Out of Italy
Two Centuries of World Domination and Demise

The Baroque felt at home in empires: it had been imperial from birth. This was a strange volume, one dashed off by Braudel possibly for an Italian publisher while he was at work on his mammoth history of capitalism. It is an unusual Braudel as there’s nary a longue durée in sight. There’s cursory eco......more

I’m not certain about the story behind this book. It isn’t one of Fernand Braudel’s more famous works and wasn’t published in French until after his death – and quickly translated into English by Sian Reynolds – but it had been published in Italian during the first half of the 1970s. It seems to dat......more

Composed in the 1970s by one of the the 20th century’s most influential historians, this book locates origins of the modern world system in Italy's ‘long sixteenth century’. In that period, Italy as a nation-state did not exist, being more like a set of entrepots: Naples, Livorno, Rome and especiall......more

Beautifully written book, making all sorts of fascinating connections beyond the boundaries of Italy. Braudel and the Annales School more broadly have inspired some of my favourite Marxist historians and world-systems theorists, and I can see the wonderful way his mind works reflected in those subse......more

My first hands-on experience with Braudel doing history, in this case dealing with the cultural propagations produced by Italy between 1450 and 1650. I was of course dazzled by the breadth of his cultural explorations and especially by his notion of the “Baroque” as a more impactful Italian export th......more