Introduction

In the last forty years, some of the most important and stimulating history in the world has been written in France. I say ‘forty’ years, rather than thirty or fifty, because it was forty years ago, in Strasbourg in 1929, that Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch founded a new historical journal, Annales d'histoire économique et sociale. It is this journal, known since 1946 as Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, which first published all the articles that follow. The journal has become associated with a particular style of history and a particular group of historians, whose living members include Fernand Braudel, Pierre Chaunu, Pierre Goubert, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.