French historian (1902-1985)
Attempting to write the entire history of the world might nevertheless be thought sufficiently daunting an enterprise to discourage the most intrepid and even the most naive. It is like trying to chart a river with no banks, no source and no mouth--and even this comparison is inadequate, for history is not one river but several.
FERNAND BRAUDEL
Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century
The movement of history is slow and covers vast reaches of time: to cross it requires seven-league boots.
FERNAND BRAUDEL
A History of Civilizations
Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history.
FERNAND BRAUDEL
The Mediterranean
War, the begetter of all things, the creature of all things, the river with a thousand sources, the sea without a shore: begetter of all things except peace, so ardently longed for, so rarely attained.
FERNAND BRAUDEL
The Mediterranean
A culture is a civilization that has not yet achieved maturity, its greatest potential, nor consolidated its growth. Meanwhile--and the waiting period can be protracted--adjacent civilizations exploit it in a thousand ways, which is natural if not particularly just.
FERNAND BRAUDEL
Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century
When I think of the individual, I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before. In historical analysis as I see it, rightly or wrongly, the long run always wins in the end. Annihilating innumerable events--all those which cannot be accommodated in the main ongoing current and which are therefore ruthlessly swept to one side--it indubitably limits both the freedom of the individual and even the role of chance.
FERNAND BRAUDEL
The Mediterranean
The chief privilege of capitalism, today as in the past, remains the ability to choose.... And since it does have the freedom to choose, capitalism can always change horses in mid-stream--the secret of its vitality.
FERNAND BRAUDEL
The Perspective of the World
History is made up of hundreds of correlations, and at best we manage to see a few of them. So let us not jump to conclusions on the basis of oversimple premises.
FERNAND BRAUDEL
Out of Italy: Two Centuries of World Domination and Demise
The obstinate presence of the past greedily and steadily swallows up the fragile lifetime of men.
FERNAND BRAUDEL
Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century
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 axe or the feathered arrow; they are areas which both confine man and undergo constant change through his efforts.
FERNAND BRAUDEL
The Mediterranean
Social science virtually abhors the event. Not without reason; the short-term is the most capricious and deceptive form of time.
FERNAND BRAUDEL
History and the Social Sciences
When discussing the rise and fall of empires, it is as well to mark their rate of growth, avoiding the temptation to telescope time and discover too early signs of greatness in a state which we know will one day be great, or to predict too early the collapse of an empire which we know will one day cease to be. The life-span of empires cannot be plotted by events, only by careful diagnosis and auscultation--and as in medicine there is always room for error.
FERNAND BRAUDEL
The Mediterranean
Political history is not necessarily bound to events, nor is it forced to be. Yet except for the factitious panoramas almost without substance in time which break up its narrative, except for the overviews inserted for the sake of variety, on the whole the history of the past hundred years, almost always political history centered on the drama of "great events," has worked on and in the short time span. Perhaps that was the price which had to be paid for the progress made during this same period in the scientific mastery of particular tools and rigorous methods. The momentous discovery of the document led historians to believe that documentary authenticity was the repository of the whole truth.
FERNAND BRAUDEL
On History
We shall not allow ourselves to repeat the often-voiced opinion that "civilizations are mortal." Mortal perhaps are their ephemeral blooms, the intricate and short-lived creations of an age, their economic triumphs and their social trials, in the short term. But their foundations remain. They are not indestructible, but they are many times more solid than one might imagine.
FERNAND BRAUDEL
The Mediterranean
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?
FERNAND BRAUDEL
The Wheels of Commerce