BOOKS
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Even though Braudel devotes 400 pages to part III of the book , en–
titled "Events, Politics and People," the first 900 pages are devoted to
sections dealing with "The Role of the Environment" and "Collective
Destinies and General Trends."
The tendency to underplay events and overplay longer or me–
dium trends is even more pronounced in Braudel's late masterpiece,
Civilization and Capitalism: 15th to 18th Century,
of which the volume
under review is the concluding part. The two other volumes,
The
Structure oj Everyday Life
and
The Wheels oj Commerce ,
were published in
the splendid translation of Sian Reynolds a few years earlier. In this
trilogy , events are hardly touched upon. For example, in the present
volume which encompasses the Reformation, the index has one en–
try for Luther and none for Calvin . E. P. Thompson, the great Brit–
ish Marxist historian, wrote once that, after all, "history is about
chaps." This is surely not Braudel's history. Not that he deals with
history as a Marxist; in fact, I doubt that Marx was as much of an
economic determinist as Braude!. Marx would hardly have insisted
that" ... the economic history of the world is the entire history of the
world seen from a certain vantage point-that of the economy."
Even when Braudel immediately qualifies this statement by saying
that he is aware that "one cannot with immunity give precedence to
the series of phenomena known as 'economic'," he nevertheless af–
firms and reaffirms throughout these pages a very accentuated eco–
nomic determinism.
The first volume of his trilogy deals with markets, shops, fairs,
trade routes and networks of exchange . The second is mainly de–
voted to a meticulous tracing of trade channels within Europe and
beyond . The present concluding volume continues to stress the cen–
tral importance of national and international channels of exhange,
and it is largely devoted to describing the major hubs of these ex–
change transactions. Far from sharing Marx's view that monopoliza–
tion only characterizes a late stage in the development of capitalism,
Braudel stresses to the contrary that monopolization has been cen–
tral for capitalism since its inception. The capitalist history of
Europe, he argues, can best be understood in terms of successive
dominance of central hubs of finance and commerce, first in Venice
with its long near monopoly over trade with the East, later by Ant–
werp, and finally by Amsterdam. For a relatively short period,
Braudel argues, dominance shifted from Antwerp to Genoa, which
was closely connected to the Spanish crown. The precious metal that
the Spanish
conquistadores
shipped from the Americas to Spain, was
