Amazon.com: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. I: The Structure of Everyday Life (Civilization & Capitalism, 15th-18th Century): 9780520081147: Braudel, Fernand, Reynold, Siân: Books (original) (raw)
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Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2016
I am only a hundred or so pages into Volume 1, and so delighted I figure I owe the author a good review.
There are several notable aspects to the writing.
It is not a compendium of dates and kings and battles. It is divided into subjects, such as Population, Food, Clothing, Trade, etc. Each topic is explored as a whole, wandering over time and space as needed, not necessarily in any strict order. You get a good grasp of the Big Picture as far few books of any kind do, let alone history books. If you want to know what life and society were like, this is the book to get.
The language has some quirks, a few words that seem a slight bit out of place, and few sentence constructs which most editors dull down. I do not know if this is an artifact of the translation, or whether the translator was trying to preserve similar quirkiness in the original French. But I like it. It avoids the stuffiness of most dull histories.
It drills down amazingly deep in some places, quoting from town registers of 1537 or such.
It also explains all sorts of stuff that is not obvious. One section, discussing why Asians ate less meat than Europeans, explains this by saying that Asians grew rice and Europeans grew wheat. Rice can be grown year after year in the same field, whereas wheat so depletes the soil that it must lie fallow one year out of every two or three, with livestock fertilizer replenishing it, and if you're going to support all those animals, you may as well eat some too. There is some discussion of the three year cycle (wheat, oats, fallow) being more common in northern Europe and the two year cycle (wheat, fallow) being more common in southern Europe. I honestly do not know if this is common knowledge or if there are other reasons for the difference in meat eating, but I can google away and read up on this, now that I have the basic concept.
This last example, of meat and fallow fields, is what makes this book so fascinating to me. I am learning far more than I would have thought possible from a professor's history book, and having fun in the process.
16 people found this helpful
Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2013
Civilization and Capitalism Vol.1 : Sets the foundations of the Fernand Braudel three stage model:
First Stage-V.1 :The material civilization of every day life. A lively description of material every day life between 15th-18th century. It's mind blowing and It's like being in a time capsule. This first volumne sets the stage and the foundations of Braudel's three stage model:
1st stage: The structure of every day life (the material life)
2nd stage: The emergence of capitalism
3rd stage: The upper layer of social structures that control and manipulate the 2nd and the 1st stage by creating intentionally (or not) "zones of turbulence" in order to extract social and material benefits and their class reproduction.
8 people found this helpful
Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2014
The book is erudite and stimulating. It centers on Europe but does have a global scope. Some of the language is a bit antiquated--the author uses words such as "undeveloped" and "backward" to describe nomadic cultures, for example. But considering that the French original was first published in the 1960s, it is understandable.
The copy I received has too many highlights & writing on it though. I understand that it's a used a copy, but I wish the seller made it clear in the description.
5 people found this helpful
Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2018
Good experience with you.
Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2018
Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2003
Fernand Braudel is probably the most distinguished historian associated with the Annales School founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. This Annales method attempted to revamp historical inquiry by enlarging the scope of analysis to include disparate places and through different times. Annalists were not content to research political institutions; they wanted to delve deeper into the past, to look at social and economic factors in order to reach a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of humanity. In order to be so inclusive, the Annalists looked at historical forces over great arcs of time, recognizing that many human factors change slowly and are not capable of discovery in snapshots of time. The title of this book, "The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th to the 18th Century" captures well these two central tenets of the Annales School. "The Structures of Everyday Life" is the first volume in a three volume series.
When Braudel refers to everyday life, he means it in the strictest sense of the word. The topics covered in this encyclopedic volume are seemingly banal because they constitute the backgrounds of our lives: corn, wheat, rice, clothing, buildings, money, and other commonplace items that we take for granted in our day to day existence. Other sections deal with discerning the population of the world in a time when census records were crude or nonexistent, the development of heavy industry and its effect on the world, diseases, and shipping. The emphasis here is on economics and how the growth (or lack of) economies increases or decreases the growth of a society and how that society or region waxed or waned in prominence.
Much of the time, the greatness of Braudel's book is in a detail, or a turn of a phrase. For example, the author concludes that the massive pyramid structures and immense jungle cities of the Mesoamerican cultures resulted not from huge markets or an intrinsic need to construct enormous edifices. Instead, he traces their societal structure to agriculture, specifically the reliance on maize as the staple crop. In the warm climates of Central America, corn does not take much work to plant or maintain. This left the indigenous populations with plenty of time on their hands to build monuments and participate in elaborate religious rituals.
"Structures of Everyday Life" appears to be a huge book, and it is, but there are so many illustrations, maps, and charts that it does not take nearly as long to get through it as one might think. I read somewhere that Braudel traveled and worked abroad in places where he could obtain copies of primary historical documents, whether they were paintings, letters, financial statements, or other relevant documents. He gathered these by the thousands over the years and used them as the basis for his wide-ranging researches. You simply must admire a historian who notices someone picking food out of a bowl with his fingers and then compares this to another painting some years later where the figures are using utensils. Most people just do not think to look at things like this.
Braudel's book is a valuable contribution to historical studies, but I don't think I will read the other two volumes in the series. The amount of information in this volume is so overwhelming that I don't think I could assimilate the vast amount of facts in the other two books. As far as "Structures of Everyday Life" go, even reading one or two chapters is enough to get the gist of what Braudel is trying to say. Reading the whole thing is like reading an encyclopedia; it is fascinating but difficult.
70 people found this helpful