This general reader's history of the ancient mediterranean combines a thorough grasp of the scholarship of the day with a great historian's gift for imaginative reconstruction and inspired analogy. This title features extensive notes that allow the reader to appreciate the state of scholarship at the time of writing, the scale and breadth of Braudel's learning and the points where orthodoxy has changed, sometimes vindicating Braudel, sometimes proving him wrong. Above all the book offers us the chance to situate Braudel's mediterranean, born of a lifetime's love and knowledge, more clearly in the climates of the sea's history.