The Perspective of the World; Civilization And Capitalism 15th - 18th Century Volume III

ii, 699, [3] pages. Fernand Paul Achille Braudel (24 August 1902-27 November 1985) was a French historian. His scholarship focused on three main projects: The Mediterranean (1923-49, then 1949-66), Civilization and Capitalism (1955-79), and the unfinished Identity of France (1970-85). He was a member of the Annales School of French historiography and social history in the 1950s and 1960s. Braudel emphasized the role of large-scale socioeconomic factors in the making and writing of history. In a 2011 poll by History Today magazine, he was named the most important historian of the previous 60 years. At the outbreak of war in 1939, he was called up for military service and on 29 June 1940 taken prisoner as lieutenant in the 156th Infantry Regiment. He was held at prisoner-of-war camp Oflag XII-B in Mainz. He became the rector of the camp university, which gained him respectful treatment from the authorities and the right to borrow books and journals from the municipal library for his research. Under the Geneva Convention he received his pay, which he used to buy German books, and was able to order material from France. In June 1942, suspected of "Gaullist" (i.e. French Resistance) involvement, he was transferred to a camp for special category prisoners (Oflag X-C) near Lübeck, where he remained for the rest of the war. Braudel became the leader of the second generation of Annales historians after 1945. He defended his thesis at the University of Paris in 1947. The concluding volume of the trilogy charts the growth of the world economy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century concentrating on the human activity that underlies the business of life - the bustle of the market, the great manipulators of capital, the labor of the slave, the peasant and factory workers, the fashions of the rich and the rise of the great financial centers of Genoa, Venice, Amsterdam and London. The third volume, subtitled "The Perspective of the World", was strongly influenced by the work of German scholars like Werner Sombart. In it, Braudel traces the impact of the centers of Western capitalism on the rest of the world. Braudel wrote the series as a way of explanation for the modern way and partly as a refutation of the Marxist view of history. Derived from a Kirkus review: With this work, the magnum opus of French historian Braudel's distinguished career comes to a conclusion. The subject is the establishment of a capitalist world economy--meaning, to Braudel, the movement of goods and money over long distances in an integrated system. After the two previous volumes, with their focus on daily subsistence and local markets, this one's main actors, and their roles, are relatively well-known: the world economy requires central cities, so we look to the Italian city-states, to Bruges, Antwerp, and, in greatest detail, Amsterdam; a national market is needed to propel accumulation and growth, so London displaces Amsterdam; the world economy requires a hierarchy of regional economic development, so attention shifts to the Russian and Ottoman Empires and European colonial expansion; and, in this interpretation, development means specialization, leading to the rapid division of labor and accelerated growth of the industrial revolution. Braudel's concern, however, is as much with other interpretations as with his story, since he knows he is dating the rise of capitalism significantly earlier (in the 13th century to where an earlier generation of historians had placed it) and that his world-system approach merges the usual distinction between commercial and industrial capitalism. Braudel's usual wealth of detail--on the Paris-Lyon rivalry, on Siberian fairs, the rise and fall of Malacca--is bolstered by the logic he grants to the system as a whole. Those well versed in social and economic history will be able to judge Braudel's grand scheme and its effect on individual episodes. First U.S. Edition [Stated], Second Printing [stated] [May be book club as dust.…