The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II: Volume I Book

This is not like a normal history book. One does not simply sit down and read Braudel's Mediterranean. It is a two part thing and each part is seven hundred pages, and there really is no narrative thru-line. I think the best way to approach this book is to keep it around, and read it in chunks in between other works of history. Then you'll need to refer back to it in the future. The thing is, you're going to need to take this "total history" piece by piece and decide if it works for you.
What Braudel does here, ostensibly, is tell the story of the Mediterranean world during the second half of the sixteenth century, during the reign of Philip II of Spain. A lot of things happened, politically, during that time, most of which had to do with Phil and the Spaniards in the western part of the sea versus the Ottomans in the eastern part. According to Braudel, however, these military and political events (which are only covered in detail in final third of the book) are really not very important. They are surface manifestations of the deeper structures which truly drive the Mediterranean world. What is very important to FB is to examine, in painstaking detail, the geography of the Mediterranean, its climate, its many people, the economic ties that bind them together, the trading routes that snake north and south and east, the cyclical symbiotic fellowship between warfare and piracy over the centuries, and on and on, etc. It is only after examining these structures in detail that we can begin to understand the way both westerners and easterners saw the Mediterranean when they found themselves in conflict.
I finished this a few weeks ago, and what I find is that little bits of it stay with me. I think that is its use, really - I will remember, occasionally, hey, Braudel had that interesting bit on the four different major trade routes north from the Mediterranean, I should reread that chapter and see whether it helps me understand this other thing I'm reading. Or, hey, I wonder if Braudel's bit on pirates might help me understand that part of American history where the early republic traders were dealing with that pirate problem.
This is an amazing work of scholarship. Whether or not you like this method of examining history, you have to respect the study and craft that went into putting it all together.