This work poses to the author numerous problems, due to the number of documents that had to handle, to the controversies that raised the subject matter-the economy, in itself, it is evident that it does not exist-and to the incessant difficulties that provokes a historiography In constant evolution.
The so-called economic histories, which are still in the process of construction presents a number of damages. The author has chosen the deep, long-term equilibrium and imbalances, and begins by talking about the everyday, about what, in life, takes care of us if we do not even realize it: routine. Such is the thread of its first volume; its purpose: an exploration. Their chapters are presented by themselves. First chapter: "The number of men". It is the biological power par excellence that pushes man, as all living beings reproduce. Second Chapter: "What do they eat? What do they drink? How do they dress? Where are they staying? “Third chapter: "Techniques". It deals with the work of men and their very slow progress within the framework of their daily struggle against the outside world and against themselves. Fourth chapter: "The currency and the cities". Currency is a very old invention, if we understand as such all means that agilizes the exchanges. And without exchanges there is no society. As for the cities, they exist since the Prehistory.
In my previous lecture I pointed out the characteristic place that occupies, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, an enormous sector of self-consumption that remains essentially completely apart from the exchange economy. Europe, even the most developed, appears until the eighteenth century, and even later, in areas that participate little in general life and which, in their isolation, persist in their own existence, almost completely enclosed in itself . There are two sectors that, from our point of view, are not confused. Let us repeat, however, that these two groups of activity - market economy and minority capitalism until the eighteenth century and that most of the actions of men remain enclosed, submerged, in the immense field of material life.
In the two previous chapters, the pieces of the puzzle have been presented to them either isolated or regrouped in an arbitrary order, because of the needs of the explanation. It is now a question of rebuilding the puzzle. This is the object of the third and final volume of my work, titled El tempos del mundo. The title suggests, by itself, my ambition: to link capitalism, its evolution and its means to a general history of the world.
This does not mean, of course, that this story of tomorrow will be economic history. There will always remain, for historians, for all other human sciences and for all objective sciences, an America to discover.
Fernando Braudel "The Dynamics of Capitalism"
Bogota Colombia. Economic Culture Background. (1997)