Fernand Braudel

Again, fascinating.

You put this in the longue durée, as Braudel called it, the long view.

And we're talking a thousand years in how this developed.

Not just a couple of hundred years with the French Revolution, but a thousand years.

They're long, but I need your comments back because I think they're interesting.

It is about the long durée of world history, as Fernand Braudel would have called it, the long sweep of world economic history.

A point that Smith made that's quite fundamental is he said that the, we'll see it in a moment, the discovery of the sea routes from Europe to the Americas, Christopher Columbus, and the sea route from Europe to Asia, Vasco da Gama, which were within six years of each other, 1492 and 1498, he said were the two most significant events in the history of mankind.

Wow, what a weird statement.

And, you know, you quote from a sort of like, you know, kind of short list in addition to the long list of all the sources, a sort of like frequent short list of popular history works for some of your examples.

So this is books like Christian Olson's Daily Life in the 18th Century and Fernand Braudel's.

Civilization and Capitalism in the 15th and 18th Century, and William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire, popular nonfiction bestseller that a lot of people have probably heard of, if you're a history nerd.

How did you go about doing this research and trying to sort of figure out where do I start and where do I find the, especially the short, attention-grabbing, illustrative anecdotes that are nevertheless properly sourced? you know, reliable.

But, yeah, so in any case, our guest today looks at these fights.

Who's the French historian who talked about the longue durée, Sandeep?

Oh, God, I don't know who you're asking.

Is that...

Thanks so much for having me.

I'm really excited to be here.

By the way, Braudel.

Braudel is your longue durée in Alice school.

In this case, select, indeed adopt, a philosophy of history.

Fernand Braudel.

But not all exclusions are bad, the conventional wisdom of our time will be quick to remind us, and we are all left with the responsibility for deciding where to try to draw circles, with whom, and around what.

David A. Hollinger.

in scope, but they had this, this view that the Industrial Revolution was built on the backs of the colonized people, right?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know that there's such a robust sociological theory in the new history of capitalism to really point to a, a lineage that goes to a, a Braudel and a Wallerstein.

I tend to think of them, this is actually a, a line from Brad DeLong, who's also an economic historian here at Berkeley, where I've heard him say that the new history of capitalism is work that would have come from Harvard Business School in the '50s, but with the moral polarity flipped.

And so everybody who would have been a good guy in the '50s is now a villain-

And so it's the same era of history under the opposite selection pressures.

And Fernand Braudel, potentially the greatest historian of the 16th century, said the core theme of it was...

the, uh, the increasing population across the Mediterranean and Europe where he's in every single country over the course of the 16th century, the population went up and the entire society got wealthier.

Right.