ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates Fernand Braudel's monumental works on mercantile capitalism in terms of what they have to say about structure, the agency exercised by merchants, and geographically specific historical processes. It examines certain elements of a theory of local and regional transformation. The chapter explores a sketchy showing of some evidence concerning the interplay of individual knowledge acquisition, biography formation, and the growth of Boston between the end of the Revolutionary War and the outbreak of the War of 1812. Braudel's brilliant, insightful descriptions of the mercantile period rest on a three-fold division of the economic realities which prevailed from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The critique of Braudel thus far presented arises largely out of the discourse of structuring theory and what Anthony Giddens terms the "theory of structuration." Most of the key figures associated with the structuring theory discourse recognize in various ways that all practices, all social activities, take the form of concrete interactions in time-space.
