The idea that the study of a civilisation might be named after a sea originated with Fernand Braudel. Arab geographers were aware a thousand years ago of the relationship between different oceans and the Bilad al-Islam. In our own times, Braudel remains one of a select group of French historians and geographers who have perceived, with rare clarity, the connection between the sea and the people who lived around its shores. For them the interaction between space, the passage of solar time, and the identity of civilisations constitutes one of the most important latent forces of history. Ten years' work and residence in an Islamic country (Algeria) bordering the Mediterranean, as Braudel himself has told us, no doubt sharpened his insight into and awareness of cultural and geographical unity (and by definition differences), the memory of which has gradually been lost over the last two centuries and has had to be recaptured through long and painstaking research in a dozen different archives. The title of the present work is an inadequate acknowledgement of a profound intellectual debt owed to Fernand Braudel and a recognition of the trend in social and economic history set in motion by the publication in 1949 of La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II. Since its first appearance a whole generation of European historians have learnt their craft from this great teacher at the Collège de France and the VI Section, L'École Pratique des Hautes Études.