Fernand Braudel - Capitalism

Capitalism

After La Méditerranée, Braudel's most famous work is the three-volume Civilisation Matérielle, Économie et Capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe (Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800), which first appeared in 1979. The entire three-volume work is a broad-scale history of the preindustrial modern world, presented in the minute detail demanded by the school called cliometrics, focusing on how people made economies work. Like all his major works, it mixed traditional economic material with a thick description of the social impact of economic events on various facets of everyday life such as food, fashion, and social customs. There was little original research in the survey; rather, it was a synthesis of a large body of work by many scholars, some of it outdated. Braudel compiled descriptive detail rather than building theoretical constructs. He avoided all economic theory, and used statistical data as an illustrative rather than an analytic tool.

Braudel claimed that there are long-term cycles in the capitalist economy which developed in Europe in the 12th century. Particular cities, and later nation-states, follow each other sequentially as centers of these cycles: Venice and Genoa in 13th through 15th centuries (1250–1510), Antwerp in 16th century (1500–1569), Amsterdam in 16th through 18th centuries (1570–1733), and London (and England) in 18th and 19th centuries (1733–1896). He used the word "structures" to denote a variety of organized behaviours, attitudes, and conventions, as well as literal structures and infrastructures. He argued that structures that were built up in Europe during the Middle Ages contributed to the successes of present-day European-based cultures. He attributed much of this to the long-standing independence of city-states, which, though later subjugated by larger geographic states, were not always completely suppressed—probably for reasons of utility.

Braudel argued that capitalists have typically been monopolists and not, as is usually assumed, entrepreneurs operating in competitive markets. He argued that capitalists did not specialize and did not use free markets. He thus diverged from both liberal (Adam Smith) and Marxian interpretations. In Braudel's view, under capitalism the state has served as a guarantor of monopolists rather than as the protector of competition usually portrayed. He asserted that capitalists have had power and cunning on their side as they have arrayed themselves against the majority of the population.