Summer Books
Karamat! Karamat!
Eric Christiansen
The Perspective of the World Fernand Braudel Translated by S. Reynolds (Collins £18.95) Unlike many historians, Fernand Braudel has more friends than enemies. This is not owing to his personal charm, his honourable career or to his .venerable age. He is liked and admired because of his books. In particular,, be- cause of one book, the English translation of La Mediterranée et le Monde Mediterra- neen, which Collins published in 1972. After that, he became the great Braudel. .a matter of days, every educated human u,enig in the world appeared to have read " Mediterranee, all 1,375 pages, and, What is more to have read it in French several years earlier without mentioning their achievement even to intimates. Slow rises worth. Braudel was 70 years old before that book brought him world fame, even in France, but he had con- eerved it before the war, and had published the first version well before his 50th birth- Y. Now Now he is over 80, and the third of three giant volumes on Civilisation and Capitalism has just appeared in English as The Perspective of the World, which is an Unexpected but sound rendering of Le k'n1P5 du Monde. The previous volumes !lave been much applauded. This one 'Illlspired Georges Duby to declare 'For us, e is a prince.' Prince of what? — that is the question. What I like about him is his inconclusive- ness. He presents his subject; he offers no tinal. solutions or explanations, he pursues 110 single line of inquiry to the bitter end, 1311d he confines himself to no one period, °Pic or point of view. In La Mediterranee LI* told the story of the maritime conflict tw. een Spain and the Turks by dissecting into three planes. The first was back- the long term, the relatively r'angeless fate of man in contact with the Was sea and its coasts. The second plane ;vas that of the economic and social sys- sys- tems, Which change rather faster. The third was politics: Philip II versus the Ottoman empire, a drama in which the tempo was 40Inetirnes rapid. VerY slow history, slow history, and fast thst°rY were presented consecutively, in hope that they would combine into 7flat the author shamelessly referred to as great history,' meaning the past surveyed h:dm a commanding height, as Michelet y Once surveyed the history of France. tLe1 cannot really be demonstrated that wIl_15 effect was achieved. Each third of the °rk remains an 'essay in general explana- tion' connecting with the others in any way the reader chooses, without merging or even interlocking. It is like the three-speed gears on a bicycle: they make it easier to ride, but it doesn't turn into an aeroplane.
The professed aim of the writer was to promote the methods of the Annales school of French social historians. But these gentlemen were anxious to change historical writing from an art into-a science, by applying quantitative analysis to the past. After the death of Bloch, they were not much interested in being readable. When their would-be champion used some of their methods to construct a flamboyant work of literature, he got very little thanks for it.
What set him apart from them, and from most modern historians, was his concern for history as literature: with solving the ancient problem of how to combine narra- tive with description. His strength lies in his ability to accept any amount of statistics and any number of competing interpreta- tions of the past, and to combine them into an intelligible order, somewhere between a dossier and a yarn.
The latest enterprise has the merits of the first, although its scope is the history of the whole world over the last 500 years. It is an intellectual blow-out, organised with- out the three consecutive time-speeds. They crop up every now and then, but each volume is more or less restricted to a variety of human activity. The first was about eating, reproducing, wearing clothes, working and living in towns. The second was about commerce. This one is about the effects of commerce and industry on broad sections of mankind, the so- called World Economies which are not systems which engage the whole world but which link disparate regions of it. That means the trading empires of Venice, Genoa, Portugal, Antwerp, Amsterdam and London, with a concluding investiga- tion of the Industrial Revolution.
It is a marvellous book for a beginner. When I was young, there was nothing like it. The history of commerce and industry were the property of people who knew the answers because they knew the figures.
There seemed to be very little pleasure involved, and far too many sums. The sums are still there, of course, but Braudel provides pleasure as well. His approach is akin to that of the poet Masefield, who wrote the piece called Cargoes in order to depict the persistence and mutability of commerce over a long period of time, but without the assistance of graphs. I refer to the one beginning 'Quinquireme of Nineveh . . .', which, as Graves pointed out, was about an impossible ship, going to an unlikely destination by an absurd route with an inconceivable cargo. Braudel uses graphs, and takes a great deal more trouble than Masefield over the details, but he still has room for poetry, in the informal sense of the word.
Galanga, Benjamin, Cubebs are spices inscribed over Java in the map on page 527; perhaps they were less sonorous in French, but now they are unforgettable. On page 509 there is a procession of 'cambays, nicannes, bejeutapauts, papolis, korotes, brawles, boelans, lemanees, quilts, chittees, caddies and white dullees' among the fabrics made in India in the 18th century, where mansabdars and omerahs overawed whole sarkars and their parga- nas, but never forgot to cry `karamat' (or 'wonderful!') every time the Grand Mogul opened his mouth. The reader will utter `karamat' more than once before the end of this book, not only at the wealth of curious detail, but also at the mathematical figments which appear in the sections of economic analysis. So skilfully are they developed that the `Kondratieff cycle' and the `Labrousse intercycle' become as fasci- nating as Galanga, Benjamin and Cubebs; at one point I almost believed that I knew what they were.
The arrangement of the evidence is masterly. The evidence itself is not always up to the mark. Societies are sometimes assigned in rather short order to whichever category of time suits the argument. Thus the Fen-men who resisted the drainage speculators of the 17th century are plunged into a 'pocket of underdevelopment' which surely never existed in that particular area. There are too many swift summings-up which don't bear closer inspection. The notions, for example, that the Muscovites spent three centuries in constant warfare with the Tartars, or that the Byzantine empire was 'uncombative' or that the Italian condottieri were phoney warriors are very questionable indeed.
Such are the dangers of relying on other men's work. The rewards appear in the sections on French and English economic development in the 18th century, where maps, tables and text present a variety of current theses and pressings of evidence with a deftness seldom found among those labouring solely in those fields. All the maps and illustrations are well-chosen, from the dust jacket which shows 'Portu- guese merchants in India dining with their feet in water', to the charts by Arbellot which prove that the speed of coach travel within France doubled between 1765 and 1780. Never were the dire effects of rapid- ity more convincingly illustrated. At the end, there are some words of encouragement for those who fear the post-1974 recession as a sign of the long- term decline of capitalism. Capitalism is so ancient and so multifarious that it comes to terms with everything, and survives even its own failures. It is the motor of civilisa- tion, the only hope for the future, the 'seedbed of inspiration'. At the same time, it is under attack both from monopolies within and from state socialism without, ignorant armies that trample on the small businesses that could be the light of the world. I won't pretend that this is the best part of the book, or that it is the only possible deduction from what has gone before. But I have heard much less in- teresting after-dinner speeches, and really, this dinner is superb.
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