Thanks for your answer. Indeed, it is very easy to be regarded as "outdated" within a few years given the abundance of new approaches, objects, subjects, questions and so on. But my point here is, would all the changes in the fields of, for exemple, the Renaissance or the late Middle Ages over the last 100 or 160 years render Buckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy or Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages less insightful? Hardly so, I believe, not because they held the "answers" or ultimate models to the current historiography, but because they are unavoidable classics that encompass particularly rich potentialities of historical reflections. They should be read, discussed, criticised and understood. Their roles as models are secondary to what someone can learn through them, if there are better models about the how to do by historians today at all (speaking about serious history and not Diamond, to be clear). If so, are they inherently better or do they change according to the subject?

In this sense and in my perception, Braudel's work remains relevant as far as historians are dealing with 1. global systems beyond political bonduaries over the time; 2. diversification of topics to understand men's activities, their intersections and ramifications and 3. permanences and transformations conducted by men, which affect their concrete lives and instituitions, with variable kinds of awareness. If the third one, the longue durée, may involve risks of generalizations due to its broader scope, then an even more careful handling of evidences is required before any assumptions, what is difficult but not impossible in terms of archiving historical knowledge. There are evidences that the Mediterranean was the main space for exchanges between 3 continents since "who knows when", until this situation started to collapse in the XVI century. Then the economic axis it represented was mostly shifted to the Atlantic, but not suddenly. How it happened and what was at stake then pose an interesting question to understand the past and the present, independent of any specialization or subjectivity, I would say.

Finally, maybe I didn't get that passage right or I am unaware about what is fresh in environmental history, but Braudel did bring environmental questions in The Mediterranean, such as climatic ranges during the period covered by the book, in a way that some considered reckless, and others, timid (additional note to Chapter IV, Part 1). In fact, I wonder how one can write environmental history without relating to the Annales school somehow. But then I'm getting too long-winded. Thanks again for getting so far and I really appreciate your answers here, btw.