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This work is concerned with the quest for progress in daily life throughout the world between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Professor Braudel studies the demographic expansion that outstripped the production of goods, and the many other factors that brought about the low subsistence level of the majority of people in contrast with the luxurious living standards of the wealthy and privileged few; the effects of famine and plague; the gradual expansion of the towns in a basically agricultural economy. In this first of a two-volume work deals with population; staple diets throughout the world; housing and clothes; the spread of technology in particular, sources of power; communications; early economies and kinds of money; towns in East and West. The second volume will deal with the rise and expansion of capitalism.