Latin America: Global Crisis and Multiculturalism - Series of Humanistic Frontiers

Author: Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas ()
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: Fernand Braudel had long lived in Algeria and gained significant experience there. During this time, his research on Mediterranean countries also yielded new results. It can be said that his understanding of historiography began to change before 1935. The experience in Brazil only deepened and solidified this intellectual transformation. Of particular significance is that Fernand Braudel's shift in academic thought—from traditional historiography to the new economic-sociological approach—occurred between 1927 and 1935. This transformation was completed by the end of 1934 and early 1935, when he discovered the entire "Economic Mediterranean of the 16th Century" in the Ragusa archives for the first time. That is to say, he uncovered all the diplomatic maneuvers, political alliances, and covert economic activities—such as commodity trade, currency, and financial circulation—among Mediterranean countries under Philip II's rule. Subsequently, in Brazil, the concept of the inseparability of politics and economics solidified in his mind. In this concept, the economy also evolved through rapid combination, transformation, and differentiation—all Latin American countries were no exception. In Latin America, he could observe this phenomenon from close range, proving through direct experience the true role of economic and social factors in history. This helped him lay a firmer foundation for his transition to the new historiographical perspective. This new approach reanalyzed the significance of economic and social activities and proposed new evaluations. At the time in France, young scholars at the Annales journal were vigorously promoting and advocating this new historiography. As a student at the Sorbonne, Braudel had been trained in Eurocentric or Europe-centric historiography. Now, this perspective was also facing "fragmentation." As he himself noted, during his time in Algeria, while gradually learning to "observe" Mediterranean countries in a different, unacknowledged way, he began to question that historiographical view and gained a new understanding of Eurocentrism. From a completely different platform—Algeria and the Maghreb—he analyzed Mediterranean countries, leading to new insights and judgments about the region. Observing and analyzing the Mediterranean from the "southern shore" yielded a completely different perspective on it, one largely unfamiliar to most European historians. Thus, after meeting directly with the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne for the first time, Braudel was greatly shaken. He had met Pirenne during an academic visit to Algeria in 1931. Listening to Pirenne's famous lectures, Braudel reaffirmed his own ideas: that the Mediterranean could be seen as the "main character" in historical analysis, thereby overturning traditional arguments. According to these arguments, the Mediterranean was merely a "connection point" between Europe and other regions and a supplement to European development. This time, Brazil pushed for a shift in world history research, re-establishing the "perspective of observation" and the center of development. This was a genuine "encounter between civilizations," forged in Brazil by Latin American countries, which allowed Braudel to break free from the constraints of Eurocentrism and "pave a new path," fundamentally transcending the traditional notion of viewing the world solely from a European standpoint. Thus, he could study the Mediterranean as a "self-contained" world—a decisive, organized center within the "Old World." This was a groundbreaking argument with revolutionary implications. In fact, this very perspective was already embedded in Braudel's subsequent work on Mediterranean studies. When he further elaborated on this idea, he proposed that European civilization was a product of continuous dialogue between "two Europes"—each existing and intertwining to form Europe. This led to Braudel's unique view of world history: the sum of the dialectical relationships between the various civilizations established by humans on Earth over a long period. Now, Braudel used the materials provided by Brazil in the 1930s to continue his intellectual transformation, gaining new facts and experiences that led to profound changes. For example, as the professor of "Civilization History," he was slow to develop a reference framework for analyzing civilizations. In his own words, the course of "Civilization History" was designed to examine "the history of all human activities in time and space." He had to review his knowledge of world history to address the various topics in the course and lectures, covering Eastern history, Greek history, Roman history, 19th-century history—from the origins of Iberian history to its discovery—and the various stages of the Middle Ages. In a sense, all these issues were aimed at answering the questions raised by Brazilian history and life at the time, and the students were sharp and inquisitive, forcing Braudel to consider problems "from everyone's perspective." As a result, almost spontaneously, Braudel, the author of Material Civilization, Economy, and Capitalism, was compelled through patient and systematic review of all records of human activity to develop a completely new, more comprehensive comparative approach to analyzing and observing historical problems.