L'histoire, mesure du monde

To mark the 40th anniversary of Fernand Braudel’s passing, Éditions de la MSH is publishing a new edition of a pivotal text drawn from lectures he gave while in captivity during the Second World War. Scheduled for release in November 2025, "L'histoire, mesure du monde" lays the early foundations of Braudelian thought and global history.

The book will be featured in a special session of the “Livres en dialogue” series, held to close the first day of the international conference The Worlds of Fernand Braudel taking place on November 27–28, 2025, at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.

The event will bring together geographer Christian Grataloup (Université Paris Cité) and historian Maurice Aymard (EHESS, former director of the FMSH).

Fernand Braudel began writing The Mediterranean while held as a prisoner of war during the Second World War. Composed in pencil, on school notebooks, the book was conceived behind the bars of prison camps in Mainz and later Lübeck. Perhaps it was this confinement that gave the work its distinctive tone— evoking with great power “the wind of the sea and the sand it carries.”

This episode is well known to nearly every reader of The Mediterranean. Less well known, however, is that during the same period, Braudel delivered a series of lectures on history to his fellow prisoners. In this talks, he explored methodological questions, emphasizing the weight of "great history"— deep, structural history he referred to as “la longue durée”— as an alternative to event-based narratives. Advocating for interdisciplinarity with the social sciences, economics, and geography, he proposed studying the interactions between human societies and their geographical environments through what he called “geo-history.”

L’histoire, mesure du monde was reconstructed by Fernand Braudel from the notes taken by his fellow inmates. It was first published after his death, thanks to the work of Paule Braudel. On the 40^th anniversary of his passing, the Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme has chosen to reissue this text, which lays the groundwork for Braudelian thought and global history. The new edition includes a foreword by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, an international specialist in connected history, and an afterword by geographer and ambassador of geo-history, Christian Grataloup.