A History of Civilizations by Fernand Braudel, Richard Mayne book contains
much that is prescient and insightful. Consider, on China: "In 1945, she
was unable to make a motor-scooter by 1963 she was on the brink of producing an
atomic bomb." And what would he say now? On the concentration of power in
the elites, consider his quote from Lenin: "If Tsarism could last for
centuries thanks to 130,000 aristocratic feudal landowners with police powers
in their regions, why should I not be able to hold out for a few decades with a
party of 130,000 devoted militants?" (And indeed Lenin did!, before
joining that proverbial dustbin).
Braudel
also covers A History of Civilizations why the world speaks English and not
French, largely due to the fact that the English were sending out in the
mid-18th Century a million colonists compared to 70,000 for the French, since the latter had fears of becoming
depopulated. And he gave a wonderful nod to one of my favorite cities, Avignon.
The A
History of Civilizations
author's arguments on historical trends are cogent his brush is broad, and the
read enjoyable. He anticipated the "butterfly theory," without the
name (the flapping of the wings of a proverbial butterfly in China might
contribute to a tornado in Kansas). He did so by also referencing China, and
spoke of the spread of the Chinese fashions of the T'ang period eventually
reaching France, and the court of Charles VI "... the heritage of a long
vanished world-much as light still reaches us from stars already extinct."
A
History of Civilizations, Fernand Braudel PDF
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Fernand
Braudel
(Author), Richard Mayne (Translator) |
Paperback: 640 pages | Publisher: Penguin Books
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