The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

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by Fernand Braudel


  This was the ultimate expression of the intellectual ambitions of the Annates school, which was reborn after the war and the execution by the Nazis of Marc Bloch, one of its two founders and a hero of the resistance. Braudel became a member of its editorial board. Meanwhile in 1947 a new section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes had been formed with the help of money from the Rockefeller Foundation, the famous Vie Section in social sciences, with Febvre as its president and Braudel as his assistant. In 1949 Braudel was elected to the College de France, and in the same year he was given the immensely powerful position of president of the agregation in history, the general qualifying examination for teaching in secondary schools. His reforms were resisted by the conservatives, but it took them six years before they could dislodge him in 1955. The record of what he sought to achieve is contained in a little textbook that he wrote for teachers in this period called a ‘Grammar of Civilizations’ (written in 1962-3 and republished in 1987), which was designed to introduce contemporary history and world history to the school curriculum: history was divided into six civilizations – western, soviet, muslim, the far east, south-east Asia, and black Africa, all of course relevant to a France still at least in memory committed to its status as a colonial power. Braudel’s attempts at reform were destroyed by an unholy alliance of right and left; for he was one of the few French intellectuals who belonged to neither camp. He was therefore hated by Georges Pompidou, who held proto-Thatcherite views on the unimportance of all history apart from the history of one’s own country, and who was later to regard him as responsible for the events of 1968; and at the same time he was denounced by orthodox communists as ‘a willing slave of American imperialism’.

  Lucien Febvre died in 1956, and Braudel inherited the direction both of his section of the Ecole Pratique and of the journal Annates. In the first institution through his appointments he created and fostered one of the most extraordinary collections of talent in the twentieth century: to mention only the most famous of his colleagues, they included the historians Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Maurice Aymard, the philosopher Roland Barthes, the psychologists Jacques Lacan and Georges Devereux, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss; and the classical scholars Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Braudel worked hard to create a separate institution or building, where all his colleagues could work together, and where a succession of foreign visitors could be invited as associate professors; this idea, begun about 1958, did not achieve physical shape until the opening of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in 1970. And it was only after he retired in 1972 that the Vie Section finally metamorphosed into its present status as a new and independent teaching institution, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

  In and through Annates Braudel sought to promote and defend his conception of history. For thirty years the great debates on the nature of history took place in its pages. In retrospect one can see four successive but overlapping issues with which he engaged.

  The first debate was provoked by the claims of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss that the theory of structuralism offered an explanation of human social organization. Braudel had been possibly the first historian to use the word ‘structure’ in his original thesis; but he saw that the structuralism of Levi-Strauss was fundamentally anti-historical, in that it sought to explain all human societies in terms of a single theory of structures: the notions of difference and of change which are basic to all historical thought were simply dismissed as irrelevant to the search for a universal underlying structure, which existed in the human mind if not in the physical universe itself. Against this, in a famous article in Annates 1958 on his conception of the tongue durie Braudel sought to explain his own historical conception of the varieties of underlying forces influencing human society, which he had already formulated during the writing of his thesis in relation to the static forces and the slow movements behind the ephemeral history of events. Braudel’s conception of the Uongue duree (usually translated rather misleadingly as ‘the long perspective’) is not easy to express in non-historical terms as a theoretical concept; for it is the recognition that human society develops and changes at different rates in relation to different underlying forces, and that all the elements within any human situation interact with each other. There are underlying geographical constraints, there are natural regularities of behaviour related to every activity, whether climatic or seasonal or conventional, there are social customs, there are economic pressures and there are short-term events in history with their resulting consequences – battles, conquests, powerful rulers, reforms, earthquakes, famines, diseases, tribal loves and hatreds. To translate this messy complication which constitutes the essence of history into a general theory is impossible, and this fact represents the ultimate problem of trying to subsume history within any abstract theory, from whatever philosophical or sociological or anthropological source it is derived.

  The second debate concerned quantitative history: after the Mediterranean, Braudel became more and more attracted to the idea of quantification in economic history, the notion that history could become scientifically respectable through the use of graphs and tables and the collection of hard quantifiable data. It took the example of his disciple Pierre Chaunu, who sought to surpass Braudel with his immense work of 7800 pages on Seville and the Atlantic trade (finally published in 1963), to convince Braudel that something was missing from this type of statistical history: history was something more than the effect of the fluctuations in the Spanish American trade on the economic boom and decline of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was in response to this debate that Braudel wrote his second great work, translated as Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century (1982). The first volume of this work had originally been published in 1967, and was translated into English in 1973 as Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800. It presented a vivid picture of social life and its structures before the Industrial Revolution, in terms of population, bread, food and drink, fashion, housing, energy sources, technology, money, cities and towns. This was revised and incorporated into a three-volume work published in 1979 with a one word addition to the title: Material Civilization, Economy and Capitalism; the work now approached the whole question of the origins of modern-world capitalism: the second volume dealt with the organization of commerce, manufacture and capitalism, the third with the growth of a world economy and world trade. His conclusion was both historical and practical: it is small-scale business and freedom of trade which both produce and sustain capitalism, not either state enterprise nor large-scale capitalism; without the independent small artisan and the merchant-shopkeeper no economic system can survive, and these smaller entities are embedded in the social fabric, so that society and economy can never be separated from each other. His work stands therefore as a refutation through the study of history of both communism and capitalism.

  The third issue with which Braudel was involved was a consequence of his growing distance from the most talented of the historians whom he had called to join him in the management of Annates. The new history of the sixties was turning away from the factual certainties of economic and descriptive social history, and exploring the ‘history of mentalities’. The historical world was created out of perceptions, not out of events, and we needed to recognize that the whole of history was a construct of human impressions. The crucial question for a history which still sought a degree of certainty and an escape from arbitrariness or fiction was to analyse the mental world which had created the record an age or a civilization. The medieval historians Duby, Le Goff and Ladurie pioneered this approach from 1961 onwards; it meant a whole-scale return to the old German conceptions of cultural history, and to the use of literary and artistic sources alongside archival material. This was perhaps one of BraudePs blind spots: to him it was the realities of peasant or merchant existence that mattered, not the way that they might be expressed in artistic or literary form. He was a
lso more and more interested in the global sweep, and saw the detailed studies of the mental world of small communities undertaken by his colleagues as a betrayal of the grand vision. As he said to Ladurie in relation to his famous book Montaillou, ‘We brought history into the dining room, you are taking it into the bedroom.’ His disapproval of these trends cost him the direction of his journal, and by 1969 he had abandoned Annales, sidelined by those whose careers he had started and whom he had originally invited to join him.

  Braudel’s reply to this development was long in coming, and remains incomplete: it was his last great projected work, ‘The Identity of France’. Three volumes were published before his death, comprising the first two parts on geography and demography and economy: these were for him traditional territory. With the third and fourth he would be entering new territory, by writing about the state, culture and society, and in the fourth about ‘France outside France’. Fragments of the third volume were published in 1997. They suggest that what he was really aiming at in this last work was to confound his critics by proving that the ‘mentality’ of France was contained within its physical, social and economic history. The peasant was the key to the history of France, and a true history of mentalities could only be written in the Hongue duree and from a long perspective. History must do more than study walled gardens.

  The difficulty of translating ‘tongue durée’ as the phrase ‘the long perspective’ reveals another problem, which was perhaps to emerge in the later debates with Michel Foucault, whose importance Braudel had recognised early: in a letter to Foucault he explained that he was unable to appoint him to the Vie Section, because that would damage his chances of election to the College de France, which took place with Braudel’s support in 1969-70. Braudel never claimed that his categories were absolute: they were only means of organizing the explanatory factors in any situation. But equally he was not prepared to see them simply as constructs fashioned by the observer for his immediate purposes: however indeterminate and changeable, they did possess a real existence as forces in the field of history. This was challenged by the theories and methods of Foucault, who published Words and Things in 1966, and The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1969. The idea of historical relativity introduced in these works and adopted by post-modern history took one step beyond the history of mentalities. Not only did the uncertainty contained in the study of history rest on its derivation from a set of human impressions rather than facts: the crucial role in this process belonged to the historian as interpreter. Indeed the whole organization of knowledge could be seen as a construction designed to control the world: history, like all the social sciences, was an aspect of power; so that history was both the history of forms of control and itself a form of control, not an innocent activity. All this is highly controversial still today, but for Braudel it was of course one step worse than the history of mentalities. The historian was no longer the innocent observer but himself complicitous in society’s attempt to marginalize categories such as the woman, the primitive, the mad, the criminal, the homo-sexual, and through its control of the psychology of humanity to construct mechanisms of social power – or ultimately (in Foucault’s last work) a more beneficent form of the control of the self. Moreover, Foucault singled out the Braudelian conception of history for special attack: it was ideas and the sudden rupture created by them (exemplified in his own books), not the long perspective, which mattered in a history dominated by random change, by discontinuities not structures.

  This theoretical debate had just begun in 1968. Braudel was giving a lecture series in Chicago, when he was recalled to face at the age of 6x the revolutionary student movement. Like many radical professors he was sympathetic but uncomprehending of the anarchic streak in youthful protest; his interventions were paternalistic and not well received, and later he condemned the revolution because it made people less rather than more happy. He could not understand the desire to destroy everything that he had personally tried to build outside the university system, of which both he and they disapproved, or their contempt for facts and research in the face of neo-communist and anarchist ideas.

  More dangerous still for Braudel was the reaction, which brought the conservatives under Pompidou to power, and which placed the blame, not on their own resistance to change, but on those who had tried to encourage change. Had not the ‘events’ of 1968 proved the importance of the history of events? Where now was the long perspective? ‘Has structuralism been killed by May 68?’, as a headline in he Monde put it in November of that year. Either the new history (whatever it was) was responsible for the ‘events’, or it was disproved by them: as a conservative you could have it both ways, and both implicated Braudel along with all his intellectual opponents. This was of course to accuse the Enlightenment of causing the French Revolution; but the claim was successful in blocking Braudel’s access to government circles for almost the first time in his career. The university conservatives had indeed lost, and the old Sorbonne was swept away; but they had their revenge on the man who had been most responsible for establishing their irrelevance to modern life.

  Braudel ended his life as he began it, as an outsider, but not unhappy with this fate. He had always believed in the importance of accepting reality and the relative powerlessness of the individual in the face of his circumstances, even though he had himself ruled French intellectual life ‘as a prince’ for a generation. Above all, despite his recognition of the importance of the grand vision and the power of the ‘longue durée’ and of structures, he had always upheld that crucial historical value, the centrality of the individual as the subject of history: not the individual great man but the anonymous yet real peasant, the ordinary unknown man. In this sense he remains more truly revolutionary than any of his opponents on the left or on the right.

  How powerful the legacy of Braudel, and especially of his Mediterranean, still is and how modern its conception still appears, can be seen by considering its impact on two recent books. The first is Barry Cunliffe’s Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and its Peoples (2001), where Cunliffe seeks to do for the Atlantic what Braudel once did for the Mediterranean, and where the title of his last chapter makes explicit reference to Braudel’s Hongue duree The second is the latest book on the Mediterranean, whose first volume appeared in the year 2000; Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: a Study of Mediterranean History. For all its immense learning and resolute up-to-dateness, this work too is inconceivable without the example of Braudel. It is an attempt to answer the same questions as Braudel for the centuries before the age of Philip II; when we were young we all of us indeed dreamed of writing a book on the Mediterranean which should replace in its title Philip II of Spain with that earlier Philip II of Macedon.

  It is not therefore surprising that this work, Braudel’s Mediterranean in the Ancient World, although it was originally written a generation ago, can still serve as a model. This little book exemplifies all the ideas that Braudel believed in, and for that reason it is richer than most of the detailed books by experts which have been written both before and since its original composition. It contains all those elements that he taught us to respect, and offers new surprises still. The first is its scope and its exemplification of the meaning of the tongue durie A history of the ancient Mediterranean would normally begin with the Minoan age, or not earlier than zooo BC; Braudel invites us to consider the Mediterranean not as geography but as a historical phenomenon beginning in the Palaeolithic age, or even with the start of geological time; as he points out (p. 29) the historical period of classical civilization belongs in the last two minutes of the year, and the last two chapters of this book. How Braudel would have relished the recent perspectives on the early stages of evolution and the biological history of the universe that are being revealed by the new uses of genetics in archaeology and evolutionary biology. How he would have loved the enrichment of our knowledge of the origins of human art in the Palaeolithic age with the new discoveries of the Grotte Chauvet in the
Arddche.

  Braudel’s picture also invites us to consider the Mediterranean in its broadest geographical context, inclusive of the great civilizations of Iraq and Egypt, the steppes of Russia, the forests of Germany and the deserts of the Sahara. For him, Mediterranean history is an aspect of world history. Within the context of human history he emphasizes two themes. The first is what I would call the reality principle. Human history is a history of technological mastery and the development of the skills basic to ancient civilization: fire and water technology, pottery, weaving, metal-working, seafaring and finally writing. This emphasis on the physical realities of early civilizations brings out the actual quality of life with a vividness that no amount of reading in other books can achieve. The second theme is the importance of exchange, especially long-distance exchange: ‘Our sea was from the very dawn of its protohistory a witness to those imbalances productive of change which would set the rhythm of its entire life’ (p. 58). It is imbalance that creates exchange and therefore leads to progress. These two ideas, first formulated in the Mediterranean and subsequently explored in depth for the pre-industrial world in Civilization and Capitalism, are here applied to the ancient Mediterranean with magnificent effect. This deceptively modest book is indeed the work of the greatest historian of the twentieth century, and Christopher Logue’s new poem will serve as a fitting preamble.*

  Oswyn Murray

  Preamble

  Two limestone plates support the Aegean world.

  The greater Anatolian still lies flat,

  But half an eon since, through silent eyes:

  ‘Ave!’

  God watched the counterplate subside, until, Only its top and mountain tops remained Above His brother, Lord Poseidon’s, sea:

 

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