Febvre became the man who carried the Annales into the post-war period, most notably by training Fernand Braudel and co-founding the VI section of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, later known as École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).

Goitein referred to these materials, together with his photocopies of geniza fragments, as his “Geniza Lab.” He had adopted the “lab” concept from Fernand Braudel (1902–85), the great French historian of the Mediterranean, who ran a center in Paris that he and others referred to as a laboratoire de recherches historiques. Between 1954 and 1964, Braudel’s “lab” funded Goitein’s research on the Mediterranean.1

Ken Pomeranz’s study, published in 2000, on the “greatdivergence” between Europe and China in the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries,1 prob ably the most important and influential bookon the history of the world-economy (économie-monde) since the pub-lication of Fernand Braudel’s Civilisation matérielle, économie etcapitalisme in 1979 and the works of Immanuel Wallerstein on “world-systems analysis.”2 For Pomeranz, the development of Western in-dustrial capitalism is closely linked to systems of the internationaldivision of labor, the frenetic exploitation of natural resources, andthe European powers’ military and colonial domination over the restof the planet. Subsequent studies have largely confirmed that conclu-sion, whether through the research of Prasannan Parthasarathi orthat of Sven Beckert and the recent movement around the “new his-tory of capitalism.”3