The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

Part III
AMERICA’S DESTINY

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Chapter XV

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BRAUDEL, MEXICO, AND GRAND STRATEGY
The late Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote in 1972 that no group of
scholars had a more “fertilizing effect” on the study of history than the so-called
Annales
group, founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, and named
for the Paris periodical in which they frequently published: 
Annales d’Histoire
Economique et Sociale
. Foremost among these Frenchmen was Fernand Braudel.
In 1949, Braudel published 
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in
the Age of Philip II
, a work that broke new ground in historical writing by its
emphasis on geography, demography, materialism, and the environment.
1
Braudel brought nature itself into a work of history, thereby immeasurably
enriching the discipline, as well as helping to restore geography to its proper
place in academia. His massive two-volume effort is particularly impressive
because he wrote much of it while a prisoner of the Germans during World War
II. In Braudel’s vast tapestry of a narrative, permanent and unchanging
environmental forces lead to enduring historical trends that go on for many
decades and centuries, so that the kinds of political events and regional wars
with which we concern ourselves seem almost preordained, if not mere minutiae.
It was Braudel who helps us understand how the rich forest soils of northern
Europe, which required little to make an individual peasant productive, led
ultimately to freer and more dynamic societies compared to those along the
Mediterranean, where poorer, more precarious soils meant there was a
requirement for irrigation that led, in turn, to oligarchies. Such poverty-stricken
soils, combined with an uncertain, drought-afflicted climate, spurred the Greeks
and Romans in search of conquest.
2
In short, we delude ourselves in believing
that we are completely in control of our destinies; rather, Braudel leads us to the
attendant realization that the more we are aware of our limits, the more power
we have to affect outcomes within them.

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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
climate 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 commodities, 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-Roper goes on: “Geography, climate, population
determine communications, economy, political organization.”
3
Braudel, who

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unlike Mackinder, Spykman, or Mahan lacks a specific theory of geopolitics for
us to investigate, nevertheless achieves something greater. For he is more than a
geographer or strategist. He is a historian whose narrative has a godlike quality
in which every detail of human existence is painted against the canvas of natural
forces. If geography ever approaches literature, it does so with Braudel. In a
sense, he is a summation of all the strategic thinkers we have encountered thus
far.
Oxford archaeologist Barry Cunliffe notes that perhaps Braudel’s signal
contribution to the way in which history is perceived is his concept of “varying
wavelengths of time.” At the base is the