A History of Civilizations

"Refreshingly broad-brush in its approach...this history provides the big picture."- The Christian Science Monitor. Written from a consciously anti-enthnocentric approach, this fascinating work is a survey of the civilizations of the modern world in terms of the broad sweep and continuities of history, rather than the "event-based" technique of most other texts.

Fernand Braudel was born in 1902 in Lumeville, north-western Lorraine, France. The son of a teacher, he took his degree in history at the Sorbonne in 1923. He spent much of the war as a prisoner in Germany, where he wrote most of his Mediterranean thesis. In 1949 it was published as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, and it remains one of this century's seminal works. In 1984 he was elected to the Academie Francaise. Fernand Braudel died in Paris in 1985.