Dear Prof. Rosser

<<The 15th (century) saw the flowering of the Renaissance in Italy>>

I feel this stands in need of clarification.  Spufford seems to be correct
in fixing a low point in pan-European monetary history in the exact year
1464, when coin issue came to a standstill almost everywhere, Venice and
Milan included.  Trade stopped, and banks failed even in Florence.  The
recovery, soon after in the 1470’s, likewise was Europe wide.  Italy stood
at the hub of these events but was not disconnected from the rest.

<<Braudel probably providing the best account of all that>>

I would not comment on those specific passages in Braudel, but I like to
expand on my earlier negative comments on his work, as follows.  In passages
I mentioned earlier, in his Capitalism and Material Life Braudel makes a
general summary of the early modern Indian economy which is wrong, and
preposterously so.  I spent a good part of the 1980’s attempting to publish
the necessary refutation of his simplistic, counterfactual bullionist
approach, with no success what so ever.  It seemed no one wanted to see
criticism of Braudel in print.  In the 1990’s I abandoned historical
research altogether for a good while, to investigate instead the background
to Braudel’s work.  At that time it was easy to track the many somewhat
political affiliations his patron Lucien Febvre had forged in the murky
worlds of interwar France and Cold War USA.  But it was not until 2002 I
think, that confirmation began to appear in print that the large donations
made to Braudel’s academic institution by the Ford Foundation under McGeorge
Bundy were made with regard to his political rather than intellectual value.
 Nor did I discover until then that the syllabus of Braudel’s Maison des
Sciences de l'Homme was co-written with Paul Lazarsfeld

I corresponded with Wallerstein (among many others) about 20 years back,.
asking how Braudel could make such a blunder, and got the reply that Braudel
did not know much about India.  But is it reasonable to suppose that a man
described as “one of the greatest of the modern historians”, could go to
print with work that would disgrace a secondary school essay, because he did
not know any better?

Sincerely

Rob Tye, York, UK