Fernand Braudel (August 24, 1902 - November 27, 1985) was a historian who revolutionized the 20th century study of the discipline by considering the effects of economics and geography on global history, a prominent member of the Annales School of historiography, who concentrated on meticulous historical analysis in the social sciences.

He was born in the département of the Meuse. In 1923 he went to Algeria, then a French colony, to teach history. Returning to France in 1932, he worked as a high school teacher and met Lucien Febvre, who was to have a great influence on his work. In 1939, he joined the army but was captured in 1940 and became a prisoner of war in Germany, in a camp near Lübeck, where, working from memory, he put together his great work La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen a l'époque de Philippe II. After the war he worked with Febvre in a new college, founded separately from the Sorbonne, dedicated to social and economic history.

In 1962 he wrote A History of Civilizations to be the basis for a history course, but its rejection of the traditional event-based narrative was too radical for the French ministry of education, who rejected it.

His most famous work is the three-volume Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, which first appeared in 1979. It is a broad-scaled history of the pre-industrial modern world, presented in the minute detail demanded by the school called "cliometrics" focusing on how people made economies work.

Braudel has been considered one of the greatest of those modern historians who have emphasised the role of large scale socio-economic factors in the making and telling of history.

SUNY Binghamton in New York has a "Fernand Braudel Center", and there is a Instituto Fernand Braudel de Economia Mundial in São Paulo.

Works

• The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II (La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen a l'époque de Philippe II) (1949)
• The Mediterranean in the Ancient World
• Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, 3vols. (1979)
• On History (1980)
• The Identity of France (1986)
• Out of Italy, 1450-1650 (1991)
• A History of Civilizations (1995)

References

• Giuliana Gemelli, Fernand Braudel (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1995)
• Pierre Daix, Braudel, (Paris: Flammarion, 1995)

External links

• Fernand Braudel Center (http://fbc.binghamton.edu/)
• Instituto Fernand Braudel de Economia Mundial (http://www.braudel.org.br/)