Volume 20, Number 20 · December 13, 1973

Historian of Everything

By Keith Thomas
Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800
by Fernand Braudel, translated by Miriam Kochan

Harper & Row, 462 pp., $13.00

Fernand Braudel is probably the most widely admired of all living historians. Author of the huge The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, doyen of the Annales school of historians founded by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, recipient of an enormous Festschrift containing contributions from over ninety authors drawn from many parts of the world, Braudel has received all the honors and exercised all the influence that can come a scholar's way. The Mediterranean is an acknowledged classic: living testimony to the possibility of 'total' history. The Annales group is the world's most productive and dynamic school of historians. If there were a Nobel Prize for history there can be little question about its most likely recipient.



Review, 2728 words

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