The French Colonial Mind, Volume 1: Mental Maps of Empire and Colonial Encounters

4 The Colonial Cosmology of Fernand Braudel

72 4 The Colonial Cosmology of Fernand Braudel john strachan The sunlight sinks over the golden buildings that tumble along the Malécon as it sweeps along the shoreline into La Habana Vieja. Sitting on the concrete wall, I stare out into the sea, towards Miami, thinking of the generations that have sailed into this harbor—the Spanish conquistadors, the shiploads of slaves from West Africa, British buccaneers arriving to capture the island in 1762, US troops arriving in 1898, US troops arriving in two thousand and . . . ? Cette implacable blancheur: wave after wave of white conquerors have rolled in on the surf, wanting this island, coveted object of imperial desire. robert j. c. young, “White Mythologies Revisited” There exists an intimacy, as Robert Young points out, between empires, bodies of water, and the cyclical nature of history.1 Throughout history imperial pretenders have risen and fallen, ebbed and flowed in time with the waves that carried them to their happy destinations. Of the many who have contemplated this tripartite relationship none was more eloquent than the French historian Fernand Braudel (1902–85). Mobilized , captured, and imprisoned in 1940, Braudel spent the war years in Germany, completing a project conceived in the 1920s and published as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in 1949.2 This book, now considered his masterpiece, has enjoyed extensive influence in France and beyond, particularly among the Annales School of historians. Braudel’s revolutionary approach to historical time Colonial Cosmology of Fernand Braudel 73 is well documented and is discussed further below. What is less often remembered is that Braudel’s Mediterranean was also, crucially, a work of imperial history, conceived in colonial Algeria and in the turbulent context of France’s own imperial decline. The focus of this essay is the importance of this distinctively colonial genealogy of Braudelian and Annaliste thought. Braudel’s imperial imaginary has suffered from comparative neglect in the studies produced since his death.3 The first and most obvious explanation for this lies in the structure of his text in which the sixteenth -century imperial machinations of Philip II of Spain occupy a relatively marginal place. A brief account of Braudel’s methodology helps clarify this point and introduce the discussion that follows. The great innovation of the Mediterranean was to divide historical time into three—longue, moyenne, and courte durées (or what Braudel referred to as geographical, social, and individual time)—and to explore the relationship between these constituent parts. First and most important was the longue durée.4 Here Braudel charts the history of humans’ unequal relationship with their physical environment. Mountains, deserts, climate, and, of course, the Mediterranean Sea are the essential components in his géohistoire, setting the parameters for, and defining the possibilities of, human civilization and history. This longue durée moves slowly and cyclically. Part two of the Mediterranean deals with “collective destinies and general trends.” This is the moyenne durée—the history of economies, populations, and states—moving faster and more superficially, and always at the mercy of geographical considerations. Peter Burke has compared Braudel’s rendering of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean to Edward Gibbon’s classic account of ancient Rome—both empires operated within the constraints imposed upon them by geography; both were limited and doomed, ultimately, to a similar fate.5 Finally, the courte durée of individual time is of least importance. Political and military events, championed as the essence of history in the work of Leopold von Ranke, appear as ephemera in the Braudelian cosmology. The sea is both the subject of Braudel’s Mediterranean and the most important actor in his drama. Changes in the moyenne and courte durées occur invariably within this framework and are seen to have little, if any, Colonial Encounters, Imaginings of Empire 74 lasting impact upon geographical time. The sea is also a metaphor, in Braudel’s imaginary, for the rhythm and the pace of history. The deep and unchanging Mediterranean is his longue durée personified. Change in the moyenne durée is described as the ebb and flow of tidal movement . Lastly events on the surface of things and of time stand for the flotsam and jetsam of history. Throughout the text, empires occupy the moyenne and courte durées and are condemned to all the frailties that such status demands. Least momentous of...