Fernand Braudel

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

Related Topics:
August 24 - 1902 - November 27 - 1985 - Historian - 20th century - Economics - Geography - Annales School - Historiography - Analysis - Social science

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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, the co-founder of the influential Annales journal, 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.

Related Topics:
Meuse - 1923 - Algeria - 1932 - Lucien Febvre - Annales - 1939 - 1940 - Prisoner of war - Germany - Lübeck - Sorbonne

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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.

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Besides La Méditerranée, his most famous work is the three-volume Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century (in French, Civilisation Matérielle, Economie et Capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe), 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.

Related Topics:
Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century - 1979 - Cliometrics

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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.

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

Related Topics:
SUNY Binghamton - New York - Instituto Fernand Braudel de Economia Mundial - São Paulo

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