"The present," writes Fernand Braudel in the third and final volume of his Material Civilization and Capitalism, "is largely the victim of a stubborn past bent on self-preservation." That remark is one key to a broad vision of history.
When Fernand Braudel became an editor of the French his- torical journal Annales: Economies, Sociitis, Civilisations in 1948, and when in 1956 he was named director of the 6th Sec- tion of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, France's most...