White-haired Fernand Braudel fingers a 13th century Florentine coin, its bronze surface green with age, as he muses on the grand passion of his life: the Mediterranean. "Everything about the Mediterranean has pleased me—the sea, the people, the food. It is a passion that burns you up. And nowadays, for me, the Mediterranean is too strong, too burning. It's all over."
But it is not yet over. Last weekend an international gathering of 150 historians and social scientists assembled at the State University of New York at Binghamton to pay homage to Braudel and his enduring love. English Scholars Peter Burke and Eric Hobsbawm arrived to offer tribute. Historians from Canada, The Netherlands and France sang Braudel's praises. The occasion: the inaugural conference of SUNY'S new Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations. It was the first major American recognition of French Historian Braudel—perhaps the most influential historian now at work and the author of the magnificent 1,375-page book, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.
Internecine Warfare. The Mediterranean is like no other history. It opens not with Philip II (1527-1598) —whose royal entrance is delayed for several hundred pages—but high in the mountains that fringe the sea. It analyzes the shepherds' trails over the Pyrenees, it considers the early use of glacial ice to make ice cream, and it ponders the fate of the Jews, driven from city after city as the population exceeded the available food supply. Only after the fundamentals are established does Braudel turn to the traditional history of political events. Even then, the celebrated King Philip of Spain is only a small figure in the vast struggle between the Spanish and Turkish empires for the domination of the Mediterranean—at the very moment when the sea was about to lose its importance.
Braudel's sweeping view is particularly influential just now, for American historiography and historical teaching have been torn by internecine warfare in recent years. Against the traditional view that history should be based on documentary evidence—and artistically inspired by the Muse Clio—the innovators known as Cliometricians argue that truth can best be found in computer analyses of population movements, interest rates and other social data. Still others explain old riddles by invoking the theories of sociology and psychoanalysis. New voices insist that it should serve the purposes of racial justice or economic reform. In contrast to all these divisions, Braudel offers historians a new kind of synthesis. Oxford Historian H.R. Trevor-Roper has written of the Braudelian method that it "is a kind of history which crosses all frontiers and uses all techniques. The achievement is to have drawn geography, sociology, law, ideas into the broad stream of history and thereby to have refreshed that stream, which previously had been running dangerously dry."