Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600-1800 (review)

The collection of essays assembled under the title Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600-1800 is as much a critique as it is an homage to the French historian Fernand Braudel. It is also an intellectual effort to rethink the place of Braudel in the broader context of history and humanities, allowing us to rediscover the extent and significance of this work for contemporary scholarship and an understanding of the uniqueness of the Mediterranean world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Above all, it is an acknowledgment of the continuing power of the original work on intellectual currents today.

The editors explain that this volume of essays springs from a series of conferences under the rubric "Braudel Revisited" held during 2002 and 2003. The eleven essays, of various levels of relevance and quality, offer insights that span the divide between thinking with and thinking beyond Braudel. The editors are sincere when they write in their introduction that Braudel's monumental study of the Mediterranean world is "undoubtedly one of the most important historical works written during the past century." An element of suspicion creeps quickly into the discourse, however, when they suggest immediately that "a strong case can be made that it is the single most important historical work to appear in the entire span of time."

To fully understand and appreciate the collection of essays under review it is necessary to have a good sense of Braudel's original work. My point of reference is the first American edition, published in 1972, and the focal point of this review shall be the elusive nature of Braudel's original discourse on civilization. The term civilization does not appear in the index, which is not a major oversight, nor does it hold much intellectual import. Indeed, Braudel discusses civilizations in the plural in his second volume. It is almost as though he ends with civilizations rather than basing his intellectual efforts on civilization as the springboard for his themes. Braudel notes, "Of all the complex and contradictory faces of the Mediterranean world, its civilizations are the most perplexing." Rather than offering a definition of civilization, Braudel gives us a description of the fluid characteristics of civilization as constantly mobile and yet stable. He suggests that the defining "mark of a civilization is that it is capable of exporting itself, of spreading its culture to distant places. It is impossible to imagine a true civilization which does not export its people, its ways of thinking and living."

According to Braudel, civilization, in addition to giving, must also be capable of receiving and borrowing, as well as refusing to borrow by its resistance to certain alignments, by its resolute selection among foreign influences offered to it but that would no doubt be forced upon it if they were not met by vigilance or, more simply, by incompatibility of temper and appetite. The diffusion of civilizations and their complex, overlapping interplay appear to be at the core of Braudel's understanding of the cultural matrix underpinning the Mediterranean.

Geoffrey Symcox's "Braudel and the Mediterranean City" links Braudel's discussion of civilization and the role of cities as economic engines, as its diffusers. Symcox reminds readers that Braudel sought to introduce a new kind of history, a history of the Mediterranean world from the geographical bottom up, adopting a method known as géhistoire, a fusion of two disciplines, history and geography. Géhistoire purports to make possible the writing of "a true human geography." Symcox notes that there is a slight but significant shift between the first and second editions of Braudel's original French volume. In his view it moves away from treating cities almost exclusively as economic factors and introduces new elements that focus on culture. Indeed, cities are viewed as "the true matrices of Mediterranean civilization." The city, for Braudel, is an embodiment of an individual "who lives for others and is watched by...