Raymond Carr on a history of Mediterranean Europe

"No true lover of the Mediterranean," the publisher hopes for Professor Braudel's great work, " should be without a copy." It will be a tough-minded lover who takes this long and difficult book to bed with him at Cap Ferrat or Amalfi. You can't have an affair with it; you have to marry it. The magnificence of its scope attracts; the density of its detail deters. As with some great Egyptian monument, distance gives a simple grandeur; closer inspection reveals a surface covered with what, to the uninitiated, appears as a mass of obscure signs.

This volume is a revised edition of a book first published just after the war when exciting history books were in short supply. New additions have made it a more extensive exhibition of fine scholarship in a difficult field — and in no field are there so many stones and difficult corners to turn as in the economic and social history of the sixteenth century where to discover a statistical series is a rarity. But let there be no mistake: with all its convolutions this is high professional history on the grandest scale. Braudel does not share "the fear of great history which has killed great history." His central theme is the relationship between 'timeless history' — the story of man's contact with the inanimate world of mountains, soils and seas — and what is fashionably called l'histoire evenementielle, that is, mere history of events. These superficial manifestations, for Braude], are meaningless without the deeper rhythms of history. Politics and diplomacy (and Braudel started his career as a diplomatic historian) are surface currents that can only be explained when we have charted the great movements of the sea. There is a conspicuous history and a submerged history; structure and conjuncture. To connect the two is Braudel's task in order to forge une histoire totale. It was an aweinspiring task. No one, oddly enough, has taken on a similar job — for instance for the Baltic, the great sea of seventeenthcentury Europe.

The origins of Braudel's great endeavour lie in the strong geographical traditions of French historiography deepened by the social and economic historians whose work appeared in Annales. And it is in the early sections, where the geographical imprint is most apparent, that the general reader, presumably that true lover of the Mediterranean celebrated in the blurb, will find his reward. It is here that Braudel's passion for the warm south illumines the world of deserts, peninsulas and seas — for the Mediterranean is not one sea, but a complex of seas. It is here that the width of reference yields an abundant harvest.

All the changes that sweep over the Mediterranean Braudel conceives as great dramas. There is the long battle, lasting until the nineteenth century and beyond, with malaria, mud and water in the plains where, he argues, reclamation with its heavy capital costs produced a tyrannous social system symbolised, by the castles of the harsh landlords of the Tuscan Maremme. There is the resistance of mountains where civilisation is baffled by "a few hundred metres" and where it remains fragile and where free men are bred. There is the grip of the great cities of the Italian "developed world" on the primitive economies of the islands forced into colonial monocultures, their economies " distorted " as it is alleged that the economies of, say, Argentina have been distorted by dependence on Smithfield. He chronicles the sudden rise and fall of states created by desert nomads who "adapted to sedentary life for only a brief moment before vanishing again into the darkness" as did the Shabbiyya who ruled for a brief moment in Kairouan, "leaving a trail of holiness behind them"; the conflict between the oasis dwellers (the Bauchrusse or belly people) and the desert dwellers (the long-legged, broad-chested Brustrasse). In the later and more difficult part of this book comes the flood of silver that finds its way from Spanish America, via the Mediterranean, to India and China, and the invasion of the sea by ships from the north. It is here that the technicalities of price history (which, perhaps too easily, has been used as the main scaffolding from which to build histoire totale) may overwhelm the uninitiated.

This Mediterranean world is not, as Braudel insists, richly endowed by nature. There are few fish, few trees — a Spanish humanist could write that the wood cost

more than the meat it boiled in the pot. The great flocks of sheep must move the length and breadth of Spain for pasture. The thin limestone soils, unlike the deep soils of the north, degenerate and blow away in the wind if not cultivated. This poor land could not feed a growing Population and " famine, real famine when people died in the streets, was a reality." The national economies around the sea were complementary; it was the trade with the outside world which made cities like Venice and Genoa and Ragusa rich.

Nor was this world suddenly ' ruined' by the discovery of America and the shift to the Atlantic, and it is the detailed proof of this continued vitality that constitutes one of Braudel's major contributions to the history of the region. The Genoese became the bankers of Europe, shuffling huge sums all over Europe by paper transactions at the great fairs; Philip II hated them but could not shake them off. The spice trade that had once made the fortune of Venice continued to flourish long after the Portuguese had opened (and lost) the Atlantic route. The little boats that invaded the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century did not mean that the fortune of the great mercantile cities declined with the size of their merchant navies; their arrival gave evidence of the " sea's Prosperity, of its ability to enlist and pay for the services of the proletarians of the Atlantic."

Perhaps this last sentence reveals one of Braudel's favourite stylistic devices characteristic of the grander school of French his the personification of complex variables. Catalonia declined in the fifteenth century (partly, I believe, because the Catalans confused piracy and Commerce). "History," writes Braudel of this spectacular decline, "sooner or later takes back her gifts." There are "the great Missed opportunities of history." Rather questionably he cites Spain's failure to Pursue the conquest of Africa as such a missed occasion, raising the old vision of a great Spanish African state. A HispanicArab empire would have been a better bet for Spain than the deceptive riches of the New World and exhausting European ambitions in the old. Presumably, had the alternative option been seized, then Spain Would now be fighting in some rearguard colonial action a Ia Portugaise.

Stunningly wide though his comparative framework is (and clearly reflections on the third world revolution have enriched the the present edition), it is intra-MeMditerranean. He sometimes talks, for instance, as if famine were a Mediterranean phenomenon and it is true that Spanish picaresque novels of the time are obsessed with the theme of getting the next square meal; yet Swedish peasants were dying in ditches, their mouths stuffed with grass and bark, When the proletariat of the great southern cities was existing on convent soup. Sometimes he compares the incomparable. Is there any point in comparing the extensively cultivated latifundia of Anda where the historic conditions of the Reconquest created the great estates Of a military nobility — with the semiservile estates created by capital intensive reclamations in the Tuscan Maremme or the plain of Lombardy? Geographical

fatalism creeps in: did Castile rule Spain with a "rod of iron" because the central plateau gave her control of the roads along which she could march to dominate the periphery?

Sometimes this translation itself cuts some of these grander gestures down to size; and it is a brilliant translation of a difficult work. Indeed it is the best historical translation I have ever come across, combining elegance and accuracy.

Dr Kamen is sharp and learned, but his book* is a puzzling one. It is, on his own confession, not a comprehensive survey. He has deliberately committed what Eli Heckscher, the great Swedish economic historian, called the greatest crime a historian can commit; writing on themes which are interesting rather than important and where the evidence is abundant and available.

For the aristocracy, in this Iron Century of inflation and rising prices — low by our standards but appalling to contemporaries — the important thing was to keep afloat at the top, to make ends meet in a society where aristocrats were expected to be great spenders. For the poor it was important to survive at all against catastrophes like the great famine of 15947 and 1647-9.

For Dr Kamen the poor are in some way more ' important ' than the rich; social protest (abundantly evident, as always, in the sources) more significant than the processes by which ' oppression ' was internalised and accepted. Hence the emphasis on banditry as a social protest with "strong popular support "; hence the long ' key ' chapter — Dr Kamen's phrase — on popular revolts. All this is fashionable social history. Aristocrats and kings who ruled Europe, are out. Peasants, on whose toil rested a predominantly agrarian society, and beggars, are in. The old balance of social history needed redressing; but when the study of the underprivileged becomes a moral imperative, then we are as badly off as in the days when we were all seduced by what Dr Kamen calls the "gilt glittering on the surface."

Braudel's depth — in the sense that in his search for those slow geological changes in structures he goes outside any precise, recognisable chronological framework — is his contribution to the formation of the modern historian's conception of his task. Yet as John Cooper

has pointed out in his excellent survey of early seventeenth-century Europe, the "consideration of a relatively short period of time can be useful in so far as it reminds us of the unforeseeable and unexpected character of what now seem clear and inevitable trends." It can save us from writing history backwards, from assuming that what seems important to us now was important to them then, from using a modern concept like the nation state to analyse periods in which it was unknown. Dr Kamen struggles to restore the emphasis of contemporaries; but The Iron Century is an odd construct — too short for depth, too long for the Cooper effect. It corresponds to the ravages of inflation and the height of the witchcraft — and the two have some connection, for as Michelet pointed out long ago, the witch mania corresponds with "times of despair." Otherwise it doesn't all hang together. And neither, it must be said, does Braudel's great work. Perhaps it is only in the historical anthropology of a small community that we can really see the long and the short of it all.