The second volume in Braudel's classic Civilisation and Capitalism, The Wheels of Commerce, is concerned with the middle of the three levels, the market economy itself. Circulation.

The market economy is defined as the moment when subsistence existence is transformed by exchange, what Braudel calls the fateful threshold of exchange value. The first part of this volume looks at the structure of the market economy as whole, to provide a typology, a model, or perhaps a grammar. We look at the development of markets in towns, fairs, shops, peddlers; trade circuits, bills of exchange, problems of currencies and specie. Along the way we are treated to fascinating case studies: the tiny snapshots of Volume 1 are also here, but supplemented with longer steady gazes of specific historical situations: the English/Portugese trade; the way Europeans gradually disrupted and usurped the ancient and extensive trade circuits of India in the 18th Century and China in the 19th Century.

In the second part of the volume, Braudel is concerned to cast light on the classical view (put forward by Marx, Polanyi, Weber and so on) that real capitalism (an industrial mode of production) only started in the 19th century.

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2301 Civilization and Capitalism 15th -18th Century Volume II The Wheels of Commerce, by Fernand Braudel translation from the French by Sion Reynolds (read 22 Jun 1990) A more unorganized, haphazard throwing together of uninteresting information I have seldom read. Only stubbornness impelled me to finish the book. I will NOT read the third volume. ( )

Braudel looks at the development of capitalist trade in the period he examines.