The structures of everyday life

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1. i_am_proteusNov 2025
   An excellent starting point for Braudel's work would be Civilization and Capitalism: Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life
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2. lkrubnerMay 2025
   Surprising they don’t mention Fernand Braudel:

   https://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Capitalism-15th-18th-Cen...

   The Annales journal was established in 1929 and shaped the context of everything that Christopher Hill did:

   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_school

   Braudel is the most famous of the historians from this school. His book “The Structures Of Everyday Life” established historiography on the basis of what ordinary people did in their ordinary lives: what they ate, what they wore, how they worked. And Braudel was building upon ideas already established by the founders of the Annales school. But this enormously influential group of historians were a constant source of inspiration to Christopher Hill, and I think shaped the way he wrote The World Turned Upside Down.

   I recommend both Hill and Braudel, both pillars of my intellectual life.

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3. borzoi2Dec 2022
   I am reading The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism Vol. 1 by Fernand Braudel right now and I'd say it is doing this. It sounds boring but it is incredibly fascinating - pages and pages on what people ate, drank, lived in, slept in, how they spent their days etc in the transition from feudal to industrial society and how subtle patterns of weather, technology, etc caused large events in history. It's well written, too.

   Also: 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger

   A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

   Impro by Keith Johnstone (you don't need to care about theatre or improv to enjoy this book)

   Ways of Seeing by John Berger (or just watch the TV show)

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4. i_am_proteusOct 2021
   Lunch has never been free.

   Good reads, if this area interests you, are Fernand Braudel Civilization and Capitalism Vol 1: The Structures of Everyday Life and Vaclav Smil Energy and Civilization: A History.

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5. bildungFeb 2021
   There is also Ferdinand Braudel, who published 3 works about peasant live in the 15th to 18th century: "The Structures of Everyday Life", "The Wheels of Commerce" and "The Perspective of the World". I found them very interesting, they depict normal days for different trades and classes and the changes that occured to them over the centuries.
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6. clock_towerApr 2017
   Luxury goods traveled very far, even crossing the frontiers of mutually-hostile civilizations, but most commerce was local. As for people, merchants could really travel, mercenaries sometimes did the same, and elites and soldiers would sometimes go abroad and come back, but most people stayed put. Knowledge was also very expensive to come by, and the difference between what the best-educated and worst-educated knew was much larger than it is today. You might find Fernand Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life interesting; likewise A History of Private Life, especially the first two volumes (the classical world and the Middle Ages), as well as Simplicius Simplicissimus, a novel about the Thirty Years War which was written in the 1670s but is still eminently readable today.

   (Of course, my main area of interest is the early modern period, when Islam was a wall that bisected the world: Muslim merchants could and did travel freely through most of the Old World, but no one else could expect to get through Islam. The pre-Islamic world was more mobile, especially for merchants and mercenaries; likewise the early age of the Mongols, before the Golden Horde and the Il-Khanate converted.)

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