Michael Wood on the dawn of global history writing
It’s time for a book clear out. I’ve been avoiding this moment for some years, but (and I’m sure many readers feel the same) our house is sagging under a lifetime’s accumulation of history books, especially from second-hand bookshops. Arlington and Lewisohn’s In Search of Old Peking (10p from a stall in Bath); Letters of Lupus of Ferrières (9 francs from a bouquiniste on the Quai Voltaire in Paris). The latter inspired me to write a book about his friendship with Einhard, which is still in my drawer. There’s even a tiny battered Gertrude Bell from Baghdad’s open-air book street, still with a Farida beer-label bookmark. Stories, experiences, memories. But will I ever read them again? Be ruthless, I told myself.
So I’ve started using the lockdown to go through the boxes. Should Samuel Eliot Morison’s Great Explorers go, riveting as it is? Or Tawney’s Documents? Or those odd volumes of Toynbee’s Study of History – back in favour again? Then I picked up Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean. Sitting on the floor among the discards, I felt a flood of emotion. It was like greeting an old friend.
Teaching in Algeria in the 1920s, young Braudel did a doctoral thesis on Philip II of Spain’s foreign policy. He also became fascinated by the Mediterranean, by “its creative space, the amazing freedom of its sea-routes, its many regions so different yet so alike”. In the thirties he taught in Brazil, further widening his horizons while he gathered materials for the big book. But as all writers of history have discovered, the more he thought about it, the more factors seemed to come into play: climate, environment, landscape, social history.
When war broke out in 1939 Braudel was called up, and the following year he was captured during the German attack on France and became a PoW – first at Mainz and then at Lübeck, where he wrote the entire first draft of the book from memory. (He had no notes, but he had access to a library at both camps.) His book was published in 1949 and a revised edition in 1966. By the time it was finished, the events that he’d originally set out to explore were only a small part of the book. Most of it was about the human cultures and civilisations that were their context. But those civilisations in their turn, he thought, had to be seen within the “longue durée” (long term) – reaching over time from prehistory to the present. In that light, mere events, like the wars that led to the battle of Lepanto, were superficial, “flickering, like fireflies on the surface of history”. Even civilisations, although often very long-lasting, depend on much deeper realities of geography, landscape and climate.
Braudel’s book would be the real beginning of global history writing – the study of world systems, including histories of oceans and seas, which is so important today. The final title of his book is The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, and, along with his other writings, it features granular descriptions derived from an unbelievable range of documents on the lives of ordinary people. Most surviving sources in history come from the wealthy, the literate and the powerful, but he wrote about the lives of slaves, serfs, peasants and the urban poor – the people who generate the wealth of societies and civilisations. He went on to explore these themes in detail in his great trilogy, Civilisation and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century.
At the end of volume two of the Mediterranean, Braudel wrote an afterword which, as a statement of the sympathetic imagination that lies behind the historian’s craft, has stayed with me all my life. Looking back, I believe it’s played a big part in how I think about doing history on TV: bringing in landscape, climate, geography and the lives of ordinary people as well as the rulers – in Braudel’s case, the “timeless realities… the deep bone structure of the Mediterranean”. He thought this needed to be approached with the eye of the geographer, or the traveller, or the novelist.
Quoting the travel writer Lawrence Durrell, he wrote: “I believe that antiquity lives on round today’s Mediterranean shores. In Rhodes or Cyprus, ‘Ulysses can only be ratified as an historical figure with the help of the fishermen who today sit in the smoky tavern of The Dragon, playing cards and waiting for the winds to change’.”
With the huge changes caused by cultural and economic globalisation in the last 50 years, I don’t know whether that’s still true. But as you will imagine, Braudel went in to the “save” box. More adventures there, I hope!