Laying Foundations

The Structures of Everyday Life, Fernand Braudel, 1981.

Peasants Gathering Grapes, Natalia Goncharova, 1913.

Fernand Braudel is famous for two great trilogies: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, his study of Italy and the Habsburg domains in the 15th-16th centuries; and Civilisation & Capitalism, of which this, The Structures of Everyday Life, is the first volume. While the first trilogy grew from Braudel’s thesis, and is (relatively) limited in scope, the second was written much later, and with a greater ambition: to describe the economic development of the world from the 15th to the 18th century. Over more than eighteen-hundred pages, Braudel approaches this gargantuan task in his distinctive tripartite style; addressing first the material foundations of organised human society, then markets, commerce, and finance; and finally, the ‘world-system’ of the global economy.

I will be tackling all three in succession, and The Structures of Everyday Life is first on the block. It is brilliant but also deeply infuriating. On the one hand, it boasts an extraordinary breadth and detail in its historical description. This is true whether Braudel is explaining how rice cultivation practice developed in China, or how the interiors of Parisian houses changed over time. His gift for evoking the substance of ‘everyday lives past’, without losing a social science tone, is impressive. As a result, the book is a pleasure to read. It sucks you in. But Braudel’s talent in this regard can obscure some frustrating parts of The Structures of Everyday Life: that analysis of why what is described matters is often scare; and, when such analysis does appear, the scale of the claims are rarely matched by the evidence.

For the first few chapters, however, this is not much of an issue, as Braudel is comfortable in his descriptive register, and with good reason. After a section of guesstimates about the ‘scale’ of the early-modern world, the book moves to survey all things food, drink, clothing, and technology, one after the other. Armed with a myriad of brilliant and original charts - who would not wish for a visualisation of the horse-breeding areas of France? - and frequent images plucked straight from the museum, Braudel sketches an astonishingly broad picture of the material foundations of early-modern society. His sketch is not without gaps, however. Braudel is basically focussed on comparing Western Europe (in particular, France, Italy, and England) with China - although, in Braudel’s defence, this is still true of almost all ‘global’ history books anyway. Insofar as Braudel has an ‘argument’ in this part of the book, it is that these ‘structures of everyday life’ changed more (and more rapidly) in Europe than in China - and the obligatory ‘rest of the world’. Just as Chinese metallurgy was at the cutting edge in 1400 but then stagnated, so did its fashion, food, and drink change little over this period. I am sceptical of whether this is true to the extent Braudel claims, but I am not knowledgeable enough to contest it. However, the most glaring problem is not the claim itself, but that Braudel does not offer any theories of why this was the case. He observes it again and again, and with consistently charming descriptions, but explanation is never forthcoming - except via the occasional recourse to simple platitudes about ‘inward-looking civilisations’. This may be intentional - a conscious choice for an intentionally descriptive book. But it may also reveal Braudel’s awareness of his own limits, a tell his knowledge of China might be insufficient for bold comparative claims.

The meatiest part of the book is concentrated in the final chapters, which discuss money and towns respectively. Once again, both are primarily descriptive. But they are written less like surveys than the earlier chapters. In the chapter on money, Braudel’s essential point is that money and credit are “languages… which every society speaks after its fashion, and which every individual is obliged to learn”. Braudel likes his overwrought metaphors, and this is perhaps one of them. Currencies “make dialogue both necessary and possible and they only exist when the dialogue itself exists”. This phrasing is characteristically dramatic. However, I think it is still useful. Like a language, money and credit represents an interwoven, communicative system that can nonetheless exhibit stark and uneven variations in grammar and vocabulary. Braudel’s description of this varying grammar and vocabulary - the different and changing monies and credit instruments - is one of the few chapters in the book that genuinely feels global, not just Europe with ‘the rest of the world’ tacked on haphazardly. But this descriptive achievement is somewhat diminished by the flippant inclusion of grand, largely unsubstantiated claims. Braudel argues in rapid succession that China did not possess a complicated monetary system because it did not need one to exploit its neighbours, that medieval Europe ‘perfected’ its money because of the challenge by Islam, and that monetary revolution in the Ottoman Empire was caused by ‘forced entry into the concert of Europe’. These are, no doubt, fascinating arguments - but they are not backed up at any point. In Braudel’s defence, they are arguments clearly beyond the scope of this volume - he may be teasing you to continue with his next doorstoppers. However, the book would be improved without them.

The final chapter is about towns. Once again, Braudel begins with one of his classic-if-slightly-overdone metaphors, declaring that “towns are like electric transformers. They increase tension, accelerate the rhythm of exchange and constantly recharge human life”. From the eleventh century, European towns were “outposts of modernity” - responsible for inventing public debt, bills of exchange, patriotism, and the ‘state of mind’ imparted by capitalism, among much else. Even after the city-state and quasi-independent town were cut down to size by the territorial state, it was they which made their countries, and not vice versa. For Braudel, the successes of Britain and the Netherlands were the successes of London and Amsterdam. The failure of Spain was the failure of Seville, which “was not a powerful free town capable of producing and carrying through a really individual economic policy.” These towns were important, but attributing the decline of Spain to some Schumpeterian failure on behalf of Seville is maybe pushing it a little far. Still, it is not worth taking Braudel too seriously. He loves stylistic hyperbole, and here is a great example of where it needs some discounting. Because what this reveals is just how much significance Braudel attributes to ‘the town’ as a historical actor.

Nowhere is this more clear than when Braudel opens discussion of capitalism for this first time. Towns - locked in conflict with their neighbours for wealth and glory - had a competitive spirit that, Braudel believes, is why “capitalism and towns were basically the same thing in the West”. Economic development in Europe in his vision comes from fundamentally urban roots: long-distance trade, finance, and the state. This is maybe the quintessentially Braudelian position - a flexible idea of capitalism, untied from notions of ‘modes of production’, oriented towards trade over industry, and focussed on towns (especially Braudel’s beloved Genoa and Amsterdam) is traceable back to The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World. But it is also easily contested. I will leave this topic for now, because Braudel does not go much further, and the Structures of Everyday Life ends with the clear expectation that these themes will dominate volumes two and three (which they do!). Still, this section of the book was my favourite. It is the first time (a mere five-hundred pages in!) that Braudel begins to try explain history - even if this is mostly earmarked for the sequels.

I worry I have been a bit harsh on Braudel and The Structures of Everyday Life. This is in part because the best aspect of the book - the broad strokes of rich description - is hard to do justice in a review. Simply repeating a long list of facts wouldn’t be much fun to read (or write). Above all, Braudel has written a brilliant reference book, material history, and story (a particularly impressive achievement given how little narrative the book holds). But the book’s first five-hundred pages strike a tone that is alternatively laboriously descriptive and flippant, which can frustrate your ability to enjoy it. The final chapters break this, and it is here where I feel the ‘real’ Braudel - the Braudel people swoon over - can be glimpsed for the first time. But why such a slow burn? I am inclined to think that the early chapters of The Structures of Everyday Life form an extended foreword of sorts, wherein Braudel sets the scene without revealing the plot. But the plot is what makes his book worth reading, and it is only in the last chapters, wherein said plot is partially revealed, that the book acquires a sense of direction and purpose. Braudel would likely respond that I am missing the point - that “it was [not] possible to achieve an understanding of economic life as a whole if the foundations were not first surveyed. These foundations has tried to lay down; upon them the next two volumes… have been built”. But I am not convinced that this erratic survey, which even Braudel acknowledges could have used “more explanation, justification, and example”, needed to lead the charge of Civilisation & Capitalism.¹ Much of it might have made a great appendix.

1. The Structures of Everyday Life, p. 588. He really does write this! I don’t normally reference quotes here, but you can look this one up if you do not believe me.