced decline in
profit rates. (Braudel 1992b: 433)

In this way, Braudel was able to reject the conventional Marxian approach that
conceptualizes capitalism as evolving in sequential steps ‘passing through various
stages of growth, from trade to finance and industry—with the ‘mature’ industrial phase
seen as the only ‘true’ capitalism’ (Braudel 1992b: 433). This rejection means also
parting ways with the conventional wisdom of true capitalism being first born in
England with the Industrial Revolution that helped institute and spread the factory
system based on wage labor, the implication of which for our work will be elaborated
further down. The imprint of this distinctive analytical framework will be kept in mind
when considering the place of the Mediterranean in Civilization and Capitalism.

The Mediterranean: Protagonist in the Historical Drama

A logical implication of the broader geographical scope, covering little less than the
whole world, of the three-volume work is the imperative to locate the movement of

8
human beings and their possessions, from commodities to ideas and techniques, in a
temporal- and spatial-axis. Especially for the Mediterranean, ‘a link in a vast trading
zone stretching from Gibraltar to China’ (Braudel 1992b: 557), this is inevitable. Hence,
in its capacity as a relay point, the Mediterranean acted as a bi-directional conveyor belt
between the distant little known lands of Far East, the Indian subcontinent, the
Americas, as well as within the shores washed by the inland sea.
To name but a few, grain mill (Braudel 1992a: 358), rice (Braudel 1992a: 110),
cotton and silk (Braudel 1992a: 326) were among the expedients that thoroughly
influenced material life, if not the limits of the possible in the early modern period.
Another commodity that travelled through the world before reaching the Mediterranean
was sugar, which proved to be of decisive importance as far as the operations of
capitalism is concerned. (Braudel 1992a: 224; 1992b: 272-273)
Apparently, the image of a conveyor belt, a fortiori an intermediate link, excludes
the possibility of further operation upon the transmitted entity. However, in case of the
bill of exchange as a financial technique, the Mediterranean appears both as a conveyor
belt and an innovator:
[T]he bill of exchange, which had been familiar in the days of the
Islamic triumphs of the ninth and tenth centuries, appeared in the West
in the twelfth . . . a time when money had to be transported over
enormous distances, across the Mediterranean and through the Italian
cities to the fairs of Champagne. (Braudel 1992a: 477)

The Italian merchants were the carriers of this convenient method from the ports of
Islam. Forms of raising loans, stock market operations and forerunners of modern
banking methods were central to the transactions of Florence, Venice, and Genoa
(Braudel 1992a: 512; 1992b: 100-101, 392-393).
The pioneering innovative role of the Mediterranean economies in spearheading the
development of capitalism is explicitly emphasized in a distinction made along the
European North-South axis:

It cannot be denied, I would suggest, that Reformation Europe as a

whole overtook the Mediterranean economy, brilliant as this was and
already long-experienced in the ways of capitalism, (I am thinking of
Italy in particular) . . . in about 1590, the centre of gravity of Europe
swung over to the Protestant North . . . Until then, and perhaps even
until 1610-1620, the word capitalism applies primarily to the South . .

9
 . Amsterdam was only beginning to be important at this time. We
might also note that the North had made no discoveries . . . Nor did
the North invent any of the instruments of capitalism. (Braudel 1992b:
569)

The successful Mediterranean practices constituted models for the latecomers in the
race. Especially Venice, for long enjoying its place at the commanding heights of the
European world-economy, signified an important source of business methods: ‘The
spice-market shifted from Venice and its Fondaco dei Tedeschi to Antwerp (with a
short sojourn at Lisbon) and then to Amsterdam’ (Braudel 1992a: 222). The success of
Amsterdam was made possible by ‘collecting, storing, selling and reselling the goods of
the universe. It was a policy which had already been practiced by Venice’ (Braudel
1992c: 236).
The commercial monopoly of Venice in particular—and of the Mediterranean cities
in general—was to be reproduced time and again in the European landscape. The great
Spanish merchant company Carrera de Indias, a state monopoly, ‘was imitated from the
Venetian model’ (Braudel 1992b: 444). What is more, ‘[e]ven the Bank of Amsterdam
was modelled on the Venetian Bank of the Rialto. And it was by competing with the
state monopolies of the southern countries—Spain and Portugal—that the great
merchant companies of the North were forged’ (Braudel 1992b: 569).
The financial expedients wheeled on by England to obtain the position of world
supremacy by dethroning Amsterdam was a restaging of Venice’s ‘model of capitalist
wisdom. For she invented, as early as the thirteenth century, a method of raising money
which would be practiced successfully by England in the eighteenth century’ (Braudel
1992b: 522). The Genoese practices supplied another source: ‘In the old days, the fairs
had offered similar concentrations, with credit taking precedence over cash. England
was merely giving new dimensions to old solutions and found herself flooded with more
paper than the Besançon fairs and with just as much as Amsterdam’ (Braudel 1992c:
364).
A step back from Civilization and Capitalism is necessary at this point in order to
keep track of the continuities between this work and The Mediterranean. The portrait of
the Mediterranean drawn by Braudel in the latter book reveals a remarkable parallelism
with that of the former. Cultural diffusion and give-and-take were the rule in the

10
Mediterranean, where living is equivalent ‘to exchange—men, ideas, ways of life,
beliefs—or habits of courtship’ (Braudel 1972b: 76). In Mediterranean history,
the rule has been that Mediterranean civilization spreads far beyond its
shores in great waves that are balanced by continual returns. What
leaves the sea comes back and then departs once more [hence the]
circulation of man and goods, both material and intangible, formed
concentric rings round the Mediterranean. (Braudel 1972a: 170)

The islands in turn were transmitters of material culture (Braudel 1972a: 149-155).
To continue with the innovator Mediterranean, Braudel, in The Mediterranean, put
forward Italy as the realm with advanced monetary techniques: ‘The coming of the age
of paper, its extension if not its first appearance, in fact marked the beginning of a new
economic structure . . . The Genoese were pioneers in this respect and derived from it
the usual advantages brought by progressive techniques’ (Braudel 1972a: 510). Dutch
capitalism, ‘the superstructures of which, including the most modern form of credit
machinery’ were at work in the beginning of the seventeenth century, was to replace the
Genoese as the leaders of European world-economy but ‘the old model, patiently
assembled over time, was in every respect a pattern for the new’ (Braudel 1972a: 510).
All in all, until the mid-seventeenth century when the center of gravity shifted
towards the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean continued to be the most original
protagonist in the unfolding of narrative in Civilization and Capitalism. As a matter of
fact, in the trilogy, fitting with its purpose, Braudel went further than in The
Mediterranean insofar as he explicitly attributed the historical and institutional origins
of European capitalism to the Mediterranean. This becomes all the more striking in his
summary lectures of the basic findings of Civilization and Capitalism in his
Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism:

The northern countries took over the place that earlier had so long and
so brilliantly been occupied by the old capitalist centers of the
Mediterranean. They invented nothing, either in technology or in
business management. Amsterdam copied Venice, as New York
would one day copy London (Braudel 1977: 66-7; emphases added)

The Mediterranean: A Springboard for Analytical Construction

Up to now, in its different facets, the Mediterranean appeared as an active participant

of the wider historical narrative. An equally important and solid contribution was

11
realized in the theoretical front when it supplied the empirical evidence that triggered
the three-tiered pyramid—material life at the ground level, economic life or market
economy at the middle storey, and capitalism at the pinnacle—in Braudel’s mind. This
gives us an opportunity to uncover the differences, if any, between The Mediterranean
and Civilization and Capitalism in this respect. In the latter work, while elaborating the
definition of world-economy, Braudel explained how he conceived the Mediterranean in
his earlier work:

I have in the past, for instance, studied the Mediterranean in the

sixteenth century as a Welttheater or Weltwirtschaft—a world-theatre
or world-economy—meaning by this not merely the sea itself but the
whole area stimulated by its trading activities, whether near its shores
or far away. I have treated it in short as a world itself. The
Mediterranean region, although divided politically, culturally and
socially, can effectively be said to have a certain economic unity, one
imposed upon it from above on the initiative of the dominant cities of
northern Italy, Venice foremost among them, but also Milan, Genoa
and Florence. This Mediterranean economy did not however represent
the whole of the economic life of the sea and the surrounding regions.
It was so to speak the highest plane of the economy. (1992c: 22)

Indeed, in Part Two of The Mediterranean, ‘Collective Destinies and General

Trends’, Braudel used the concept of ‘world-economy’ more or less in the manner given
above (1972a: 371, 384). Already in the first edition of The Mediterranean, Braudel had
spoken of an imperfect world-economy, in the Mediterranean, limited to rare luxury
items on the one side and to the necessities on the other (1949: 333). The Mediterranean
itself was conceived as not fully constituted; a zone where integrating tendencies were
constantly countered by centrifugal ones working their effects on subunits every one of
which was a Mediterranean in itself (1949: 296). The most important single difference
between the two editions was the insertion of a new section entitled ‘Is It Possible to
Construct a Model of the Mediterranean Economy?’ 9 since the first edition only
contained a brief section with the heading ‘Les possibilités d’une économie-monde’
(Possibilities of a world-economy) which was anything but an embryonic formulation of
the former (1949: 328-33, 1972a: 418-61). In short, the concept and hypothesis of a
world-economy was in Braudel’s mind from the beginning, but its evidence and
elaboration came along in the course of time. Braudel seems to have hit upon the
concept while improvising with evidence without being fully aware of the importance of

12
his discovery; therefore the term lacked the rigor of a reflexive concept (Fourquet 1988:
77). Even so, it is important that as early as then Braudel chose not to translate the
concept he borrowed from a German scholar of the 1920’s as ‘world economy’ but as
‘world-economy’; a choice to which Wallerstein (1986: 43) ascribes great significance.
Be that as it may, though Braudel was aware of the inequality between zones within
a world-economy, in his early magnum opus, the corresponding conceptual framework
of a hierarchy based on a tripartite schema, is missing. With reference to his further
study of the evidence provided by the Mediterranean, Braudel gave us the full story of
how he came to conceive economy as a heterogeneous reality:

Early enthusiasm made me study the history of the Mediterranean in

the second half of the sixteenth century. I navigated mentally through
these fifty years, putting into port, bartering and trading. Then I
moved on to the history of the Mediterranean in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, thinking that I would feel lost, that this would be
a strange world in which I would have to serve my apprenticeship all
over again. But I quickly discovered that I was on familiar territory, in
1660 or 1670, or even in 1750 . . . There were a few changes here and
there, but they nearly all had to do with the superstructure . . . The
olive oil of Apulia was, by the eighteenth century, being exported to
northern Europe through Trieste, Ancona, Naples and Ferrara, and
much less was going to Venice; this was a significant change, but did
it matter very much to the peasants in their olive-groves? It is on the
basis of this experience that I interpret the construction of world-
economies and of the mechanisms through which capitalism and
market economy can coexist and interpenetrate one another without
merging entirely. (1992c: 35-36, emphasis added)

The conceptual distinction between market economy and capitalism was never made
explicit in The Mediterranean. When Braudel (1992b: 24) spoke of a market economy,
he did not mean ‘a normal and often routine exchange economy’ with symmetrically
distributed buyers and sellers competing fairly against each other in a transparent
manner. Instead, it covers the whole range of goods and services exchanged in a certain
area within a time period. Yet, under the common denominator of exchange there exists
a diverse array of transactions that are carried out by various agents, and the
conspicuous differences between them do not escape the careful eyes of Braudel. In
fact, the following excerpt from The Mediterranean might be considered as the
harbinger of the tripartite schema that realized its full potential only years later in
Civilization and Capitalism:

13
 Commerce is a many sided activity . . . ‘Commerce’ can mean the
fruit that a peasant woman takes to market . . . or it can mean the
goods handled by the Venetian galere de mercato or the Casa de la
Contratación at Seville. The range of activities it may embrace is
immense. Besides, in the sixteenth century all goods were not
commercially handled, far from it. The market economy covered only
a fraction of economic life. More primitive forms—barter and autarky
—rivalled it everywhere. (1972a: 438)

Here, the essential demarcation line between material life based on self-sufficiency
and the circulation of goods in commerce seems to be made by underlining the fact that
most of the economy was in fact a ‘non-economy’, in other words infra-economy. As
for the market economy, its interpretation is far from unequivocal. Notwithstanding the
recognition of the contradistinction between petty commerce and state monopolies,
from the passage above, it might be inferred that the market economy applies to all
entities that are handled by numerous instruments of exchange. The other passages,
albeit limited in number, where the reader witnesses the spectacle of the market
economy also lean towards the loose use of the concept (see Braudel 1972a: 429-430,
451, 460).
In sharp contrast to the fuzzy connotation of the concept of market economy,
‘capitalism’ was quite at home in The Mediterranean. It would suffice just to cite a
number of cases where Braudel uses the term in a generic fashion: ‘Commercial
capitalism’ (1972a: 211, 319, 441, 598), ‘land capitalism’ (1972a: 599), ‘urban
capitalism’ (1972a: 589), ‘types of capitalism’ (1972b: 896), ‘international capitalism’
(1972b: 825), ‘Genoese capitalism’ (1972a: 379, 394, 621, 638), ‘history of capitalism’
(1972a: 211, 379, 500, 517), ‘hybrid capitalism of Amsterdam’ (1972a: 394, 500), and
‘Italian capitalism’ (1972a: 218).
Befitting this prolonged parade of the term, Braudel (1972a: 319) correctly
established its connection with long-distance trade: ‘The imperatives of large-scale,
long-distance commerce, its accumulation of capital, acted as driving forces’; ‘long-
distance trade, Fernhandel, the very life-blood of commercial capitalism’ (1972a: 441).
The logic of the mechanism that gave rise to superprofits, rapid reproduction and
accumulation of capital was made particularly clear. Furthermore, the monopolistic
nature of capitalism in general (1972a: 320-321) and the particular instances in the

14
history of capitalism, such as the Venetian capitalist empire and the Genoese mastery of
the finances of Europe (1972a: 373, 500-517), are laid out.
Perhaps the most valiant and revealing attempt to provide capitalism with an
appropriate definition stepped in the discussion of the allegedly causal relationship
between Judaism and capitalism. First came the rejection: Not that ‘all Jewish
merchants were rich and trouble-free; nor that Judaism was, by any speculative vocation
or ethical assumptions, responsible for what we now call capitalism. . . of the sixteenth
century’, and then the definition: ‘Capitalism can mean many things. It implies amongst
others a system of calculation, an acquaintance with certain techniques relating to
money and credit . . . to be successful [it] presupposes a network, the organization of
mutual confidence and cooperation throughout the world’ (1972b: 816-817). An
observation needs to be made concerning the nevertheless weaker characterization of
capitalism in The Mediterranean compared to that of Civilization and Capitalism. It is
plausible to claim that The Mediterranean only possessed an embryonic form of the
analytical framework used in Civilization and Capitalism and lacked an in-depth
understanding of the reciprocal links among various planes of economic activity. It is
only after the further study of the evidence supplied by the towering urban network of
the region that Braudel clearly envisioned the pillars of his tripartite schema. It is thus
no coincidence that he accredited the Mediterranean as the fount and matrix of
European capitalism in his later work(s).10 It was only then that Braudel could trace its
genealogy back to Mediterranean foundations: ‘Thirteenth-century—and a fortiori
fourteenth-century Florence was a capitalist city, whatever meaning one attaches to the
word’ (1992b: 578), deploying ‘the whole panoply of forms of capitalism—commercial,
industrial, banking’ (1992c: 621).

Retrogression of the Mediterranean-Effect in The Identity of France

Having seen above how Civilization and Capitalism improved upon what was
already present in The Mediterranean, it would now be worthwhile to take a closer look
at the status of the Mediterranean in Braudel’s last manuscript, as approached, this time
from within France, albeit the fact that Braudel himself approached France after a
lifelong detour from without ‘as if it were another country’ (1988: 15). First of all, with
this last intended magnum opus, Braudel stepped out of the domain of economic history

15
into the wider terrain of general history. This had important implications for the
tripartite schema which was conceived within the framework of general economic
history. In contradistinction, the general history of France was to contain further
elaborations added to the original tripartite schema in order to address political, social
and cultural processes to be observed. Braudel described successive volumes he had in
mind, only the first two of which he purportedly ‘completed’ before his death.
Ironically, this makes the manuscript all the more comparable to his previous major
works.

The Identity of France is divided into four main sections: I. History

and Environment (inspired by geography); II. People and Products
(demography and political economy); III. State, Culture and society
(politics, cultural studies, sociology); IV. France outside France
(which will go beyond the usual remit of international relations and
provide a conclusion for the whole work). (Braudel 1988: 25)

The careful reader will immediately notice that the first two sections added together
correspond to the constituent layers of the tripartite schema. Within the narrative,
Braudel worked with the same framework of triptych-based analysis. After a lengthy
discussion of human geography to do with the structures of everyday life corresponding
to the lowest layer, Braudel ventured into the historical process of market formation
associated with the intermediary layer. It was in relation with the third and topmost
layer that Braudel diagnosed some of France’s important setbacks and shortcomings.
First and foremost, France was ‘an economic failure—why not even call it a capitalist
failure … Apart from the ‘continental’ century of the Champagne fairs—if then—the
centre of Europe, where wealth collected, was never to be France’ (Braudel 1988: 327-
328).
For Braudel, France was the richest country in Europe in terms of the precious metals
that circulated as money in its domain, but economically speaking, it was far from being
first (1986b: 354). This wealth was underemployed and France was conceived, like
India and China, as a large necropolis for precious metals (Braudel 1986b: 351).
Braudel also concluded that capitalism was stationed at the top of French life. Since
late eighteenth century it had become observable. It was nevertheless rather late in
penetrating French life, and as a further consequence, the dominance of a ‘peasant
economy’ (économie paysanne; 1986b: 10) was prolonged well into the twentieth

16
century. Perhaps because of the thinness of capitalist stratum, even with the impetus
provided in the second half of the nineteenth century, French capitalism preferred the
foreign world and colonies to France. In short, ‘Pas assez capitaliste, la France? Oui,
sans doute’ (Braudel 1986b: 420, emphasis added).
All this above discussion is in accord with the tripartite schema that has been
successfully deployed in the study of French history. However, the tripartite schema has
neither been significantly modified nor improved. It has been used as it is. In one
respect, The Identity of France entails a major methodological shift stemming from a
change in the conception of time drawn on. As Braudel reduced the spatial scope of his
analysis from the world to France, he increased the time scale he worked with. In
contradistinction to the majority of historians who ignore developments in prehistory,
Braudel insisted on incorporating prehistory into the narrative (1986a: 14, 1988: 20). In
this work, Braudel characterized ‘the past and present as a diabolical and inseparable
couple’ (1988: 27). It is the presence of the past in the present that really matters, and
more importantly, it is the living presence of a far more remote past (Braudel 1986a:
61).11 Braudel moved from the longue durée to the très longue durée (see 1988: 305).
This major novelty however did not have any important effect on his conception of
the Mediterranean. As a matter of fact, he had already ventured into the très longue
durée of the Mediterranean with his complementary manuscript dated 1969, Les
Mémoires de la Méditerranée: Préhistoire et Antiquité (1998) that has also been
posthumously published. In his preface to the manuscript, he admitted how this book
project provided him with an opportunity to make a fantastic voyage through the très
longue durée (1998: 21-2) Therefore, methodologically speaking, the last magnum
opus did not achieve anything new as far as the expression of the Mediterranean-effect
is concerned.
We will now briefly explore how the content of the Mediterranean idea changed, if at
all, when approached from within the historical advent of France. The persistence of the
Mediterranean factor as ‘The South’ in the protracted making of France, where ‘division
is within the house and unity is no more than a façade, a superstructure, a shout in the
wind’ is recognized by Braudel (1988: 119). The South is also identified as the ultimate
loser. Braudel compounds the north-south dichotomy in the making of France with the
inland-peripheral one where the inland far outweighed the peripheral rival. In one

17
instance, there was an overlap (1988: 250). Marseille was in one sense the center of the
Mediterranean-looking South. During the period of 1481-3, France mastered Provence
and Marseille and thereby ‘had a clear run on the Mediterranean’ as it ‘completed its
Mediterranean seaboard’ (Braudel 1988: 278, 325). Nevertheless Marseille was far from
fit to play a pivotal role in giving France a major leap forward (Braudel 1988: 280). It is
no surprise that Marseille was circumvented by Lyon, ‘the meeting point for business,
and for many years the financial and capitalist pole of the kingdom’ (1Braudel 988:
251). However Lyon was at least as much looking to eastbound European connections
as the European economy picked up a new momentum as it had historically been an
extension of the Mediterranean before (Braudel 1988: 279). In a nutshell, according to
Braudel, the Mediterranean that had succeeded as a protagonist in the making of the
modern world was nevertheless not as influential in the making of France. This may
well have to do with the fact that France, in the making of which the Mediterranean
played a less than proportionate role, also failed to become a capitalist center par
excellence (Braudel 1988: 280-281).

Conclusion
In this paper, we attempted to unearth the potential insights that could be drawn from
a serious consideration of the proposition that ‘Fernand Braudel is not a man of single
book’ (Aymard 2001: 16). Reducing Braudel to The Mediterranean might induce a
biased interpretation that comes at the cost of a clearer understanding and a more
balanced view that could be gained through establishing the links within the ouevre of
the master.12 To carve out the practical and analytical roles assumed by the
Mediterranean in the unfolding of Civilization and Capitalism is a way of recovering
the lost opportunity. Such a choice is an unusual one since the rule seems to be
remaining within the topics, hypothesis, and weaknesses inherent in Braudel’s first
magnum opus. Braudel is not only a man of several major books but there is also more
than one Braudel, so to speak, as far as the division of time and economy into triple
planes is considered among The Mediterranean, Civilization and Capitalism, and The
Identity of France.
Contrary to the emphasis put on the longue durée identified with very slow change if
not outright endurance, the careful reader will notice that the appearances of the
Mediterranean up to now mostly took place in a surprisingly dynamic fashion. The

18
perspective of towns and cities bordering the inland sea has dominated our
representation of the Mediterranean landscape as portrayed in Braudel’s works that are
of interest here. Yet, our aim was not to belittle or neglect the ‘all permanent, slow-
moving, or recurrent features of Mediterranean life’ that Braudel focused on in the first
part of The Mediterranean (1972a: 353). Such a historical language has its counterpart
in the first volume of Civilization and Capitalism, where Braudel introduces the ‘all-
pervasive, repetitive’ structures ‘perpetuated through endless ages’ that are inherent in a
number of parahistoric themes ranging from food to costume, lodging and technology
(1992a: 27-29). Moreover, the existence of vast zones of self-sufficiency and autarky
prisoned in inertia is explicitly expressed in The Mediterranean (1972a: 382-85), and in
Civilization and Capitalism Braudel wrote: ‘[T]his layer of stagnant history is
enormous’ (1992a: 28) so much so that within the tripartite schema ‘material life
constitutes, throughout the ancien régime, the broadest layer of all’ (1992b: 22).
Therefore, in both books, the inert and static nature of ‘an overall structure which had
an obstinate tendency towards a routine balance’ is made clear (1992b: 25), not to
mention The Identity of France where the effect of the longue durée was amplified.
Yet, Braudel also gave a pride of place to the towns and cities in his writings. The
Mediterranean as a human unit is made possible by communications and towns that are
nodal points in a densely woven, complex and dynamic urban network: ‘The
Mediterranean is an urban region’ (Braudel 1972a: 278), cities of which are like
‘motors, turning over, warming up, exhausting themselves then setting off again’
(Braudel 1972a: 352), facilitating change and movement, albeit very slowly. In an
immobile environment, assuming the most dynamic roles, urban economies acted as the
‘driving forces’ (Braudel 1972a: 341), ‘subordinating everything else to their needs’
(Braudel 1972a: 278). In fact, towns and cities are among the nonhuman actors that
have important bearings in the operations of capitalism. In this capacity, they displayed
a higher momentum of dynamism and adaptability to changing conjunctures since
‘capitalism alone had comparative freedom of movement . . . where other structures
were inflexible (those of material life and, no less, those of ordinary economic life)’
(Braudel 1992b: 562).
As such, the emphasis on the great cities is compatible with the frequent appearance
of the urban monsters of the Italian peninsula in previous sections. The link between

19
urban economies, world-economy and capitalism that is emphasized boldly in
Civilization and Capitalism (Braudel 1992a: 509-514, 1992c: 89) could be considered
as the amplified echo of the remark made earlier in The Mediterranean: Cities ‘with
their agile and dangerous capitalism were in a position to control and exploit the whole
world’ (Braudel 1972a: 342, also see 1992c: 44).
To witness this once more, we need to turn back to Venice, a great city the history of
which Braudel (1972b: 894-895) had ‘personally studied in some detail’ before The
Mediterranean was published. In this book, with respect to the incorporation of the
coastal strip of the Italian peninsula into the Venetian-centred European world-
economy, Braudel does not have much to say in terms of the difference between market
economy and capitalism that is of import to us (see 1972a: 54). In Civilization and
Capitalism, Braudel’s verdict is unequivocal 13:

A significant example, to remain within this context, is the

domestication of the Adriatic by Venice . . . The pattern of domination
exerted by Venice can be found elsewhere as well. Essentially it rests
upon a dialectic between a market economy developing almost
unaided and spontaneously, and an over-arching economy which
seizes these humble activities from above, redirects them and holds
them at its mercy. (1992c: 36-38, emphasis added)

Thus, in his first two major works, Braudel draws remarkably similar pictures of the
Mediterranean, articulating its immobile aspects in juxtaposition to the dynamism
provided by its tight urban network. However, The Mediterranean is far from presenting
the reader with a systematic and consistent use of the tripartite schema in the
explanation of historical phenomena as developed in Civilization and Capitalism, and
then used without significant change in The Identity of France. The building blocks of
the schema which are present in the various pages of the former book are discussed in
diverse sections and thus lack a robust treatment that would establish the logical
implications of their interactive relationship. It is thus Braudel’s tripartite schema that
matures in the course of time and not so much his original conception of the
Mediterranean.
Historians are first and foremost concerned with time-effects and so is Braudel. In
contradistinction, Braudel was also very attentive to space-effects which remain the
privileged domain of human geographers. Intrigued by the multiple charms of Venice as

20
a historian, Braudel (1977/1986c: 169) once remarked, as quoted in the epigram that
leads this paper, how it remained outside the domain of time-effect. In a similar vein, in
one of his more theoretical moments, Braudel (1980: 31) spoke of the architectural
nature of ‘structures’ for the historian, but also how structures (including ‘mental
frameworks [that] can form prisons of the longue durée’) could actually distort the
effect of time, changing its scope and speed. It may be that novelties in ideas and
conceptions come after actual changes in places and geographies occur. This is because
ideas and conceptions are admittedly also ‘structural’, that is change resistant. For them
to respond with a lag to an actual change in places, the change must first materialize.
This is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Often times, the response may not
come about at all as there exists no guarantee that a catching up will ultimately take
place, given the conservative nature of institutional structures of knowledge within
which ideas and conceptions are expected to develop. If this is so, then we may be
faced in the above general conclusion concerning Braudel—where the conceptualization
comes much later than the original embryonic conception—with a rare success story
demonstrating how the time-effect, albeit slowly, caught up with the space-effect.
Without Braudel’s analytical accomplishment, the riddle Venice posed would have
remained unresolved.

Notes

1. Braudel entertained the idea of dropping out the entire third part of his book that dealt with the
history of events while he was reediting thoroughly the rest. He was convinced not to do so because
of its historical significance as part of the 1949 book. We are told that because he was dissatisfied
with this part he did not revise it as much as he did the first two parts (Ferro 1986: 8). In any case, a
geographer also singles out this part as the most historical yet the least interesting part of the whole
book (Grataloup 1986: 74).
2. For the early reception and review of The Mediterranean see Marino (2004, 2010), and Volume 24,
Number 1 issue of Review, A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center.
3. Braudel was the editor of Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations from 1956 to 1968, and the
president of the Sixième Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris from 1956 to 1972.
For the relationship between Braudel and the Annales School, also see Braudel (1972c), Hexter
(1972), and Burke (1990). The impact of the Annales School on the social sciences is also well
documented in the Winter/Spring 1978 (Volume 1, Number 3/4) issue of Review.
4. Not surprisingly, Matvejevic, the author of a fantastic-rhapsodic Mediterranean: A Cultural
Landscape, quotes from Braudel what suits him best: ‘But as Fernand Braudel warns, “The history
of the Mediterranean constitutes a mass of knowledge that defies all reasonable synthesis” (La

21
 Méditerranée: l’espace et l’histoire [The Mediterranean: Space and History], Paris 1985, p. 157).’
Despite his certain reservations, Matvejevic, admits: ‘[Braudel’s magnum opus, The Mediterranean]
is the best study we have, the pinnacle of historical discourse on the Mediterranean for the
foreseeable future’ (Matvejevic 1999: 213). Horden and Purcell identify as their ‘project’s great
inspiration and progenitor, Braudel’s Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World’ (Horden and
Purcell 2005: 358). The same book is taken as the point of departure for the first chapter by Ian
Chambers, the author of Mediterranean Crossings, for its recognition of the Mediterranean that
embraced diversity and always spoke with many voices (2008: 1). Jean-François Lyotard argued: ‘A
work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not
modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’ (1984: 79). In this sense, true
postmodernity was at the least simultaneous with modernity. That Braudel has escaped devastating
criticism seems to do with the much richer texture, content and openness to interpretation of his
work.
5. Braudel’s Mediterranean has been a ‘world-maker’ in more than one sense. Braudel’s approach has
been applied quite successfully to geohistorical realities other than that of the Mediterranean, as
diverse as the Indian Ocean, Far East, Southeast Asia, and the North Sea (see Reid 1988; Chaudhuri
1990; Roding and van Voss 1996; Sutherland 2003; Wong 2003; Gipouloux 2009). These
applications can be seen as a test of the strength of Braudel’s case for the Mediterranean. In contrast,
Horden and Purcell’s (2000) alternative formulation of Mediterranean specificity as a connectivity
arising from the climatically based unstable equilibrium of risk-ridden agriculture-based localities
has not yet found its universal application in the sequel they have promised with the provisional title
of The Liquid Continent. Braudel’s approach has been tested against that of Horden and Purcell with
respect to the Black Sea by a number of archaeologists whose findings indicate that Braudel’s
approach helps explain the unity of the Black Sea where climatic conditions were far more
predictable and certainly not arid and therefore less risky than that of the Mediterranean and
consequently no such crisis-ridden equilibrium states were witnessed (Doonan 2009; Bauer and
Doonan 2013). In light of this evidence, it seems, Braudel’s approach is more generally applicable
whereas Horden and Purcell’s approach contributes to the further elaboration of a Mediterranean
specificity rather than unity, at least until their long waited volume demonstrates otherwise. It is also
worth emphasizing the asymptotic convergence between Horden and Purcell on the one side and the
late Braudel on the other (see Braudel 1988: 126).
6. Under normal circumstances, tracing the linear development of the intellectual biography of an
author through its various phases can be a very rewarding exercise. In Braudel’s case this has
already been done (Gemelli 1990, 1995; Daix 1995). More importantly, Braudel is in many ways an
exception that confirms the rule in this respect. Braudel did not start from a local background and
then became a national scholar who finally gained worldwide recognition. His experiences in
colonial Algeria and Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s, not to mention Dubrovnik, along with his
reaction to and imprisonment during the Second World War, helped make him a European and a
world citizen from the outset. His deep passion for the Mediterranean as a domain of plurality was a
response to nationalist conflicts that gave rise to the Second World War, just as his love for his
country manifested itself only in the last stage of his career when he returned, using his own phrase
in a different context, as a ‘visiteur du soir’ to his native France only to discover diversity, in the
place of where others have registered unity, and to observe the multiple effects of prehistory, the
Mediterranean, and Europe in this particular laboratory. Braudel did not change much over time as
far as his priorities and value preferences and commitments were concerned. The general informed
opinion caught up with him instead. In the meantime, the means at his disposal to achieve his ends—
such as setting up academic programs and institutions, international conferences and exchanges as a
medium of networking and disseminating influence—increased considerably just as the constraints
that limited him in the first place were removed as his reputation progressed. This is why we prefer
focusing on the advent of his analytical schema as a proxy rather than on his entire career.

22
7. Unless otherwise stated, in the rest of the paper, the tripartite schema refers to the division of
economy into three planes, that is to say the backbone of historical explanation in Civilization and
Capitalism.
8. Even those who think that the tripartite scheme is totally contestable, find it extremely interesting
(Lipietz 1986: 47).
9. The section contains not only valuable observations on the interrelationships between production,
consumption, exchange and distribution but also makes use of a macro-economic model the origins
of which can be traced back to François Quesnay’s Tableau économique (Stoianovich 1976: 68, 75).
10. Also in his elaboration of the Italian model, Braudel made equally strong statements concerning the
origins and continuity of capitalism: ‘Comme si ce capitalism, qui fleurit dans le Nord, n’avait pas
tout d’abord germé, ne s’était pas tout d’abord épanoui en Méditerranée!’ and ‘Du capitalism du Sud
au capitalism du Nord, il y a eu transfert, imitation, continuité, non pas rupture et découverte’
(Braudel 1994: 169-70).
11. Braudel confessed: ‘Personally, I have always found the massive weight of our distant origins both
convincing and terrifying. They are indeed a crushing burden’ (Braudel, 1988: 263).
12. Here, what we have in mind is perhaps best represented by Cheng-Chung Lai (2000), who offers an
evaluation of the frequently used concepts in Braudel’s writings. The sample chosen by Lai—longue
durée, conjoncture, event-history, world-economy and total history—more or less fully represents the
underlying analytical foundation upon which Braudel erected his treatise on the Mediterranean.
However, it is far from covering the whole Braudelian edifice. The justification put forward by Lai
admits the existence of additional concepts but rejects them on the ground that ‘they are neither his
major concerns, nor were they initiated by him’ (2000: 67). It is surprizing to see that von Thünen’s
location theory is mentioned amongst the omitted, while there is complete silence on the tripartite
schema of Civilization and Capitalism.
13. Another relevant case is the monopolization of the production and exchange of raw materials
produced in Poland and Hungary in the service of an international capitalist system controlled from
above, directed and regulated by Amsterdam discussed in Civilization and Capitalism (1992b: 265-
272). Once again, it is seen that Braudel remains silent on this issue in his earlier magnum opus (see
1972a: 196-197) as far as the relationship between the lower levels ‘into which capitalism thrusts its
roots’—i.e. market economy and material life—and capitalism is concerned within the hierarchical
nature of world-economy (1992b: 229).

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