Fernand Braudel prefers the term “world-
economy” to “world-
system,” though he makes clear that he is indeed speaking
of a system characterized by boundaries, an urban center,
and an internal hierarchy (Braudel 1984, pp.25-45). An
accomplished and evocative writer, Braudel uses several
kinds of system metaphors in the interest of describing and
characterizing the European world-economy as it developed
between 1500 and 1800. The three most recurring and
effective of these are the circulatory system, the solar
system, and the machine. In other words, medicine, physics,
and mechanics supply the conceptual grounding for the world-
system
metaphor as it is presented in Civilization and
Capitalism.
The most obvious metaphor Braudel draws from
the circulatory system is the description of money and
trade as the life-blood of the world-economy. Thus Braudel
writes that, “the heart of world-economy centred on Venice”
(p.124) and “the life-blood of Venetian trade was the
Levant connection” (p.132). Moreover, Venice carved its
fortune “out of the living heart of the Byzantine economy”
(p.130). Letters of credit and gold both circulate along
trade routes like blood through arteries (pp.155, 168). At
the center of any world economy were “pulsating capitalist
cities” (p.31), and indeed the urban center is “the
logistic heart of its activity. News, merchandise, capital,
credit, people, instructions, correspondence all flow into
and out of the city” (p.27). At the same time, exchange
between urban and rural regions drives “the elementary
circulation of the economic body” (p.39). In the clearest
example of the presence of the circulatory system metaphor
Braudel concludes, “From the earliest times, the core
or ’heart’ of Europe was surrounded by a nearby semi-
periphery and by an outer periphery. And the semi-
periphery, a pericardium so to speak enclosing the heart
and forcing it to beat faster... was probably the essential
feature of the structure of Europe” (p.56). Even when not
explicitly invoked, the presence of the idea of the human
circulation system can be felt, as when Braudel describes
the vibration of the world economy that “closes and opens
once again the gates
of the
complex flow of the conjuncture” (p.83). Through these and
other instances, the pumping of the human heart emerges as
one of the main analogies by which the world-system
centered can be placed, made familiar, and thus
understood.
The solar system is also part of the
conceptual backgrounding that Braudel’s description of the
world-economy draws upon, particularly the gravitational
forces that make planets orbit the sun. If an urban core is
the heart of a world-economy, it is also its “centre of
gravity” (p.27). Indeed, Braudel argues that both economic
zones and cultural zones have centres of gravity (p.67).
Except during upward swings of the economy when “a multi-
polarity of centres was possible,” there could be only one
urban center: “The success of one sooner or later means the
eclipse of another” (pp.86, 33). Braudel explores the
monumental implications of a shift in this “centre of
gravity” at several historical junctures, but these all
pale in comparison to the “cosmic upheaval” initiated by
European expansion beginning in the late fifteenth century
(pp.116, 173-4, 138). In general the early history of the
modern world-economy or world-system is the story of the
succession of dominant cities that “oscillated between
strong and weak centres of gravity” (p.35). These
cities were surrounded by concentric rings of trade and
production that together form a “microcosm” of the universe
(p.38). Initially, this European world-economy had
two “poles of attraction,” one in the north and one in the
south (p.97). At the same time, within European
society, “It would no doubt be possible to map the way in
whichthese different ’orders’ of society existed in space,
to locate their poles, central zones, and lines of force”
(p.47). Finally, as with the circulation system metaphor,
Braudel gives one example that leaves no doubt about the
usefulness of the solar system metaphor. He writes of
Venice’s trade links, “But the string of glittering towns
continued north over the Alps, like a milky way: Augsburg,
Vienna, Nuremburg, Ratisbon (Regensburg), Ulm, Basle,
Strasbourg, Cologne, Hamburg and even Lübeck,