Montesquieu on reading

It seems to me that until a man has read all the old books he has no reason to prefer new ones instead.

"Civilisation and Capitalism" Fernand Braudel

My purpose throughout has been to see and to let others see, by allowing what I show to speak for itself, all the richness, complexity and heterogeneity of real life.

Braudel’s huge history of economic life consists of three volumes:

The Structures of Everyday Life
The Wheels of Commerce
The Perspective of the World

The work was begun as a summary of the available sources on economic history between the 15th and 18th centuries. However, during the writing of it, Braudel began to discern from the primary sources a story which was different from the accepted version of what was supposed to have happened. Instead of a single layer of economic activity - the market economy studied by economic historians, and which shows up on statistics- Braudel saw three layers interacting with each other. A shadowy sub-layer on a much lower level than that of the market economy, the level of material life, the food, clothes and living conditions of societies. A rarefied higher level, that of the world economy itself, the favoured domain of capitalism, in which a few extremely powerful individuals made financial decisions which effected whole zones of economic activity (the hedge fund managers who have wrecked our current global economy), decisions which were unbeknownst to and little understood by the larger numbers of people who lived through these effects. These outer levels are both the shadow and the nimbus cast by the light of economic history.

Braudel’s especial gift as a writer and as a historian is his ability to sustain two fields of vision at the same time: the short close up and the long view, each illuminating the other. In the three volumes that make up Civilisation and Capitalism these two views, the accumulation of close ups and the long view (la longue duree), are brought into shifting relations, what Braudel calls the past/present dialectic.

This is a magnificent work which I feel my reading of has not really done justice to. Economics is not my area of specialisation, and I also only have an amateur knowledge and understanding of the various Marxist theologies. I am often ignorant of what Braudel is writing against. Compounding these difficulties is learning how to read the book, how to understand the balance between the patterns and the details. In the first volume the details are to the fore, and the patterns which Braudel discerns have to be teased out the text. I think the idea is to let the details wash over one. However, once this style of reading has been grasped, the reader is on to the second volume, which requires a different kind of reading. Here, the patterns are to the fore, and a much more analytical kind of reading is required. In the third volume, after the difficult first chapter, one can sit back and enjoy the historical narrative unfolding. One is constantly asked to switch reading styles. It is not helped by a typically French refusal to signpost the discourse clearly. Some Anglo Saxon clarity in paragraph labelling and signalling would certainly have helped my reading. However, Braudel is a wonderful guide, freely admitting when he has difficulties himself (his bafflement at the Fuggers’ 16th century account books, for instance), sharing the excitement of his discoveries in the primary sources with the reader, and offering witty and humane captions for the many excellent illustrations: Jacques Bertin has amused himself by ingeniously producing this little masterpiece of data-processing.

"The Structures of Everyday Life" Fernand Braudel

The first volume in Braudel’s classic Civilisation and Capitalism, The Structures of Everyday Life, is concerned with the lowest of the three levels, the details of everyday life: in a very general sense food on tables in houses. Consumption.

In this volume Braudel identifies two limits to the structure of material life: an upper limit, beyond which technology cannot progress and a lower limit, the routine, the inertia of ordinary life, which he calls stagnant history.
The upper limit of what is technologically possible is determined by food supplies, population size relative to available and created resources, the limits of labour and transport and control over nature. In China, for example, there seems to have been a crashing halt to technological development around the 13th century. Braudel suggests that this halt was reached when the balance between population and the means of food production for that population reached a level of equilibrium which effected progress negatively. The population was so enslaved to the necessity for ensuring three rice harvests per year (rice growing is excessively labour intensive) to feed that population, and there was such a surplus of labour, that technological innovation was both unnecessary and not possible because everyone was working on the paddy fields.
The lower limit of what is technologically possible is determined by the forces of cultural inertia and laziness, daily and seasonal routine, and the distrust of the ignorant in the face of the new. The obstinate presence of the past greedily and steadily swallows up the fragile lifetime of men. (Nowhere is this more true than in Chinese culture.)

Braudel’s method in this volume is to use a mass of detail to build up a picture of material life in the pre-industrial era. On one page we can go from Peru to the South China Sea, from the Baltic to the southern most tip of Africa, from the early 15th century, to the late 18th century. The text is a tapestry of many different coloured threads woven together to create a huge panorama of human activity from the lowest level of agriculture to the highest and most rarefied level of financial engineering; a pointillist painting made up of thousands of tiny dots, each with its own significance and place in the design.

Braudel uses these facts to 1) illuminate powerfully what daily life was like at a certain time and place, or 2) to put forward simple material and economic explanations for historical phenomena, or 3) to offer through the interstices of the primary sources tantalising glimpses of real people, allowing us to conjecture stories of empathy. (1) It was only in 1720 in Europe that advances in chimney design (narrowing the flue and putting a curve in it) made it possible to really heat rooms. Before that time, heating from fires was inadequate and restricted to the immediate area round the fire only, and people literally froze in very cold weather. (2) The English navy was superior to the French during the pre-revolutionary period because the French were barred from the Baltic wood trades, and therefore had to use composite masts which were liable to snap under high winds instead of masts made from a single tree trunk which the British imported from Riga. (3) In 1776 Jacob Fries, a Swiss doctor and a major in the Russian army travelled from Omsk to Tomsk in 178 hours. What was his story? “Oh where are you going”, said reader to rider?

The very attempt to envisage the past through the theoretical categories of the present inevitably alters our ways of seeing and explaining it.

The self regulating market seems to be the product of an almost theological taste for definition. This market, in which the only elements are ‘demand, the cost of supply, and price, which result from a reciprocal agreement’, is a figment of the imagination.

Geography, an indispensable lantern in this respect, shows up any number of these structural, permanent differences: mountains and plains, north and south, the continental east and the sea-mists of the west. Such contrasts weigh on human existence as much as, or more than the economic changes that pass over our heads, sometimes improving, sometimes discriminating against the zones where we live.

Geography proposes, history disposes.

"The Wheels of Commerce" Fernand Braudel

The second volume in Braudel's classic Civilisation and Capitalism, The Wheels of Commerce, is concerned with the middle of the three levels, the market economy itself. Circulation.

The market economy is defined as the moment when subsistence existence is transformed by exchange, what Braudel calls the fateful threshold of exchange value. The first part of this volume looks at the structure of the market economy as whole, to provide a typology, a model, or perhaps a grammar. We look at the development of markets in towns, fairs, shops, peddlers; trade circuits, bills of exchange, problems of currencies and specie. Along the way we are treated to fascinating case studies: the tiny snapshots of Volume 1 are also here, but supplemented with longer steady gazes of specific historical situations: the English/Portugese trade; the way Europeans gradually disrupted and usurped the ancient and extensive trade circuits of India in the 18th Century and China in the 19th Century.

In the second part of the volume, Braudel is concerned to cast light on the classical view (put forward by Marx, Polanyi, Weber and so on) that real capitalism (an industrial mode of production) only started in the 19th century. To do this he examines the banking and finance sectors of the pre-industrial economy, and their relations with the state. He also looks in detail at three sectors of the economy often overlooked by classical Marxists where capitalism may be said to have arisen patchily: land use and ownership, industry (literally pre-industry, or artisan activity) and transport.
In terms of land use and ownership, he shows through extended case studies that what appeared to be feudal or seignorial pockets of the economy were in fact participants in a long range capitalism. For example, the second serfdom of Eastern Europe and Russia, in which during the 16th Century land owners gradually re-enserfed the free peasants living on their lands by making them give more days in the week to working on the lord’s land rather than on their own, was actually the result of trading decisions made in Amsterdam. The landowner was exporting most of the goods produced by his unpaid peasant’s labour. Braudel shows the virtue of his long distance view very clearly here: it’s only by standing back and looking at the long term, that what appears to be feudalism close up, is actually capitalism operating long distance through the circulation of trade.

In terms of industry, he examines in depth the key industries of the pre-industrial age: textiles, mining and manufactories. He shows that the putting-out system was an early form of capitalism. Mines in particular demanded huge capital investment which only merchants were willing and able to provide. In terms of transport, road and river haulage were often scenes of capitalistic activity, as was of course the practice of buying shares in ocean going ships and/or their cargoes.

What these three industries have in common is the presence of the merchant, who was always the instigator of capitalistic activity: capitalism started through the circulation of trade, not in the industrialization of production, as described by classical Marxism. The capitalism of the time was that of the urban merchants.

It is in this volume that Braudel first makes three controversial statements. The first, that history is created by the minority, not by the majority, is an assertion that flies in the face of much contemporary bottom-up historiography which de- emphasises the role played by rulers and politicians. According to Braudel, the decisions made by a handful of merchants did more to move history forward than the enormous but inert masses. There are plenty of reasons for arguing that the minority had a greater influence over the course of history than the majority. The second is the assertion that it is a structural law of societies, that power and wealth is always concentrated in a hands of a few families. This sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it is incontrovertible fact, as Braudel shows with demographic, financial and documentary evidence taken from many different cultures and periods. The third is that the market economy, the development of which Braudel has taken such pains to describe, is not to be confused with capitalism itself. Again, the example of China is useful here. China had a market economy in the pre-industrial period, but capitalism did not develop. The pre-conditions for the development of capitalism are: 1) a vigorous and expanding market economy; 2) a hierarchical society which encourages the slow accumulation of wealth, the survival of dynasties, and the ladders of social mobility; 3) the circulation of long distance trade.

Money was indeed a miraculous agent of exchange, but it was also a confidence trick serving the privileged.

Is not the present after all in large measure the prisoner of a past that obstinately survives, and the past with its rules, its differences and its similarities, the indispensable key to any serious understanding of the present?

Capitalism is a venture that goes back a very long way: by the time of the industrial revolution it already had a considerable wealth of experience behind it, and not only in the commercial sphere.

"The Perspective of the World" Fernand Braudel

The third volume in Braudel’s classic Civilisation and Capitalism, The Perspective of the World, is concerned with the highest of the three levels, the operation within the economy of capitalism itself. Credit.
In many ways this is the most conventional of the three volumes. It begins with a theoretical chapter, defining terms and mapping out a strategy. Then it looks at the development of capitalism in Europe, Asia, India, Africa and the Americas: a chronological economic history of the world, then. The pointillism and synchronic double vision of the first two volumes is replaced by a more traditional historiography in which narrative is balanced by analysis, primary source with secondary source.
The volume begins with an examination of the concept of a world-economy as distinct from the world economy (the translator here is beyond excellent). This is not a concept original to Braudel, but he develops it, takes issue with it, refines and complicates it, adding a historical dimension.
World-economies have certain features which define them: they have boundaries; they are centred on one particular city - a world city- (which centre can shift through time) with an already dominant type of capitalism; they are marked by hierarchies of regional economies, in fact a type of inequality.
In terms of spatial features, they consist of a core: (the world city itself and its immediate surroundings), a middle zone (the economic hinterland of the city) and a periphery (those areas of backwardness which are nonetheless effected by the city, its colonies and new overseas markets.)
In terms of temporal features, world-economies are subject to the interaction of economic cycles of varying length and visibility: short- term price fluctuations linked to harvests and epidemics (conjunctural history), Kitchin cycles, Juglar cycles, Labrousse cycles, Kuznet cycles and Kondatrieff cycles. These are well studied and documented by economic historians. Braudel’s project in this volume of his book is to look for evidence of the operation of these cycles in the pre-modern period, and to promote the recognition of another type of cycle long ignored by economic historians: the secular cycle (la longue duree in economic terms). The secular cycle operates over several centuries, and is so slow and deep that in the period covered by the book, there have only been four peaks: 1350, 1650, 1817 and perhaps 1974.

The book looks at the growth of the European world-economy, showing how it grew from a city-centred economy to a national one; in other words, how the central core expanded from a city and its hinterland, to regional economies and then to the national economy, where the middle zone expanded to the borders of the emergent nation state. The first part of the discussion focuses on how the centre of the city-dominated economy shifted from Bruges, to Venice, Genoa, Antwerp and Amsterdam, a constant fluctuation along a North-South axis. Each shift was occasioned by a crisis in credit, and was little understood by contemporaries on the ground, who merely perceived the difficulties caused by the bankruptcies of interconnected firms. The second part focuses on a fascinating extended case study of France, the biggest nation state in Europe but one that, in spite of (or perhaps because of) her size, was curiously left behind when the centre of the European world-economy shifted to London. Various explanations are offered for this historical phenomenon.

The book then looks at the non-European world-economies: the Americas, Black Africa, Turkey, Russia, India and East Asia, before examining the various causes, sector by sector, of the industrial revolution in England. The volume concludes with Braudel’s analysis of the ‘present’ (late 70’s) in terms of the longue duree and the secular cycle. This section is of course rather dated, and the crisis of capitalism, talk of which seems to have been in the air in his circle, of course came to nothing. Compared to our present problems, they had it easy back then.

When a foreign power has access to the first-hand market at the point of production, that is indeed commercial colonization.

The laws or so-called laws of economics probably last only as long as the desires and realities of the period they reflect or interpret more or less faithfully.

The laws of the market no longer apply to huge firms which can influence demand by their very effective advertising, and which can fix prices arbitrarily.

I admit to being fascinated and horrified by the spectacle of this disintegration [the Black Death and the huge recession of the mid-fourteenth century], this headlong tumble into darkness – the greatest drama ever registered in European history. More catastrophic tragedies have indeed occurred in the course of the world’s long existences – the Mongol invasions of Asia, the wiping out of the greater part of the Amerindian population after the arrival of the white man. But nowhere else did a disaster of such magnitude engender such recovery: that uninterrupted movement which began in the mid-fifteenth century and led eventually to the industrial revolution and the economy of the modern state.