Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Braudel's geographical compass identifies the Mediterranean as a complex of seas near
a great desert, the Sahara. Thus, he restored North Africa to prominence in Mediterranean
studies, and so provided context for the mass migration of workers in our own era from the
Mediterranean's southern Islamic shores (upon whose stony massifs Latin sank few roots)
to its northern Christian ones. Braudel's story, despite its emphasis on the Spanish ruler
Philip II, is not really one of individual men overcoming obstacles, but rather of men and
their societies subtly molded by impersonal and deeply structural forces. In an era of cli-
mate change, of warming Arctic seas opening up to commercial traffic, of potential sea-
level rises that spell disaster for crowded, littoral countries in the tropical Third World,
and of world politics being fundamentally shaped by the availability of oil and other com-
modities, Braudel's epic of geographical determinism is ripe for reading. In fact, Braudel
with his writings about the Mediterranean establishes the literary mood-context for an era
of scarcity and environmentally driven events in an increasingly water-starved, congested
planet.
The achievement of Braudel and the others of the
Annales
school, Trevor-Roper writes,
“is to have drawn geography, sociology, law, ideas into the broad stream of history, and
thereby to have refreshed, nourished, and strengthened that stream.” After all, Trevor-Rop-
er goes on: “Geography, climate, population determine communications, economy, polit-
