Customer Reviews

Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800

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I originally fell over a (borrowed) paperback copy of this book some years ago.

I opened it up and was taken aback, by the very minute details and descriptive writing by M. Braudel.

Whereas I would normally have passed it by, I began reading it about halfway through, and found it extremely interesting.

It is full of information about the lives of "ordinary" men and women, who lived in and through the middle ages and into the industrialisation that commenced in the 1800's. As such, it describes daily life, and living and working conditions of whole generations, long since passed.

When did we begin to eat at tables? Where did the use of knives and forks commence? How did people keep warm? What did they eat? How long did they live? What did they believe in? What did they wear, and how was it obtained? How did the arrival of corn and other cereals change the face of the world and it's human inhabitants? What was the population of Europe at this time?

Just about any questions that you have regarding the 400 years between 1400 and 1800 will be answered by this book.

I recently purchased a hardcover copy from Amazon, and this time, I commenced reading it from the beginning!

Don't be put off by the "boring" title.........grab a copy if you can, and enjoy a marvellous look into Medieval life!

This 44 year old book fills an important missing niche - an analysis on the history of our material world with an economic perspective.

In a way, this book is a progenitor to books like Freakonomics, but without all of the sensationalized, seemingly counter-intuitive, 'who-would-have-thunk-it' poppycock.

The ubiquitous recipe for a non fiction book published today is the over turning of widely held beliefs, whereas Braudel simply and methodically examines that which is so often overlooked simply because it is everywhere and always under our nose.

The format is to take on each subject (foods, shelter, cities...) and to bring to bear all written history about them. He does a good job to tease out side notes made in historic accounts usually dealing with more lofty topics and draw conclusions about the nature about utilitarian aspects of life in the 16th to 19th centuries.

I have two complaints - firstly, although he sets out not to be too Euro-centric, and does a great job for someone writing in the 60s, the book is still 98% about Europe. He often throws his hands up and says in essence, 'sorry, I can't find any info on that'. He does mention the Americas, briefly, but says almost nothing about the middle east and northern Africa, and even the far east gets mentioned only parenthetically.

This brings me to my second complaint. He starts out by studying population across the globe and cross checking this with known dietary practices. This got me optimistic that he would actually endeavor to sketch out the hidden story by inductive reasoning based on the partial economic data. Unfortunately, he often just resorted to laying out what was directly and unambiguously cited in the historic record and he hardly ever tried to draw conclusions based on detective work. If he had done this it might have lead outside of Europe and to a lot more of the material world.