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The Annales school, the Annales, Annalistes, the Annales d"histoire économique et sociale. Each is familiar to historians and their colleagues across the humanities, yet each is also embedded in the contemporary practice of history to the extent that their interrelations with different methodologies and topics obscure their central characteristics. In a growing literature on the subject, an interpretive habit takes the school, the historians, their associated institutions and journal together as an object of historical scrutiny — the origins and development of a community of thought, the personalities and organizations of a collective spirit or an iconoclastic periodical overturning old habits and disseminating new ideas. Distinct phenomena thus insinuate themselves in the context of sometimes regional, sometimes national, occasionally Western or even global historiography, and intellectual history more generally. The Annales has in this way become associated with archaeology, comparative history, family history, gender history, the longue durée, Marxist historiography, mentalités, price history, socio-economic history, to name but nine sub-fields of History and related subjects. Indeed, the 1979 International Handbook of Historical Studies contained more references to Annales than any other subject besides Marx and Marxism.¹

DOI: 10.1057/9781137294982_1

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