The structures of everyday life
the limits of the possible
by Fernand Braudel · first published 1981
78% recommend22% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Detailed history of ordinary material life in early modern Europe, covering food, drink, housing, clothing, and daily routines; recommended for readers curious how everyday people actually lived.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
This social and economic history of Europe from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution organizes a multitude of details to paint a rich picture of everyday life.
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Famines were certainly common and devastating. I recommend Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization & Capitalism: 15th-18th Century: Volume 1: "Famine recurred to insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into man's biological regime and built into his daily life. Dearth…
on “The Hedonic Treadmill” ↗That's an interesting idea, but sumptuary laws have a history of being widely evaded and hard to enforce; I'd refer you to Fernand Braudel's Structures of Everyday Life, dealing with European life in the 1500s-1700s.
on “India floats the idea of a universal basic income” ↗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.
on “What you can learn about medieval Europe if you focus on peasants” ↗I recall Fernand Braudel's 'The Structures of Everyday Life' having a chapter about the evolution of chairs and their spread around the world. It's a good series of books. https://www.amazon.com/Structures-Everyday-Life-Civilization...
on “Sitting Up: A brief history of chairs” ↗…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…
on “A very long way from home: early Byzantine finds at the far ends of the world” ↗…American "wildcat banks" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking). Fernand Braudel has some wonderful books on this subject -- the second and third volumes of Civilization and Capitalism (the storied Structures of Everyday Life is the first), plus his book on the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II.
on “Friedrich Hayek and the Collective Brain” ↗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.
on “Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic” ↗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,…
on “Ask HN: What Books helped you sharpen your brains?” ↗…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…
on “Christopher Hill's History from Below” ↗An excellent starting point for Braudel's work would be Civilization and Capitalism: Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life
on “The Transformations of Fernand Braudel” ↗…but it got them into great habits. The same is true for at least Korea and Japan; I don't know as much about Southeast Asia. Only drinking hot drinks also helped China's health. Fernand Braudel, in The Structures of Everyday Life, discusses this in passing; even 17th-century observers felt that it would be better for the Spanish colonials to adopt Chinese practice in the Philippines rather than keeping their custom of drinking…
on “India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste” ↗…chimney, and she has to squat to cook. German women were cooking standing up (building fires on raised stone platforms), with chimneys to vent away smoke, in the 17th century. (See Fernand Braudel, _The Structures of Everyday Life_.) Draw your own conclusions: pathological loyalty to tradition or lack of imagination; or severe lack of capital and calories; or what?
on “Cheap, clean stoves were supposed to save millions of lives – what happened?” ↗…pretty much the same reasons. * Wage controls, price controls, tariff walls, heavy internal regulation. The New Deal, Ireland under De Valera, all European governments before the 1700s (see Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life), and the Tokugawa Shogunate did this. For as long as the will to enforce everything exists, this approach sort of works, and it slows down wealth concentration and the development of crises; but it doesn't…
on “Trump’s F.C.C. Pick Quickly Targets Net Neutrality Rules” ↗Fernand Braudel has some pretty interesting material about coffee in passing, in The Structures of Everyday Life. One thing he discusses is how alcohol, coffee, and tobacco all substituted for each other to an extent: where coffee consumption spread in France, for example, wine consumption fell.
on “Were Early Modern People Perpetually Drunk? (2016)” ↗…will, of course; you may be proud to be a member of that group...) Edit: One thing I can say is that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did occur world-wide; following Fernand Braudel's _The Structures of Everyday Life_ and the _Annales Histoire_ school of economic historians in general, the same climate phenomena were encountered in both Europe and China, which are by no means part of the same sub-planetary climate…
on “You're Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof” ↗