Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century

Author(s):
Braudel, Fernand
Reviewer(s):
Heston, Alan
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, in 3 volumes, N
ew York: Harper and Row, 1981-84, original editions in French, 1979.
Review Essay by Alan Heston, Departments of Economics and South Asia Regional St
udies, University of Pennsylvania.
Fernand Braudel s Civilization and Capitalism
Fernand Braudel is associated with the influential Annales School (La nouvelle h
istoire) that advocated a major break from the dominant narrative paradigm of th
e early twentieth century embracing an approach to history integrating the socia
l sciences with a problem-focused history. Braudel is uniformly praised as one o
f the most influential historians of the twentieth century, but a hard act to fo
llow. Braudel immersed himself into masses of materials and emerged with plausib
le broad-brush stories to tell, teaching others how to replicate this approach i
s problematic. While the Annales School has made only a small dent in the econom
ic history curriculum in the United States, it has had much more influence on so
cial history worldwide and on economic history in France, Europe and the rest of
the world. Rondo Cameron (1989, p. 406) in speaking of Civilization and Capital
ism says, it contains a wealth of factual information, mostly correct, but the br
illiance of its author s rather idiosyncratic interpretation has been exaggerated
by the popular press. Whether one buys the whole quotation, one can certainly agr
ee with Cameron that Braudel builds very idiosyncratic interpretations based upo
n a wealth of information, often very imaginatively used.
This essay will not pretend to cover the three volumes of Civilization and Capit
alism but rather touch on some broad themes that have had influence on our under
standing of world economic history. These themes include Braudel s emphasis on the
economic condition of every-man, on a global approach to economic and social hi
story, and on the process of capitalism and its geographical spread. This essay
will begin with Braudel s uses of capitalism, and then take up themes from the vol
umes of Civilization and Capitalism.
Before dealing with capitalism, some background on Braudel s career is needed. Man
y consider The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
(1966 English translation) published in France in 1949 as his defining work. Br
audel began this research in 1923 at age twenty-one and it was envisaged as his
doctoral dissertation and was to concentrate on the policies of Philip II in the
form of a conventional diplomatic history. Braudel taught secondary school in A
lgeria from 1923 to 1932 and then lived in Brazil where he taught at the Univers
ity of Sao Paulo from 1935 to 1937. During this period he kept up with developme
nts in Paris including establishment of Annales in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien
Febvre. The long gestation period of this impressive work undoubtedly had much
to do with how different was the final product from the original design. Braudel
says that he began to see the sense of writing a history of the Mediterranean w
orld in discussions with Febvre circa 1927 but that he did not find models upon
which to build. And then in 1934 he began to find quantitative data on ship arri
vals and departures, cargoes, prices and other economic data that he felt would
be the bricks and mortar of an economic and social history of the Mediterranean.
By 1939 he had an outline of what he wished to say, but he was captured by the
Germans in 1940 and was imprisoned for the next five years where amazingly he wr
ote the first draft of The Mediterranean totally from memory. The Mediterranean
focuses on the history of one world region in a wide-ranging intellectual breakt
hrough, involving the geographic setting, transport and communications, urban an
d hinterland developments, trade, empires and more political themes.

In 1950 his mentor, Lucien Febvre, asked Braudel, who was then teaching at the C
ollege of Paris, to contribute a volume to a series on world history. This serie
s was to feature a volume on Western Thought and Belief, 1400-1800, that Febvre wo
uld prepare while Braudel would focus on the development of capitalism over the
same period. Febvre died before he could complete his volume. Braudel succeeded
Febvre in 1956 at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes where he headed the Sixth
Section, history. Braudel took responsibility for preparation of what became a
three-volume series and was sole editor of the Annales during its most influenti
al period. Braudel published the first volume of Civilization and Capitalism in
1967, and it was translated as Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 in 1973.
Volume II, Les Jeux de l Echange and volume III, Le Temps du Monde, were published
in France in 1979; volume II was translated and published as The Wheels of Comm
erce in 1982 and volume III as The Perspective of the World in 1984, a year befo
re his death. (When the three-volume set was prepared, Volume I, Les Structures
du Quotidien: Le Possible et L Impossible, was a substantially rewritten version o
f the 1967 edition and was published in France in 1979. The English translation,
The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, was published in 1
981. That translation followed the form of the original translation, Capitalism
and Material Life, 1400 1800, incorporating new materials and changes. In the te
xt, Volume I will be referred to as Capitalism and Material Life.)
A number of centers that focus on aspects of his work were begun during Braudel s
lifetime. Immanuel Wallerstein was instrumental in establishing the Fernand Brau
del Center at Binghamton University (SUNY) in 1976. Their journal, Review, begun
in 1977, explores a variety of issues relating to the evolution of capitalism,
and the study of world systems, about which more below. The Fernand Braudel Inst
itute in Sao Paulo is a think tank that has a strong social dimension to its stu
dies. The economic history emerging from these centers is likely to emphasize th
e impact of capitalism on the social structures of society and the dependencies
involved in the evolution of a worldwide economy over the past five hundred year
s.
1. Capitalism
Braudel emphasizes that capitalism is something different from the market econom
y, a distinction that should be kept in mind in understanding Civilization and C
apitalism. In lectures in 1976, he said,
despite what is usually said, capitalism
does not overlay the entire economy and all of working society: it never encompa
sses both of them within one perfect system all its own. The triptych I have des
cribed material life, the market economy, and the capitalist economy is still an ama
zingly valid explanation, even though capitalism today has expanded in scope. (-A
fterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, p. 112) Whether or not one
agrees with Braudel, this is his explanation of the order of the three volumes
moving from the lower level of the daily material life of everyman to the market
economy to the highest level of capitalism. It is a structure of thinking that
is rather alien to trends in economic research that seek to explain the behavior
of households, markets and business firms using similar economic models, a poin
t discussed further below.
What is capitalism? For Wallerstein capitalism is a system built upon the intern
ational division of labor in which the core of the resulting world system prospe
rs, if not at the expense of the others, at least relative to others. A familiar
enough theme from the recent Seattle World Trade Organization protests. While W
allerstein took inspiration from Braudel, this is not what Braudel means by capi
talism. Braudel viewed the capitalist economy as in the above paragraph, namely
as something above everyday material life and the operation of markets. Capitali
sm takes advantage of high profit opportunities generated by linking markets int
o a world economy. Braudel distinguishes between the world economy and a world e
conomy, a distinction that is not felicitous, but as one searches for alternativ
es, such as regional economy for a world economy, it seems better to stay with his l

anguage.
For Braudel a world economy features a core capitalist city whose commercial and
financial spread may be well beyond national political boundaries. However, for
Braudel there may be several world economies operating at the same time, and fo
r each there will be a dominant core city. Capitalism may utilize an internation
al or larger spatial division of labor but the hegemony of any particular core c
ity for a world economy will wax and wane over time. Further, Braudel believes t
here have been capitalist worlds from the Italian city states or earlier, wherea
s Wallerstein s analysis relies more on a Marxian progression from feudalism to ca
pitalism. Further, Wallerstein treats the political empires like Rome, the Ottom
ans or the Mughals as non-capitalist systems while Braudel would be inclined to
see in them some capitalistic features. He says,
I am personally inclined to think
that even under the constraints of an oppressive empire with little concern for
the particular interests of its different possessions, a world-economy could, e
ven if rudely handled and closely watched, still survive and organize itself, ex
tending significantly beyond the imperial frontiers; the Romans traded in the Re
d Sea and the Indian Ocean, the Armenian merchants of Julfa, the suburb of Isfah
an, spread over almost the entire world; the Indian Banyans went as far as Mosco
w; Chinese merchants frequented all the ports of the East Indies; Muscovy establ
ished its ascendancy over the mighty periphery of Siberia in record time (Perspec
tive of the World, p. 55). Braudel s position would clearly find support in Mancur
Olson s work.
One further point on capitalism concerns its origins. Wallerstein seeks the orig
ins of the capitalist world system in the feudal breakdown of the agrarian socie
ty of Northern Europe in the sixteenth century. Braudel is less concerned with q
uestions of origins, but would certainly place a European world economy much ear
lier, perhaps in fourteenth-century Italy. Braudel is equally uncomfortable with
Max Weber and any attempt to tie capitalism to the Protestant reformation (see
Stanley Engerman s essay in this project). Again, his first line of attack would b
e to point to all of the developments in the Italian city states that long pre-d
ated Luther and Calvin.
One point deserves further mention, namely the emphasis that Braudel gives to th
e ebb and flow of world economies over time and space. There is an element of Jo
seph Schumpeter s creative destruction in Braudel s view of the process but with a s
patial spin. Schumpeter saw new innovations involving new entrepreneurs replacin
g older businesses along with their technologies and labor force. For Braudel th
e slowly shifting boundaries of world economies have two important implications.
First, some areas never become involved with a world economy and their economic
level remains very low. And second, some areas that were in a world economy, an
d were perhaps a core city, lose their place as boundaries of world economies ch
ange over time.
2. Capitalism and Material Life
Braudel and the Annales School represented a reaction to traditional narrative h
istory with its emphasis on major actors, usually political or economic elites.
More problem-oriented social and economic history has been mainstream for such a
long period that present-day readers are unlikely to see anything revolutionary
in Braudel s work. However, in Volume I the chapter headings at that time were th
emselves a statement, beginning at the lowest level of economic and social organ
ization.
Braudel begins Volume I of Civilization and Capitalism with a discussion of worl
d population during the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, including an evaluati
on of the reliability of the numbers and a description of the balance of peoples
around the world. Beginning his study with counting all of humanity, Braudel st
arts off with a global view, involving the rich and the poor, and all regions of

the world. He takes on social classifications, like civilized and barbaric, pro
viding an overview of global social divisions. Public health receives major emph
asis throughout but certainly the importance of the education of mothers on the
health of children does not find its way into Braudel s treatment. It is a man s wor
ld and although his wife, Paule, was an important contributor to his research, o
ne has to look hard in Braudel for that half of humanity.
Braudel follows population in Capitalism and Material Life with chapters on the
major categories of consumer expenditure, bread and cereals, other foods and dri
nk, and clothing and housing. These chapters, enriched with appropriate illustra
tions, include the diets of the poor, food fashions of the rich, the lack of fur
nishings of the homes of the poor and middle classes, and the increasingly elabo
rate interiors of the more affluent. The treatment of fashion and necessity in c
lothing is wide ranging. While much of this is based on the research of others,
it is an extraordinary synthesis of materials from many sources and it is good r
eading.
The focus on everyday life in Capitalism and Material Life represents a concern
shaping many areas of study after 1950, a movement from the study of elites to t
hose of more ordinary people. This entered archaeology, as excavations moved fro
m the palaces and temples to remains of foods, bones, and the dwellings of the p
oor, or lack thereof. Braudel s emphasis thus fit very well into much Marxian hist
ory and with a view that capitalism grew at the expense of the lower classes. Th
e following quotation referring to Naples is in his chapter Towns and Cities, an
d is from one of several sketches of cities of the era. It gives the tone of Bra
udel s treatment of income inequality.
Both sordid and beautiful, abjectly poor and very rich, certainly gay and lively,
Naples counted 400,000, probably 500,000 inhabitants on the eve of the French R
evolution. It was the fourth town in Europe, coming equal with Madrid after Lond
on, Paris and Istanbul. A major breakthrough after 1695 extended it in the direc
tion of Borgo de Chiaja, facing the second bay of Naples (the first being Marine
lla.) Only the rich benefited, as authorization to build outside the walls, gran
ted in 1717, almost exclusively concerned them. As for the poor, their district
stretched out from the vast Largo del Castello, where burlesque quarrels over th
e free distribution of victuals took place, to the Mercato, their fief, facing t
he Paludi plain that began outside the ramparts. They were so crowded that their
life encroached and overflowed on to the streets. ? These ragged poor numbered
at the lowest estimate 100,000 people at the end of the century (Volume I, p. 532
).
Here in the midst of a description of impoverishment in Naples we also have imbe
dded an estimate of the homeless as 20 to 25 percent of society, a typical quant
itative illustration that Braudel uses to great effect. He also tells us that th
e rich have the political power to live in more desirable locations, nothing new
there. It is not surprising that Marxist historians would find much to like in
Braudel, but there is very little ideological in his writings.
In fact, Braudel is much more interested in putting the everyday life of all peo
ples in perspective by comparisons of 1400 to 1800 and to contemporary levels of
living. Braudel admired Simon Kuznets work on national income but does not appea
r familiar with concepts like urban versus rural versus national growth rates, a
nd his career predates the development of poverty weighted growth rates. But one
senses from his discussions of material life that Braudel would have found thes
e comfortable constructs with which to work. He also suggests that he would have
liked to use cliometrics in the analysis of his period but that there were not
adequate data. However, Braudel would have probably wanted to build up social an
d national accounts rather than deal with behavioral models.
3. The Wheels of Commerce

It is curious that Volume I devotes chapters to Money and Towns and Cities, whic
h seem much more the subjects of Volume II, The Wheels of Commerce. However, Bra
udel looks at money as an indicator of the degree of monetization of societies a
nd the complexity of their economies. And as we have noted, the increase in town
s and cities during the 1400-1800 period meant an increasing number of poor maki
ng their material life in urban areas. On the other hand, this curious treatment
may only reflect the evolution of Civilization and Capitalism, in which Capital
ism and Material Life was fairly self contained and appeared thirteen years earl
ier than the remaining volumes.
Wheels of Commerce moves from markets to capitalism and society. Although Braude
l does not use the language, he is concerned with the development of institution
s, ideology and social norms. He offers a justification for employing the term c
apitalism, noting that it was not a term used by Marx, only his followers. Capit
alism for Braudel involves not only the use of capital but also its position at
the apex of material life. As discussed, it is this aspect of Braudel that has h
ad a large influence on those associating the expansion of capitalism and world
systems as necessarily intertwined. The first chapter of Wheels of Commerce is c
alled the Instruments of Exchange, by which Braudel means the types of markets i
n which exchange took place; it is followed by a chapter on Markets and the Econ
omy. The two may only be separate because together they are the length of an ave
rage book. Braudel deals with local commodity markets serving surrounding villag
es and market towns serving their hinterland, as well as wholesale and financial
markets. Markets for financial instruments including bourses and exchanges, as
well as credit institutions like banks, are also discussed. Bourses, after the H
otel des Bourses in Bruges where early meetings of merchants took place, also de
alt in wholesale commodity trade, especially for articles like pepper, cotton, t
ea and the like. For Europe the 1400-1800 period sees the development of exchang
es in Amsterdam and London that while subject to bubbles, also provided a basis
for financial intermediation for even small investors.
In treating the development of markets Braudel gives emphasis to the geography o
f markets, and his treatment is often imaginative, though not terribly systemati
c. He analyzes the frequency and density of fairs and markets in England and Fra
nce. He gives more cursory treatments of other parts of the world, though both I
ndia and China receive their fair due. G. William Skinner s treatment of Chinese m
arket towns and cities is discussed in terms of the hexagons of Walter Chrystall
er and August Losch. Here Braudel argues that the size of the hexagon embracing
different size market towns varies inversely with the density of population (II,
pp.118-19). He then applies this to puzzles in French history about the varying
boundaries of pays, which he argues may well have been due to changing populati
on densities over time a rather nice cross-section, time-series application.
Braudel asks questions about markets that are fundamental but often not treated
systematically. When do wholesale markets emerge? What leads to the establishmen
t of year-round shops versus occasional markets and fairs? Why did the number of
shops proliferate during the 1400-1800 period? When are peddlers really agents
of wholesalers and when are they petty traders? Braudel concludes that the expan
sion of markets was stronger in England than in France, though he does not probe
further into why this may have been so. And he argues in terms of his view of h
ierarchy, that the development of capitalism was interdependent with the expansi
on of exchange. He also notes that France and particularly China had administrat
ions that constrained the expansion in markets and hence the amount of capitalis
tic development.
How do markets relate to each other? One way they are integrated is through the
activities of the same firm, most typically in this period, an extended family f
irm. Braudel examines these connections mainly in Europe. The extended family fi
rm was a common practice of merchants from India, China and the Middle East, som

e of which are discussed by Braudel. While he recognizes the importance of busin

ess families in extending the boundaries of any world economy, this also poses a
puzzle in some of the diasporas that Philip Curtin has described so well.
For example, in Asia, which in 1400 contained more than half of world population
, income and wealth, there was an established pattern of trade prior to European
incursions involving intersections of an East Asian world economy that was link
ed to an Indian world economy stretching from Malacca in the Malaysian Peninsula
to Calicut and Cambay in Western India. This in turn joined with what Braudel t
erms an Islamic world economy extending from the East Coast of Africa through th
e Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Turkey and Persia. However, when Vasco da Gama arriv
ed in Calicut in 1498, it was not the core city of an Indian world economy, nor
is it obvious that there was such a core city. Vijayanagar was a major South Ind
ian empire at this time but its ability to expand northward was constrained by t
he presence of the five hostile Bahami kingdoms. The Mughal empire only emerges
after 1526. Calicut is itself ruled by the Zamorin, a Hindu ruler whose state wa
s physically quite small, and who did not have territorial ambitions. As Braudel
notes, the proportion of Arabs, Indian Muslims, Hindus, and Chinese among the a
ctual merchant groups and shippers varied over the centuries. Diasporas like Mal
acca and Calicut were home or branch office to Arabs, Armenians, Chinese, Hindus
, Bohras, Khojas and similar Muslim groups, Jews, Malays and others. The activit
ies of these traders seem to fit Braudel s model of high profit seekers linking sm
aller markets. However, the claim that these Asian world economies of the fiftee
nth and earlier centuries involved core cities seems strained. Even after the Mu
ghal, Ming, Ottoman and Persian empires were established, it is problematic.
The remaining chapters of Wheels of Commerce deal with the development of capita
lism and the role of the state in markets and in establishing monopolies includi
ng a lengthy treatment of the activities of the merchant trading monopolies in A
frica, Asia and the Americas. Braudel s treatment of society is a wide-ranging soc
ial and political analysis including discussions of hierarchies, revolts and the
state and social order. Braudel does not use the terminology, social norms, but i
n a section Civilizations do not always put up a fight (II, p. 555) he certainly e
xplores their importance. He says, When Europe came to life again in the eleventh
century, the market economy and monetary sophistication were scandalous novelties
. Civilization, standing for ancient tradition, was by definition hostile to inn
ovation. So it said no to the market, no to profit making, no to capital. At bes
t it was suspicious and reticent. Then as the years passed, the demands and pres
sures of everyday life became more urgent. European civilization was caught in a
permanent conflict that was pulling it apart. So with a bad grace, it allowed c
hange to force the gates. And the experience was not peculiar to the West.
4. The Perspective of the World
In his very ambitious last volume, Braudel deals with long cycles, the emergence
of various world economies, historical problems in measuring GDP per person, th
e colonial economies and the industrial revolution. It is certainly successful i
n one of its aims, to treat the economic history of the 1400-1800 period as a st
ory of the world, not simply Western Europe. There are rich discussions of Afric
a, the Americas, and Asia balancing well the perspective of the colonizer and th
e colonized. In his essay on Max Weber, Engerman (p. 5) places Weber and Braudel
, along with David Landes, Joel Mokyr, Douglass North, Nathan Rosenberg and othe
rs as scholars dealing with the perceived uniqueness of the Western European econ
omy. Let me close this essay by arguing that while Braudel has a lot to say about
developments in Western Europe, he did not see a simple explanation of the caus
es of growth in the West, nor did he think this was the most interesting questio
n to explore.
The uniqueness of Western European experience has certainly been taken as the ph
enomenon to be explained by many economic historians. Writers like Weber not onl

y looked at European evidence in the Protestant Reformation but also offered exp
lanations of why the religions of other societies, such as India, were less cond
ucive to growth. Braudel is not at home with Weber, nor does he seem to give gre
at importance to institutions like private property, contract, and the like. In
fact, he does not seem to accept even the premise that there is something unique
to be explained about the development of capitalism in Europe.
It might be argued that this is because of Braudel s idiosyncratic view of capital
ism. Let me again quote Braudel;
Throughout this book, I have argued that capitalism has been potentially visible
since the dawn of history, and that it has developed and perpetuated itself down
the ages. (III, p. 620)
It would however be a mistake to imagine capitalism as
something that developed in a series of stages or leaps from mercantile capitalism
to industrial capitalism to finance capitalism, with some kind of regular progr
ession from one phase to the next, with true capitalism appearing only at the late
stage when it took over production, and the only permissible term for the early
period being mercantile capitalism or even pre-capitalism . In fact as we have see
n, the great merchants of the past never specialized: they went in indiscriminatel
y, simultaneously or successively, for trade, banking, finance, speculation on t
he Stock Exchange, industrial production, whether under the putting-out system or
more rarely in manufactories. The whole panoply of forms of capitalism commercial,
industrial, banking was already employed in thirteenth century Florence, in seven
teenth-century Amsterdam, in London before the eighteenth century (III, p. 621).
Here Braudel strongly sees in his period and earlier the same business forms tha
t exist today and to which others attribute the uniqueness of Western European e
xperience.
However, the following quotation perhaps illustrates where Braudel imparts his o
wn special view of capitalism. He says,
The worst error of all is to suppose that capitalism is simply an economic system,
whereas in fact it lives off the social order, standing almost on a footing with
the state, whether as adversary or accomplice: it is and always has been a mass
ive force, filling the horizon. Capitalism also benefits from all the support th
at culture provides for the solidity of the social edifice, for culture though une
qually distributed and shot through with contradictory currents does in the end co
ntribute the best of itself to propping up the existing order. And lastly capita
lism can count on the dominant classes who, when they defend it, are defending t
hemselves.
Of the various social hierarchies the hierarchies of wealth, of state power or of
culture, that oppose yet support each other which is the most important? The answe
r as we have already seen, is that it may depend on the time, the place and who
is speaking (III, p. 623).
Braudel has a number of elements of Schumpeter in his view of world economic his
tory, in particular long cycles and creative destruction. One of his important i
nsights shared by many others who stress uneven or unbalanced growth is that wor
ld economies have changing borders and that there are often areas not included i
n any world economy. Indian software programmers are writing for Oracle in Banga
lore while other areas of India (and many other world areas) are as yet unaffect
ed by the information technology revolution. Most large countries have special d
evelopment programs for backward areas, of which many have had flourishing histo
ries, such as natural resource-rich Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh in India, th
e seat of the Mauryan Empire and the birthplace of the Buddha.
However, Braudel departs sharply from Schumpeter in how he views the capitalist
entrepreneur. For Braudel the monopolistic character of capitalism is the key el

ement of privilege and the link between the state and society. He says,
The rise of capitalism in the nineteenth century has been described, even by Marx
, even by Lenin, as eminently, indeed healthily competitive. Were such observers
influenced by illusions, inherited assumptions, ancient errors of judgement? In
the eighteenth century, compared to the unearned privileges of a leisured aristoc
racy, the privileges of merchants may perhaps have looked like a fair reward for
labour; in the nineteenth century, after the age of the big companies and their
state monopolies (the Indies companies for instance) the mere freedom of tradin
g may have seemed the equivalent of competition. And industrial production (whic
h was however only one sector of capitalism) was still quite frequently handled
by small firms which did indeed compete on the market and continue to do so toda
y. Hence the classic image of the entrepreneur serving the public interest, whic
h persisted throughout the nineteenth century, while the virtues of laissez-fair
e and free trade were everywhere celebrated. The extraordinary thing is that suc
h images should still be with us today in the language spoken by politicians and
journalists, in works of popularization and in the teaching of economics, when
doubt long ago entered the minds of the specialists (III, pp. 628-9).
These closing quotations from Braudel restate his view that everyday material li
fe and operation of markets proceed at one level while capitalism carries on at
a higher level above the others. Further Braudel sees capitalism as closely rela
ted to the political elites of the world economy in which they are operating. Wh
ile Braudel s view of the world economy is shared by many Marxist historians it is
also consistent with the writers like John Kenneth Galbraith and Mancur Olsen,
with whom I sense more affinity.
5. Conclusion
One cannot write an economic history of the world of the last five hundred years
and not at least list Fernand Braudel in your bibliography. But how well does B
raudel stand up today? My answer would be very well indeed at several levels. La
ndes (1998, xvii) introduces his recent book with an account of the inability of
contemporary medicine in 1836 to save Nathan Rothschild, the richest person in
the world at the time, from death by blood poisoning. Braudel put medical advanc
es and public health practices up front in Capitalism and Material Life as criti
cal to the improvements in economic well being of the world in the early modern
period, clearly a theme shared with Landes and many others. He likewise saw the
importance of historical demography to our understanding of development of the g
lobal economy.
Related to these demographic themes is Braudel s concern with how health and mater
ial well being were distributed. He saw the great inequalities generated in worl
d economies, and thought it important to describe them. He documents inequalitie
s in both the distribution of private and public goods and services and sees sys
tems of privilege as part of past and present economies. And while he would have
liked a more equitable world, this is not a major theme in Capitalism and Civil
ization. A major theme that has contemporary resonance is the uneven development
of different geographic regions of the world, and the lack of convergence of wo
rld economies, and more particularly the persistence of regions that have never
been part of a world economy, or were part of a world economy in the past, but n
ot at present.
Braudel s distinction between markets and capitalism is probably least likely to m
ake it into mainstream economic history, yet in many ways it also has a very con
temporary ring as we move towards becoming one world economy. It is not hard to
imagine Braudel finding analogies in this period for phenomena like not in my bac
kyard or the internet. In today s world of mega-mergers that need support by one or
more nation states, of Airbus-Boeing battles and of Microsoft anti-trust action
s, the Braudel perspective of the world fits surprisingly well. The importance o

f being first when there are declining costs, learning by doing, or other scale
factors that provide barriers to entry into markets are not foreign to the world
that Braudel describes. Often, as in the case of the trading companies, monopol
y was based upon government support as in the cable industry today, and much of
the capitalism that Braudel describes is related to retaining government support
or preventing government interference.
References:
Braudel, Fernand. 1966 (English translation, 1972-73). The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. New York: Harper and Row.
Braudel, Fernand. 1977. Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism. B
altimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Cameron, Rondo. 1991. Economic History of the World. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Curtin, Philip. 1984. Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. London: Cambridge U
niversity Press.
Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1967. The New Industrial State. Boston: Houghton-Miffli
n.
Landes, David S. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich a
nd Some So Poor. New York: W.W. Norton.
Olson, Mancur. 2000. Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist D
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