Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudelwas a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects: The Mediterranean, Civilization and Capitalism, and the unfinished Identity of France. His reputation stems in part from his writings, but even more from his success in making the Annales School the most important engine of historical research in France and much of the world after 1950. As the dominant leader of the Annales School of historiography in the 1950s and 1960s,...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth24 August 1902
CountryFrance
Happiness, whether in business or private life, leaves very little trace in history.
The fundamental reality of any civilization must be its geographical cradle. Geography dictates its vegetational growth and lays down often impassable frontiers. Civilizations are regions, zones not merely as anthropologists understand them when they talk about the zone of the two-headed ax or the feathered arrow; they are areas which both confine man and undergo constant change through its efforts.
The key problem is to find out why that sector of society of the past, which I would not hesitate to call capitalist, should have lived as if in a bell jar, cut off from the rest; why was it not able to expand and conquer the whole of society?... [Why was it that] a significant rate of capital formation was possible only in certain sectors and not in the whole market economy of the time?